March to Other Worlds Day 16 Broken Time by Maggy Thomas / Emily Davenport
March to Other Worlds Day 16 Broken Time by Maggy Thomas / Emily Davenport
The best science fiction makes you think. It doesn't force you to do so, it tantalizes and teases your brain into working overtime, making connections within the plot of the book and thinking about the nature of things outside of it. I've read quite a lot of science fiction over the years but nothing quite like Broken Time by Maggy Thomas (pen name of Emily Davenport). On the surface it is the story of a bright young woman in the ultimate welfare state universe. There just aren't a lot of jobs out there except for the very best and brightest of people, and smart as Siggy is, she's just not quite in that category. So she takes a job on a planet far from home as a janitor in an asylum for the criminally insane. There she becomes the pawn of the asylum's director as he uses Siggy to try and draw out some of his notorious inmates, ultimately with disastrous results.
If that was all that Broken Time was about, it would have been a thoroughly enjoyable novel. But it's also about an alien race called the Speedies because they appear to experience time at a different rate than humans do. It's also about a bizarre cosmic anomaly in the area of Siggy's home world which has somehow taken a Speedy invasion fleet out of sync with the rest of the universe so that it is still traveling on the warpath more than a century after hostilities were terminated, still struggling to pop back into normal space and obliterate her planet. It's also about a brave young man who disappears in a "time pocket" when Siggy is a child and only she can remember him. And it's about the struggle to communicate with people and cultures that are vastly different from yours. And, well, I could go on for several more paragraphs trying to explain what this book is about. Suffice it to say, that I’ve read it several times and it still intrigues me. I have no doubt that someday soon I’ll reread it again.
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