The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma 3 stars

[Theresa]

This as a whole was a fun bit of historical fiction. Victorian London, fin-de-siécle, filled with pea soup fog, obsessions with science, spiritualism and time travel, and Jack the Ripper. The popular romances everyone is reading are no longer those gothic tales with ninny hammer governesses like The Mysteries of Udolpho, but thrilling fictional accounts filled with science and inventions, or tales of evil or ghosts, by HG Wells (who is also a protagonist), Bram Stoker, Jules Verne. And it is to these classics that gave birth to a genre eventually called science fiction that Félix J. Palma pays tribute here, most particularly to the concept of time, and the theories, speculations and feasibility of time travel.

The story is told by an omniscient narrator, part ringmaster, part raconteur, who from time to time rather arrogantly breaks the 4th wall in order to share his opinions. He is pretty funny, actually.
The tale is told from three separate but frequently overlapping, and eventually converging, storylines. The first centers on the wimpy uninspiring Andrew, a scion of the nobility who loves one of the whores butchered by Jack the Ripper. The second story told is the romance of a young woman of the nobility that imagines herself in love with a hero of the future (amusingly the year 2000), and the third starts off with a young Scotland Yard inspector who also believes in time travel, and needs to solve a murder that could only have occurred using a weapon that exists in the future - in the year 2000 to be exact.

Are you confused yet? Never fear as the author takes you through all the twists, turns, surprises, and tidies it all up nicely, with able help of the omniscient narrator and HG Wells, of course.

There are weaknesses...some repetitiveness, a few too many scenes that reek of the 21st century, and way too many absurdities to swallow whole, but those are also part of the fun. This is an entertainment, not great literature. Just like those Victorian writers and their serialized stories that Palma so patently adores.

I consider this a work of historical fiction, rather than science fiction or fantasy, and very much in the time travel school of Jack Finney or even Jasper Fforde, or for lovers of those great Victorian classic romances by Stokes, Verne, Wells, and even Henry James, but The Turn of the Screw James.