Weighing Shadows

November 16, 2015
Mythopoeic Awardâwinner Goldstein (The Uncertain Places) stumbles with this poorly-paced time travel action story, which is stuffed with thin, uninteresting characters, predictable twists, and a thoroughly uncompelling narrator. Ann Decker is a high-school dropout who works at a local computer store. She's recruited by a mysterious stranger into a company called Transformations, where she and other peopleâall of whom seem to have very few connections or close friendshipsâlearn that time travel really exists, and that agents from a devastated future are travelling back in time to try to fix small mistakes to make the world a better place. After Ann's colleague Gregory dies on a mission to ancient Crete, Ann starts to get hints that there's something wrong with Transformations, and that the company doesn't have a wholesome future in mind as she'd been told. Goldstein's plot is surprisingly neither layered nor original, and Ann offers little for readers to love as a character; her backstory of foster care and poverty is dashed off with little regard to verisimilitude or emotion, which undercuts everything moving forward. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.

September 15, 2015
Goldstein takes a break from fantasy (The Uncertain Places, 2011, etc.) and returns to science fiction with this brief tale of a corporation seeking to diminish the role of women in society by altering the timeline. Socially awkward 21st-century hacker Ann Decker is recruited by Transformations Incorporated, a company that uses time travel to improve what they say is a bleak 24th-century future. But while Ann's new employers are happy to supply her with all the information she needs to fit into past society-including history, culture, language, and clothes-they're extraordinarily reticent about just what her missions are meant to accomplish and why the mysterious organization Core would want to foil them. Goldstein's style is, as usual, beautifully spare; what she doesn't say is as important as what she does. Mood is more important than establishing logic or picayune detail. Unfortunately, that style doesn't serve this plot very well. Current conventions for the time-travel story demand a richness of detail; it's simply not plausible that a few weeks of language and history study and a costume would allow a person to blend into the past-there are too many mores and habits that would make the traveler stand out. Writers like Kage Baker, Connie Willis, and Deborah Harkness have brandished their research to address this point. Plots about sinister time-traveling organizations are not new, and there's already a novel about worshipers of the goddess Kore battling time-traveling chauvinists (Sheri Tepper's The Family Tree, 1997). In addition, Goldstein's ambiguous ending may be poetically true but still comes across as unfinished. Lovely, disturbing, and intriguing in spots but ultimately, just not enough.

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November 15, 2015

Marginally employed hacker Ann Decker gets a job offer that seems too good to be true. She's been recruited by Transformations Unlimited, a company in the time-travel business. The firm uses operatives like her to go back into the past to alter small details that they say will somehow fix a blighted 24th-century future. At first, Ann is excited by her missions, but she starts to question the motives of her employers after she meets a splinter group that believes the trips have an ulterior motive. VERDICT While Goldstein's (The Uncertain Places) writing is quite fine, this time-travel scenario never quite hangs together. Authors such as Kage Baker with her "Company" stories or Connie Willis with her time-traveling Oxford researchers have done a much better job at both painting a picture of the past and giving readers a solid reason for the traveling, rather than a vague conspiracy theory that never makes it all the way onto the page.--MM

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