The issue with Julie Cross’ novel Tempest is indicated—foreshadowed, in literary terms—on the very first page. In the very first paragraph, in fact. To be precise, in the very first few sentences of the story:
“Okay, so it’s true. I can time-travel. But it’s not as exciting as it sounds. I can’t go back in time and kill Hitler.”
What is the point of a time travel story? What is the ultimate point of any story about time travel? Exploring the impact of how jumping to the future or to the past can impact the present. This is the fundamental premise of time travel fiction. The impact may be limited to the merely personal—what does the time traveler learn himself upon returning to his own present-day—or it might be something that alters the entire known course of history. But for a story about moving through time to really matter and have weight, the history of the genre strongly encourages narratives in which the present can be altered. If time travel stories were a verb tense, they would be subjunctive: the presence of “what if” has been deemed a necessary quality.
So, then, the issue with Tempest is that the time traveling narrator can move around through time, but can’t actually impact it, right? Well, not exactly. The thing is, the rules turn out to be more complicated than those stated on the opening page. And that is the issue at hand. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a narrator learning the ropes of a certain strange ability as the story progresses. In fact, it is usually preferable than a story where the narrator never learns anything new. It is never good writing to open your novel with information that intentionally misleads the reader about the basic facts of the story. But that isn’t the issue, either, because it doesn’t seem as if Cross is intentionally setting out to mislead her readers. The fact is that the narrator will eventually learn that going back to the past to take drastic action that will alter the course of future events is technically feasible, but only under very precise conditions. He will learn a lot of things about his strange ability over the course of the narrative that he doesn’t know at the beginning. The rules change as the story progresses and that is the real issue here because it does not just apply to the rules.
At certain points, this seems to be a YA novel about time travel and tragic romance. Then it transforms into something about time travel and spying. Then it becomes something about time travel and deep state conspiracies. The rules of the plot keep shifting as much as the rules of the structural conceit. Going back to those opening lines, it does not seem a case of the author misleading readers about she has written as much as it about the author not deciding herself what she has written.
Of course, one could make the argument that is merely a case of the form of the novel reflecting its content. Time has a way of changing perspective on things as new information is gained or new attitudes develop from a better understanding of the information. Actually, come to think of it, the word “issue” really does not even seem proper here. That is a word which connotes a certain negativity, but what is actually going on here is more a topic of debate. One way of reading the novel is from the perspective that the author is confused about exactly what kind of book she wanted to write. The only genre it fits into comfortably is YA, otherwise it is a sort of science fiction-spy-romance-conspiracy novel. But then again, sometimes romances become spy stories and sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to actually be genuine examples of espionage. The only solution to solving whether the structural liquidity of Tempest is bad planning or brilliant strategy might be the re-read after some time has passed.
