As We Fall Through Time

A Wall Is Also a Road

Hachette UK; Tor Books (US)

This week, I bring before you new works by two of the most interesting writers in science fiction. The first is As We Fall Through Time, by the outrageously talented and versatile writer Claire North, which opens on the eve of the French Revolution. “The time traveller met Olivier at Madame Pelassier’s soirée,” writes North. “The year was 1789…”

The time traveller, who doesn’t have the usual pox marks of the era, and smells very faintly of papaya-scented bubble bath, is our hero Cal. He is drawn to Olivier, a young French soldier. Olivier obviously has no idea that Cal is a hugely experienced time traveller, or that Cal is only at Madame Pelassier’s in search of an artefact that can heal breaches in reality.

The pair fall in love. North is wonderful at this stuff; everything is fresh and delicious. Things begin to go wrong for the men when Cal will not accept that Olivier is going to die in service to Napoleon. Cal starts to fiddle with time, and then our tender love story evolves into a tightly plotted time-travel thriller, with Cal zipping around in a truly dizzying manner.

If you like your time-travel stories fractured and twisty – but with love at the heart of them – then this novel is surely for you.

“Newitz clearly put a lot of thought into what a highly intelligent single-celled culture would look like”

The chief protagonist in this inventive and playful tale is Gardenpath, a naive biologist studying life in other parts of the galaxy. They are also a single-celled organism, more specifically a slime mould. From a human perspective, this is a topsy-turvy part of the universe, where single-celled amoebae are apex creatures and multicellular organisms are pond scum.

Gardenpath attends an elite university, but is able to visit the planet they have chosen to study – Earth, as it happens – by donning a “galaxy suit” and being teleported to their destination. The galaxy suit can also make Gardenpath look like one of Earth’s dominant multicellular creatures (a human). Amazingly, the local folk show signs of being intelligent.

Another twist is Gardenpath has transported themselves to Pompeii in the years before Vesuvius erupts. Even twistier, Gardenpath ends up being taken in by Julia, a woman who works in a brothel. The juxtaposition of Gardenpath’s (initially) utopian life at the alien university with the reality of Julia’s human life, and the looming threat of the volcano, makes for a surprising and entertaining mix.

Newitz clearly put a lot of thought into working out what a highly intelligent, sophisticated single-celled culture would look like, and that also makes for great enjoyment. Gardenpath and their friends “cluster” at night, sinking into a single clump to recharge. There is talk of them “puddling” when things get too much. To have sex, they produce any number of probing tendrils to insert into each other and use them to stroke each other’s nucleuses. (Eeww! Eeew?)

Actually, there is quite a lot of sex in the novel, both alien-with-alien and alien-with-human, and all of it very amusing. Gardenpath’s failure to tell the human sexes apart – since aliens readily produce sticking-out bits of flesh–is a good joke among many.

Newitz is a terrific, fantastically imaginative writer with a deep interest in personhood, identity, honour and agency, and this is a wonderful addition to their already substantial body of work.

Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series (Inanna, Gilgamesh and Ninshubar, all published by Titan) and she is currently working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of New Scientist and you can follow her on Instagram @emilyhwilson1

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