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The Traveler will break your brain. I’m telling you that up front, because for all the talk in the blurb about adventure and survival and father-son relationships, this book is really about mind-bending metaphysics with a healthy dose of climate anxiety. Oh, and there’s time travel.
The story begins with an extremely average middle-class white guy living in Wisconsin. He’s driving to work as he does every day, when at exactly 7:52AM, he… slips. That’s how he describes it, anyway. The world slips out from underneath him. His car has vanished, but he’s still got his clothes on and he’s somehow travelled a day forward in time.
That would be weird enough, but the next day, it happens again. At 7:52AM, he slips – only this time, he travels forward two days. And it happens again (four days), and again (eight days).
To be clear, time continues as normal for everyone else – it’s just this guy, Scott, disappearing in the blink of an eye and reappearing exactly where he was geographically, but at ever-doubling intervals into the future.
The slips initially cause some pretty major logistical problems in Scott’s life. Soon, he’s slipping months, then years, then all of a sudden his wife is demanding a divorce from the husband she only sees once in a blue moon and his son is heading to university. It’s only been days for him, but it’s been over a decade for them. And that’s just in the first few chapters.
The Traveler moves startlingly quickly. The present day becomes futuristic, then apocalyptic, with Scott (and, thus, the reader) only experiencing one day of it at a time. Scott’s son tries to use his career as a physicist to figure out what was happening to his father, and how to stop it, but he’s dead (in his 90s) in just two weeks Scott-time. He turns Scott into a messianic figure in the hopes of ensuring his safety for the next couple of millennia. Soon, Scott is getting a glimpse of climate wars, technological advances, geopolitical upheaval, space colonisation, and the life he left behind is an ancient relic (literally).
As I said, The Traveler will break your brain.
It gets a bit gun-happy from the mid-point (so American), but on the whole I’d describe it as The Time Traveler’s Wife meets Project Hail Mary meets The Good Place meets Black Mirror. It’s a compelling read, but one you want to set aside a bit of time for (and maybe have a therapy session booked if you’re prone to catastrophising about the future of humanity). My endless gratitude to my friends at Macmillan Australia for sending through a copy for review.
Read The Traveler on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)
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