Fall in Love with a Doomed Arctic Explorer: Time Travel Edition
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Reviewed by Cecelia Larsen
There’s a sweet spot in modern science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you wish), captured by a few titles per year. These books ride a very thin line between pulpy readability and literary fiction. In other words, they are good fun, but would also fit nicely on a literature course syllabus. Sequoia Nagamatsu’s 2022 title How High We Go in the Dark recently captured this coveted spot as a darkly sparkling and prescient climate apocalypse masterpiece. This year, the honor goes to Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time – where an arctic explorer from a doomed 19th century expedition travels forward in time and an unnamed civil servant assigned to assimilate him to that future circle each other in a magnetic and witty adventure.
The British government in a not-so-distant future has come into possession of a time machine, and has decided to bring forward several people they’re calling “time refugees.” These intrepid and/or wretched folks have each been assigned a bridge by the amorphous Ministry – a handler to help them adjust to the future and to scientifically record their every waking moment in case time travel doesn’t work well on humans after all. One of these bridges is the story’s snarky, sympathetic first-person narrator and main character. Her musings on her time refugee 1847, or simply 47, are immediately hilarious in more obvious ways – she enjoys scandalizing his Victorian sensibilities as an unmarried female roommate, for instance – and in more subtle ones, by dropping little bits of modern culture on him piecemeal, to see what deleterious effect they have.
The story’s polar explorer, who becomes a love interest, is a real historical figure. Graham Gore, part of the Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, was a naval officer from the age of imperialism who died a mysterious death, and, as such, is an attractive target to both the Ministry and to the protagonist. As she says:
“…I was a callow youth and ready to commit to obsession. I picked up my first book about the golden age of polar exploration, and I coalesced around it. I came to believe in the possibility of heroic death, and from there it was easy to believe in heroism. Heroism laid the groundwork for righteousness, and righteousness offered me coherency. If I’d got really into punk rock, maybe I’d be a different woman.” (207)
The relationship between Gore and his bridge shifts slowly and subtly over the time they are roommates – from a dynamic characterized by constant-but-distant surveillance, to appreciation, to shared secrets and something romantic, to then… read it and find out! However, Bradley never lets the reader forget the complex ethics of time travel, and how it must feel to those present in an unfamiliar and damaged future. The novel holds space for time travelers who did not choose this path, and how they are each, in their own specific ways, unmoored and lonely without the lives, friends, and temporal context they had built their identities on and in. That thoughtful sensibility is woven through an enormously charming romp, and the fact that the protagonist’s asides on the nature of empire, marginalization, and assimilation do not derail it is both a testament to the author’s skill with language, plotting, and characterization, and move this novel into a category all its own.
One of the most interesting elements of the book is the bridge’s first-person point of view of her own self-image, as a mixed race British Cambodian translator within a majority white institution with opaque nationalist goals. Through her eyes the novel examines genocide and its reverberating trauma across generations, minority exceptionalism, duty to others and the future, and what may matter most to humanity in the face of the death of everything one loves. She muses,
“You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression.” (157)
This aside also skillfully foreshadows another one of the interesting stylistic choices the book makes – that first it seems an immediate first-person retelling, but eventually reveals itself to be a letter written to either a past or future self, depending on the reader’s point of view. This choice offers the reader more context and background than the close world of a first-person narrative: it’s a sort of limited omniscience. One of the classic lures of the time travel genre is the ability to know the consequences of our actions, and the possibility of changing them. Bradley wields this trope to challenge her bridge’s understanding of the power of personal choices vs. institutional directives, and to make a broader case that even if one knows “how it ends,” the flawed and changeable nature of humanity means that there is no easy fix – we are all responsible for our actions in the moment they happen.
That the main character is unnamed is another curiosity – and one that the reader may spend much time unpacking. Does it symbolize the relative unimportance of any one cog in an institutional machine? Or is it meant to juxtapose the way that the bridge (and the reader through her) knows both too much and never enough about the charismatic Gore, his motives, and his own self-image? The slow unraveling of secrets is a motif throughout the book, and while this one is kept, each reader will have their own theory as to why.
A final thought about authorial intent: Bradley’s use of a real, historical person as the love interest in this fictional tale has several possible implications. One is that it complicates and expands the genre categorization of the work. Fans of historical fiction will be familiar with the fascination that a known quantity and backstory can have, and an author’s ability to project seemingly authentic thoughts and feelings upon them. Using clues from the historical record, Bradley makes guesses about Gore’s personality and mannerisms, and the result is a depth of characterization that is hard to replicate in characters created from whole cloth. Relatedly, Gore’s inclusion mirrors the fanfiction trope real people fiction (RPF). Like historical fiction, RPF uses clues, actions, and attributes of real people to draw conclusions about how a character might act. Unlike historical fiction, it then places that character in a reality that never happened: in other words, an alternate universe. Time travel is a neat way to achieve this effect, and given the growing reach and acceptance of fanfiction, it is worth noting that Gore-as-love-interest will appeal to the same audience that devours stories about their favorite romantic heroes from television and movies falling in love with characters they shared brief screentime with (think Ted Lasso and Trent Crimm living happily ever after).
Thematically, Bradley pulls many different and complex strings, but the most ever present may be that individually, people are (or can be) better than their worst decisions, but collectively they are pretty terrible. That isn’t to say that the novel is at all pessimistic about the future – in fact, it argues for future hope even in the face of a flawed humanity: “Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future. Believe me when I say that time-travel taught me that.” In all, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is hugely entertaining and thoughtful, then casually devastating, and ends on a note of hopeful ambiguity – a most enjoyable science fiction reading experience.
Cecelia Larsen is an educator, book blogger, and frequent Cybils award judge based in Arlington, Virginia. She enjoys trivia, travel, and baking, and can be found online at @ceceliareads on Instagram.
