The “Grandfather Paradox” is one of the most common concept in the discussions about time travel, so much that entire movies and tv shows revolve around the idea of going back in time and the damage it might result in messing with the timeline. One of these shows, by the way, is one of my favorite ever and maybe one day I’ll have the time and energy for a deep dive in how much I loved it and why, but today I want to talk about something else.
It is, as you can imagine, a book I had the chance and the pleasure to read for a review: Lee Matthew Goldberg’s Miles in time, of which I also appreciated the pun in the title even before actually opening the book. You see, not only I’m a sucker for paradoxes and all that complicated stuff, but I also spend more time than necessary wondering about the road not taken, about what would have happened if I made a different choice, or how much I’d love to go back and find out. I couldn’t skip the chance to read the story of somebody going back to try and stop the murder of their own brother, could I?
And yes I know that the setting didn’t explicitly recall them, but as I read Miles in time I couldn’t stop imagining it as one of the Goonies-like movies we used to watch as kids. It appears to be set in the next future, but it presents all the elements of those old movies: a bunch of not particularly cool kids, one of which is meant to be the comic relief, a paranormal situation that looks too big for them to handle, their struggle to hide what’s going on from the grown ups…everything checks out.
Breaking the rules
Before actually travelling in time, Miles find a sort of “Do’s and Dont’s” for time travel, but still has no hesitation in breaking one of the fundamentals rules when he feels stuck in his investigation. For sure there wasn’t the time to add such a problem to an investigation that already looked very complicated, and it could be justified by the fact that Miles is quite a practical guy when it comes to his detective activity, but I was expecting it to cause some more trouble than it actually did.
Also many of the things that happen around Miles and that are not strictly related to the investigation seem a bit rushed and poorly explored, but there’s always a chance for them to be explored more in future books if the series picks up.
After all, and this is true in any form of art, a good knowledge of the rules means that you also know how to break them in order to make a story (or a photo, a song,…) better. The important aspect in Miles in time was the sense of clocks ticking as Miles followed his leads one after the other, knowing that he had a very strict deadline to figure out the mystery. It delivered, and it did it keeping the story “easier” to follow and digest.
Which, after all, is exactly what I needed right now.
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