The Paradox Hotel is a love story set 50 years from now. The love story part is touching at times, the rest, not so much.
The basic premise is that time travel has become a reality, but it’s limited to the US government and the very, very wealthy. Believable so far. I mean, it’s very expensive, so I don’t see the average person spending a million bucks to attend the first presentation of Macbeth but the wealthy guests in Hart’s story do. There’s a lot of other things I would spend my Bitcoin on. Here’s a short list:
- The Crucifixion and Resurrection
- The Underground Railroad in the US Civil War
- Buddha’s enlightenment
- Caesar crossing the Rubicon
- The Berlin Wall coming down
- Joseph Smith finding the gold plates
- Chicxulub impactor and the end of the dinosaurs
- The Great Flood
- The Burning Bush and the Ten Commandments
- The Parting of the Red Sea
- Gabriel giving the Qur’an to Muhammed
Okay, so my Judeo-Christian background is coming through here…but there are a lot or really Biq Questions in science and religion that could be answered by time travel.
There’s a “look but don’t touch” clause in place for the time travelers, but since we can’t help but touch, there’s also a group of time cops – the Time Enforcement Agency – charged with keeping you from bringing home some dinosaur eggs, or assassinating Hitler.
The nexus of the story is that the Government is selling off the whole shebang – the hotel and the magical time machine that goes with it. There are four bidders and their conflict, and the things our heroine sees because she’s “unstuck” in time, set the stage for the book.
The text is fairly “woke” and handles much of that wokism well. There’s a couple of exceptions I’ll get to later.
On the Feral Meter, the story comes in as a 4 and the science a disappointing 1.
Spoilers and gripes follow:
Our protagonist is not very likable and not very well written. January is her name. Create a stereotypical male jerk cop. Then give him a woman’s body and name and make him a lesbian. There you have January, our heroine. It almost seems that the decision to include an LGBTQ theme came after the book was written and then it was executed poorly. There’s also a non-binary character that is so pitifully developed that it took a hundred pages, and rereading some sections, to figure out that they were a single entity, not a couple of different people. Admittedly, some of that confusion is pronoun-driven.
January is also Buddhist, but a very poor one, who seems only to be interested in the philosophy because her girlfriend is/was. The girlfriend, Mena, is dead but appears to January in her unstuck moments.
My biggest gripe about the science is Hart’s “time stoppage” and being able to live, breath, and move around “outside of time.” Bleeding stops, but apparently digestion doesn’t. They can interact with physical objects and people – all of whom are frozen in place. Actions that take place in frozen time are somehow visible even in real time.
A guest has an EpiPen taken out of his jacket. We see the jacket move in real time but nothing else. No EpiPen. The jacket’s movement is caught on video as the outside-of-time pickpocket does his work. Why? If this happens outside of time, wouldn’t this all happen between one frame of video and the next?
Back in December, I griped about Newcomer’s (@josephdnewcomer) handling of frozen time in his book, Diminishing Returns. He made up for it by delivering a solid and poignant ending. The book was so good that I could forgive all the nits I picked. This one isn’t. More gripes follow.
Security at the hotel becomes suddenly worried about radiation. They don’t routinely monitor it but decide to because all problems in SciFi come from radiation. OMG, there’s a lot of it! Not so much that anyone has to leave right now. Why not? They don’t have any idea when it started, so how can they have any sense of dose? Nobody’s wearing a dosimeter. We don’t even get told what kind of radiation they’re dealing with, because all radiation’s bad. Right?
Dinosaurs. Eggs are smuggled out of the past. Then, suddenly, because the time stream is messed up, they’re hatched and knee-high. They catch them and put them in the basement without ever being concerned that they might continue to grow, and as a Buddhist, January can’t kill them. Also, where do they get the food to fuel their growth?
There are a lot of unresolved issues in the end, like the mysterious missing space in the walls that drives the action for a good 30 pages and is then abandoned.
I only finished it because it angered me enough to write this review.
The audiobook is currently free. Don’t waste your money.