The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell)

This is a deep novel, tracing the interconnected stories of several people who become more and more entwined in supernatural goings-on as they try to figure out what's happening and how to survive. I really enjoyed most of it as I dug into the mystery. Who are these mysterious voices Holly is hearing? What happened to her strange but beloved brother? How do some people seem ageless, and others seem to be able to manipulate people's memories? It all pulled together near the end in a cosmic battle between good and evil. The last section, though, let me down. After pulling for the good guys to win the epic battle (and then manage to survive their victory), the book suddenly became a dystopia about how the world is going to crash when resources run out. I didn't like that sudden left turn, partly because it was unremittingly grim and partly because it didn't seem to fit with the premise or the direction of the rest of the book. Up until that point I loved it.

Manifold. Time (Stephen Baxter)

This is a big, sweeping SF novel with lots of interesting ideas, but it didn't click with me. A failed astronaut turned wealthy businessman creates an aerospace company ostensibly to use old rocket motors to destroy dangerous waste, but really he plans to create his own rogue space company to take mankind out to the asteroids and ultimately to the stars. He is under the influence of a doomsday cult that claims that the human race is destined to die out in  200 years, and believes this can only be averted through space travel. They work together to search for signals sent back in time from future generations, and find some that seem to suggest they should start by visiting a particular asteroid first. The ship that visits this asteroid is piloted by a cognitively enhanced squid, who has much more flexible navigation and control abilities than a computer or robot. It turns out the asteroid has a portal that is a gateway to the future (or sometimes to other places - it's not consistent). All of this seems to me to be a patchwork of implausible concepts that just doesn't work. At the very beginning I shook my head at the statistical argument put forward to prove that the human race is doomed, which goes like this: If humanity continues to expand in the future as it has in the past, then all the people alive today are a vanishingly small percentage of all the humans who will ever exist. Therefore it is hugely unlikely that we are here, now, unless we are a substantial fraction of all humanity, in which case the race can't keep going much longer. Sorry, but this argument doesn't work! In addition to the unconvincing science and technology in the story, the people also failed to convince me (I never felt they were more than props acting out the author's plot visions). I know that the story grabs other people who are taken with the big ideas here, but it just passed me by.

Three Days to Never (Tim Powers)

This intricate time travel story deals starts with an old woman dying in the mountains miles from where she was moments ago. It turns out that she had links with Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein, and these links bring her to the attention of Mossad, the Israeli security agency, as well as a rival group of spies. The woman's son and granddaughter wind up under attack from both groups because they found some mysterious artifacts in the old woman's shed, including a videocassette of Pee-wee's Big Adventure that turns out to be something else entirely. The story is complex and at many times confusing, but I really cared about the central characters and I loved how it expanded my mind.

Replay (Ken Grimwood)

I re-read this book (appropriate, no?) for my book club this year, and it holds up very well for something written in 1987. For reasons that remain entirely unexplained, after Jeff Winston dies in 1988 he wakes up in his own life, in his own body, back in 1963 and has the rest of his life to live again. But he dies again at the same minute as before, and wakes up again in 1963. It's a little like an extended Ground Hog Day; he keeps living the same times over and over. He tries different things to make his life, the lives of others, and the world better, or at least different, each time. Part of why we are reading this book now is in response to this year's award-winning The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, based on the same concept of people who repeat their lives again and again. There are differences in how this repeating happens between the two books, but mostly the difference is in the general atmosphere and attitude. Harry's story is about keeping your head down, not letting anything change, trying to survive and be safe in a world that keeps getting more and more dangerous. That (and the really gut-wrenching torture scenes) make it a dark and, for me, depressing story. This book, on the other hand, looks at the chance to live again as an opportunity to get it right, to make the kind of life that one can be proud of and happy in. Jeff may get it wrong sometimes, so that his own life and sometimes the world wind up worse off, but at least he is trying. There is a sense of optimism and love that is missing from Harry's story. I like this one much better.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Laline Paull)

This is a unique twist on a time-travel story. Harry is one of a small number of people who, for unknown reasons, live their lives over and over. Each time they die, they are born again at the same moment, in the same circumstances, to the same people, and live  through the same world again and again. What is the best way to deal with this strange situation? These folks have banded together into a society devoted to finding the newly born infants, seeing that they are shepherded into life with comfort and security, and living however they choose until their unavoidable death and cycling back yet again. By and large they try to avoid making a large impact on the unfolding of grand events in the world; past experience has shown that pushing too hard against the fabric of history has terrible ramifications. But now, someone seems to be doing just that, and the world is coming to an end. Can Harry and his friends find who is doing this and stop them? The action spirals up to a grisly, frantic, intense pitch, as Harry works against powerful hidden forces over and over again. I followed it breathlessly to the end. Recommended.

