Time Was by Ian McDonald

Published by Tor.com on April 24, 2018

Time Was begins with a bookseller’s discovery of a letter in an old book of poetry. The bookseller, Emmett Leigh, is intrigued by the letter from Tom Chappell to his lover Ben Seligman, who has gone off to fight the war. Leigh feels compelled to research the story of Tom and Ben. To that end, he tracks down people in the present who can give him clues about the past. His investigation leads him to the diaries that Reverend Anson kept of his chaplaincy in 1940s Egypt. Anson, whose diary describes Tom as “gay” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, is apparently oblivious to the nature of Tom's relationship with Ben.

Although Tom introduced Ben to Anson as being in photoreconnaissance, Leigh can find no record of a Ben Seligman occupying that position in Egypt during the war. Hence a mystery arises that the bookseller feels the need to solve. Anson’s granddaughter provides photographs and an archivist identifies two men of the same name and appearance in her voluminous records of war. The two men, however, served in an earlier war: World War I. A witness described them as part of a battalion that vanished in Turkey while assaulting entrenched Ottoman soldiers — a battalion known as the Lost Sandringhams. As the witness described it, the two men vanished into a cloud of smoke. Were they deserters? Were they taken prisoner and executed? Were they abducted by aliens?

But the bigger mystery is why, twenty-four years later, Tom and Ben were photographed standing in front of the Sphinx, having not aged a day. The deeper Leigh digs, the more questions arise. He finds more copies of the book of poetry and more letters. Time Was contains some surprising twists, culminating in a final surprise that requires the reader to rethink the events that took place up to that point. I love stories like that.

I also love Ian McDonald’s prose. McDonald composes masterful phrases (Tom pushes a bike “under a sky the color of judgment”) and sentences (“All written art is an attempt to communicate what it is to feel, to ask the terrifying question: Is what I experience in my heart the same as what you experience?”). Time Was is a novella, exactly the right length for the poignant story it tells, and it tells that story in exquisite prose. Readers who enjoy serious literature while generally shying away from science fiction will be well rewarded by spending some time with Time Was.

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