Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides form a pair of time travel novellas that stand ably alongside the other fresh and new time travel science fiction being written today.
The late 21st and early 22nd century are, frankly, a mess. Even after the invention of time travel, the Earth is in a bad way. There are plans to try and move people to the future, when the climate ravages have hopefully settled down, or to the past, before the worst effects are baked in. Trying to change the past to try and fix everything has boiled down to a conflict between two time traveling factions, the Farmers and the Guides. They have very divergent ideas what to do with time travel, enough that they are in a no-win conflict They have achieved a messy stalemate in their temporal cold war. In the meantime, though, a young woman in the late 18th century is using daring, stealth, and her lover’s clockwork automaton creation to gain the funds needed to keep her family’s estate afloat. Her name is Alice Payne, and she is soon swept into the temporal cold war.
Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne Arrives begins, and Alice Payne Rides continues, the story of Alice Payne as she is introduced, and becomes a major player, in the Farmer-Guides temporal cold war.
After the pause of a few years in the SF world where the idea fell out of favor, there has been a boomlet of time travel novels and stories lately. Novellas like Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson and Ian McDonald’s Time Was, television shows like Travelers, Continuum and Timeless, and novels like King’s 11/22/63 have grappled with the consequences and issues with trying to change the future, or just trying to make small changes going forward to make the best of a bad situation.
These stories seem to be tying into a zeitgeist, a conviction that things have indeed gone wrong, and time travel provides not an opportunity for exploration and adventure like Doctor Who, but rather a way to speak to problems and maybe make efforts to solve them, or mitigate them, or at the very least, keep others from doing even more harm. Time travel, unless it is extremely limited and locked down, is an inherently messy SF device. Changing history, paradoxes, conflicts and concerns, unexpected consequences. One can look at and use time travel in a number of intriguing ways.
The author takes a middle road approach in explaining how her time travel works and what it can do. It is enough that we have characters jumping around the time stream, an antagonist manages to put a character in a compromising position by eliminating her sister from history, unintentional changes to the timeline, and plenty of other time travel tropes explored and touched upon in the two books. There are some really clever bits that the author uses, that would be extremely spoilery to mention. Time travelers can fight rather dirty, and do. Alice, however, having cut her teeth on highway robbery, is no pushover.
The heart of these two novellas is Alice herself. We meet her in her highwayman career right off, and when she is contacted by the time travelers, she manages to surprise and overwhelm their expectations quickly. She’s colorful, determined, driven and charismatic in her efforts, especially once she gets into the act of time travel and its pitfalls and possibilities. From trying to transport someone from the middle ages, to Alice dealing with the battle where her father was wounded, Alice’s desires and wishes and how they intersect with time travel are a crunchy level of exploration across the two novellas. She is surrounded by a gallery of intriguing characters, who all intersect and flesh out her story and their own. From Jane, the scientist responsible for her automation companion for her highway robberies, to Prudence, 21st century time traveler who winds up entangling Alice into the time war, to Constable Auden, who is doing his level best to find the mysterious highwayman plaguing the late 18th century, the novellas sing when the author bounces these characters and more off of each other.
The writing, too, comes in as excellent, clean and very readable. The author’s use of language is excellent, and the novellas flow very well. I read both novellas very quickly, engaged to turn pages not only on the concept and the characters, but Heartfield’s prose as well. As noted above, the real strength is in the conversations, the character interactions, the very flowing way conversations and encounters between the characters occur. In Alice Payne Arrives, even before she starts the time travel portion of her career, the writing of her interactions with her family, lover and neighbors drew me as a reader to her as a character, and drew me as a reader to Heartfeld’s work.
The two novellas, Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides, form a nice diptych of novellas that introduce and grow a character and a time traveling milieu in a satisfying fashion. The end of the second novella makes it clear that there is room and opportunity for more adventures with Alice Payne and her friends and companions. I for one would be very happy to continue to follow Alice’s adventures.