A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Rachel Cantor)

This is an odd story, set in a strange future where the main social conflicts are between philosophies of  fast food chains and the nature of time and reality are breaking down. A few people are thrown together to save the world: Leonard, a Pythagorian who handles phone complaints for Neetsa Pizza; Felix, his nephew with unexplained super powers; Sally, a book guide from the university; and an assortment of dead people, including Leonard's grandfather, Marco Polo, and Roger Bacon. The action is absurd, funny, and, in the end, satisfying. Nothing happens the way you think it will, but it all works out. I enjoyed it.

Salvage and Demolition (Tim Powers)

This novelette is a tangled knot in time, centering an odd manuscript that is found in a box in 2012 linked with odd events in 1957. It is a very brief love story that spanned 55 years. Like most of Powers's stories, it is odd and mystical, but without the length of a novel form the full atmosphere doesn't really have time to coalesce. Enjoyable, but lacking depth because it is so short.

11/22/63 (Stephen King)

I resisted reading this for a long time,  because I don't like horror and that's what I associate with King. A good friend who knows I don't like horror, and knows I do like SF and time travel novels, kept assuring me I would like this one, so I finally took her up on it, and she was right. You can't read an 842-page book in one gulp, but I tried. The hero gets drawn into a very complex time-travel situation with the aim of preventing the assassination of JFK (on 11/22/63, of course). He has to struggle against many problems, because it turns out the past doesn't want to be changed, and along the way he becomes involved in the lives of many people, some deeply evil and some heartbreakingly good. Is he successful? I will say he is, but not at all in the way he hoped to be. I'm glad I finally gave King a try.

All Clear (Connie Willis)

This is the second half of a single novel, published in two parts (the first part was Blackout). It belongs to Willis's time travel universe, which I enjoy a lot. Aside from being much too long, this is another good story in this setting. Three historians go back in time to the London Blitz and become trapped, unable to get back to their present (our future - 2060). The story describes their attempts to find each other, then to figure out what is wrong and how to get out. The backdrop of WWII London is compelling, making "England's finest hour" vivid and underlining the strength and courage of the people who lived through it. There is too much redundancy (too many newspaper clues, too many near misses, too many exploits of the Hodbins), and then the very end is not given quite enough (who exactly is he?), but it is still very much enjoyable.

Blackout (Connie Willis)

This is half a story, set in the same universe as Willis's Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog (the second half is in the volume called All Clear, which I'll be reading soon). It is a time-travel novel, but it's really more about WWII, the time period visited by the historians from Oxford in 2060. These intrepid explorers get to their various assignments (observing children evacuated to the countryside, ordinary heroes of Dunkirk, and Londoners during the Blitz) and settle in, before things start to go wrong. The book is much too long - there is no need for devoting quite so much time to the paperwork snafus and scheduling headaches at Oxford, or the logistical problems with trying to take a train in wartime England. Willis makes the places and the people seem real, though, so I never quite lost patience with the Keystone Cops feel of things. I look forward to reading the rest of the story soon.

Redshirts (John Scalzi)

This delightful book is hilarious, geeky, and still emotionally moving. Scalzi asks what it would be like to be living in a badly-written ripoff of Star Trek. Why are away missions so deadly for lower-deck folks while the main officers are rarely hurt and never killed? Why do bridge consoles keep exploding, no matter how often the circuits are checked? Why is it that decks 6-12 take damage in every attack, but never any of the other decks? How do they keep finding scientifically impossible solutions to problems, and always just moments before they are needed? The heroes find their own scientifically impossible solution to their dilemma, one that is mind-bending and convoluted and just crazy enough (and funny enough) to work. Then there are several codas and other appropriately off-kilter bits of things that bring it all to a satisfying conclusion. (I think I know who Jimmy Hanson really is. As one of the character says, "that would be recursive and meta.")

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu)

This book scores high on the cool-meter, with lots of geek references and self-consciously meta structure. The protagonist is named Charles Yu, and he is a time-machine repairman, a kind of blue-collar bloke, who spends his time outside of the time line waiting for service calls in a closet-sized time machine, equipped with a low self-esteem AI system and accompanied by a nonexistent dog. He gets trapped in a time loop after shooting himself in the stomach, and in the loop he visits a hypothetical version of his mother and simultaneously reads and writes a book called How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe as he tries to find his disappeared father, who sort of invented the time travel technology. The story is just as off-kilter as this sounds, and while I admired its originality, I never really got into it.