TIME WAS, short and sad and very well-done gay-male romantic novella

TIME WAS
IAN McDONALD
Tor.com Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

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.

My Review: First, read this:

War is no reason to change your drinking habits.
–and–
I shared my world; he shares his. What I understand is that he sees a beauty—a sublime, something awesome and terrifying—that I do not.
–and–
If you want to write, you must write experience. What it is to be that thing. There is everything in a moment.

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.

All written art is an attempt to communicate what it is to feel, to ask the terrifying question: Is what I experience in my head the same as what you experience? Terrifying because we can never know for certain. We hope; we risk.

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 River of Gods 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."