Review: Impossible Times trilogy

 Impossible Times trilogy by Mark Lawrence

☆☆☆☆☆

Science Fiction

These books are about time travel plus Dungeons and Dragons. It doesn’t get nerdier than that. The three short books are fast-paced and jam-packed.

#1. One Word Kill

I was intrigued right from the beginning all through to the end. It was a thoroughly enjoyable adventure. I was hoping for more at the end, but then I found out there will be a sequel.

The book is set in Britain and written with British punctuation and spelling with a little American style. It’s an odd combination. Some occasional strong language.

#2 Limited Wish

Nick is at Cambridge University at 16 and finds the laws of physics are kind of quirky around him. For instance, he keeps rolling 1s in D&D.

He still has to invent time travel and fight cancer, though. Okay, it’s pretty nerdy.

The D&D scenes were very interesting; that’s skilled writing to accomplish that. I loved how it paralleled real life. The ending was really exciting. All aspects of the story were just great: characters, setting, pacing, plot. The story was so immersive. (The descriptions of Nick feeling sick were so visceral; it reminded me of all the times I was throwing up in public from a migraine attack.)

It was so good: funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking; perfect pacing and great storytelling. I seriously don’t have anything to criticize.

Mother had very new-fangled ideas about nutrition and refused to buy me Golden Nuggets, on the grounds that they were 96 per cent sugar. Which, oddly, was my main argument in favour of them. Instead she bought joyless boxes of Shredded Wheat, the contents of which I conducted mechanical stress tests on by loading them with as much sugar as they could bear. “Do leave some milk in the bottle, dear!” Mother admonished as I attempted to drown the evidence.

There is an unwritten rule of tube travel, understood instinctively by every Londoner from young schoolboy to doddering ancient. You pretend it’s not happening. You pretend that half a dozen strangers are not squeezing against you to a degree that is usually reserved for orgies. You pretend that your nose is not inches from the unwashed armpit of a beefy man, that a young woman’s hair is not tickling your face, that you did not step on that person’s foot. 

#3 Dispel Illusion

This final book covers several time periods. First, Nick and the gang are in 1992, when time travel is getting under way as a feasible technology. In 2011, Nick seems himself turn into Demus and has to face the fate waiting for him in 1986. And then ... Read and find out. There is a lot of suspense and humor and surprises and a cool D&D game. Really, this series is just about perfect.

I also love how time travel works in the series. In most stories, you vanish from one time and show up in another. But I’ve always believed that you wouldn’t just disappear from space when traveling through time. We naturally travel through time and space as it is. We have more control over our movement through space. So if you could have more control over moving through time, you’d have less control over movement through space but never disappear from either. Lawrence has had this same thought, and I really appreciate it.

I wanted that back. I wanted those days back. And even though I was standing in them, letting them flow by me hour after hour, I knew that could never happen. We get one shot. However you play it out. Fast forward it, rewind, it’s still the same: a single shot.

The universe doesn’t care about time. We care about time. Because we remember.