- Title:
- Time’s Ellipse
- By:
- Frasier Armitage
- Pages:
- 280
- Rating:
- 3
No solution saves everyone. Only one keeps us human.
The hope of a dying Earth rests on a crew of astronauts. Their find a new home. But when they touch down on a distant planet, a time-bending anomaly traps them in a situation that no one could’ve predicted, causing them to question the nature of humanity, the snare of destiny, and the shape of time itself.
Time’s Ellipse spans generations, orbiting the lives of the scientists and astronauts involved in this historic mission as they discover that escaping the planet is simpler than evading its legacy.
Obviously the suspension of disbelief is important in fiction. Most of the science fiction novels I enjoy are based on a future that hasn’t happened or around some technology that is as yet impossible.
The idea of orbital locking as posited in this story took a lot of getting my head over, though, and the fact that none of the characters seem to get how it works until it serves the plot for them to do so is a bit of a mark down, too. You can argue that the work is a bit of a character study or exploration of how a group of people with a minimum viable population degenerates into chaos, which then makes one question the purpose of the story around that whole thing which falls a little flat.
So yes, it was … OK. Not my favourite book of the year. I’d go for another Armitage , I never give up on an author after one book, but the thrust of the main idea of this one, combined with the execution of that idea being so weird in the first place, takes a bit of adjusting to.