Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Release: November 2018
Format: Novel
Genres: None
Audience: YA and Up
Content: Debatable Time Travel
Original Language: English

Living in the dystopian world of the RNAS (Reconstituted North American States), seventeen-year-old Adriane Strohl is descended upon by Homeland Security and arrested for the traitorous curiousity in her eight-minute valedictorian speech, after which she is promptly teletransported to Wainscotia University in 1959 Wisconsin—a.k.a. Zone 9—where she must live out four years of Exile as undergraduate coed “Mary Ellen Enright.” Yes, really!—that’s the best use the Orwellian oligarchs in the year 2039 can think of for teletransporting people through time. Once ensconced in Wainscotia Falls, Mary Ellen suffers a patchwork of freshman homesickness, a consuming crush on a young psychology professor, an ever-present paranoia that would make Philip K. Dick proud, and an ongoing internal social commentary on 1959, the RNAS, and mid-20th century behavior psychology.

Through it all, Oates presents sufficient glimpses of a garden variety dystopian world and social science fiction to classify her novel as science fiction with YA leanings, although doing so ignores the first-person story’s ending that places everything before it into question. For a take on this terminal ambiguity, check out Paul Di Filippo’s insightful review at Locus Magazine—but don’t say I didn’t warn you that after reading his review, you’ll need to read the whole darn book over again.

— Michael Main

September 23, 1959! It could not be true—could it?

This was Zone 9—of course. This was my Exile. I must accept my Exile, and I must adjust. Yet—

The horror swept over me: this was eighty years into the past, and more. I had not yet been born. My parents had not yet been born. There was no one in this world who loved me, no one who even knew me. No one who would claim me. I was utterly alone.

DEBUT

Hazards of Time Travel (Ecco Press, November 2018).

VARIANTS

2 English variants

TRANSLATIONS

Translations to French, Russian, Spanish

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