A book dealer finds a love letter from WWII in a discarded book. Trying to track down the sender and the recipient he stumbles across a mystery: they seem to be appearing in photos over a period of 120-odd years but hardly aging.

Beautifully lyrical novella. ( )

The Publisher Says: A love story stitched across time and war, shaped by the power of books, and ultimately destroyed by it.

In the heart of World War II, Tom and Ben became lovers. Brought together by a secret project designed to hide British targets from German radar, the two founded a love that could not be revealed. When the project went wrong, Tom and Ben vanished into nothingness, presumed dead. Their bodies were never found.

Now the two are lost in time, hunting each other across decades, leaving clues in books of poetry and trying to make their disparate timelines overlap.

I RECEIVED A GIFT OF THIS TITLE.

My Review: I liked this story quite a lot. More anon.

***ANON***

Listen to the dissatisfied bleats from MM-romance readers! This is NOT that book!

It is a fun time-travel tale, and the MM couple whose life together is really more of a life-apart treasure hunt for each other after being unhitched from Time's Arrow during a WWII experiment in quantum superposition is the animating spirit. The young straight bookhunter whose obsession with the gay couple leads him into very strange territory is much more present on the page than either man in the couple. That's disappointing on some levels because of what is promised in the marketing push. But adjust your expectations and read the story that's there and the experience is just fine.

Accepting the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is easier for most fictionphiles than is Copenhagen interpretation of it, which requires us to believe in the arrow of time or the eternal and immutable journey of all things from the past to the future. There are some cracks in the immutability of time's forward progress at the quantum level (you can look it up on your own this time) but no one is saying, at this moment in time, that gross assmblages of atoms like human bodies are about to be transportable whole, entire, and functioning in any direction at any speed of more than 60 seconds per minute.

So there's the fiction bit of the tale defined.

The tale itself...lovers separated and striving to get back together despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles...is an evergreen because most of us have experienced it to some degree or another. The separated lovers in the story are both men and that, as I suspect does not need heavy emphasis, would've kept them apart in the world of 1940s England and not to mention the world of the military which both were in.

The tale of an obsessive quest for an elusive object is equally familiar. A man so utterly absorbed in his own world as to not notice the fact that his lover is being openly unfaithful to him is a familiar character, again as most of us have encountered this in real life relationships whether our own or those of the people close to us. (Well, I know *I* have, so everyone I know has as well.)

Weaving the two together in the way McDonald does is involving and interesting. This isn't something I'm surprised about, though, as I've read his excellent novel [book:River of Gods|278280] set in a 2047 India that has quantum computing. He's been thinking about these matters for a long time and that makes his world-building dense and fulfilling to read.

Take the journey with him in this short work. If you like it, and I hope you will, move to the massive, excellent River of Gods and immerse yourself in just how weird the world is, and will be; this book will give you the "was." ( )

Time to manage our expectations here.

I'm a fan of Ian's work and I'm generally amazed by the amount of research he puts into his novels, twisting strange stories into very creative manifestos, and there's a bit of that coming through the pages here, too, but it begs the question:

What is this?

It is a love story only if you see it through the lens of a mystery fan first, a time-paradox sleuth second, and if you like a REALLY slow burn through a deep focus on poetry and old personal notebooks from the PoV of a bibliophile in hunt of the central mystery.

It's not bad and the questions raised do drag us to the inevitable end, but this is a very niche piece.

History buffs, bibliophiles, and SF mystery fans who don't mind a slow burn that leads to a somewhat odd end in this thankfully short work will probably get a lot out of this.

But for me? It was fine. Okay. But not my favorite of his by a long shot.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC! ( )

I’d heard a number of good things about this novella, and while I’m usually sceptical about recommendations, and, to be honest, I’ve bounced out of McDonald’s novels on a number of occasions, but… it’s a novella, and it was on offer on Kindle. So I went for it. And I’m glad I did. The purported Nazi invasion of Shingle Street, Suffolk, has pretty much entered WWII mythology. McDonald posits it as a Project Rainbow-like experiment (AKA The Philadelphia Experiment), which actually results in sending two men careering independently through time. Unfortunately, they happen to be in a relationship. Fortunately – and this provides the entry to the story – they communicate using a collection by an obscure poet, left in antiquarian bookshops scattered throughout Europe. (Reading this novella, I was reminded of the Italian publisher who published a pirate edition of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in the UK at the time, and was so embarrassed at how it successful it was he sent royalties to Lawrence.) So Time Was is sort of a literary detective novel because the obscure collection is really obscure. But it also hints at a relationship between two men that leaves evidence scattered throughout the twentieth century. It’s cleverly done. And, I must admit, it did remind me of something, or perhaps several somethings – but I couldn’t think what. Which is not presented as a criticism. If anything, those echoes of other half-remembered stories added to Time Was. I liked this novella a lot, and I’m surprised it didn’t make more award shortlists. It won the BSFA Award, and was shortlisted for the Campbell and Dick, but didn’t even warrant mention for the Hugo or Nebula. A shame. This is an excellent novella. ( )

I suppose we should have made more of the time. We never do.
---
That was impressive. Time Was manages to take a touching, time-traveling love story between two men and make it all about a totally random straight dude instead.

Like, what?

If you read the blurb on the back of the book--or at the top of this page--you'd be forgiven for thinking that the two protagonists are Tom and Ben, who fall in love during World War II but soon find themselves traveling across time and continents. It's an epic love story of two people who must hide both their romantic interest and also the fact that, you know, they can time travel.

Right? Right??!

Lol, nope. This book has nothing to do with Tom and Ben, or even time travel. Time Was is really about Emmet, the most heteronormative hetero to ever norm. Emmet is a book collector/hoarder, but have no fear, he's a cute and young hoarder. And he hogs the attention of every goddamn page of this book. Emmet is ostensibly there to unravel the mystery of Ben and Tom after he finds a strange love letter in a discarded book of poetry. But that's an excuse to showcase the boring lameness of Emmet. In theory, the chapters are supposed to alternate between Emmet and Tom's perspectives. "In theory" because in practice, a whopping 28 pages out of 142 are from Tom's perspective. That's around 20% of the book.

The other 80% are spent in Emmet's clutches. And my goodness he's boring. Also a little creepy, and more than a little high on his own self-worth. He even manages to co-op the end of the book, stealing the whole thing from Tom and Ben. It's nauseating that McDonald thought this kind of coup was remotely acceptable.

It's a real shame, because I thought the original concept was really cool. ( )