A review by mschlat
Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau
4.0
What if you found a time wormhole in your closet and used it, not to kill Hitler or right some other wrong, but to visit rock concerts you always wanted to see? What if you stranded your best friend back in 980 CE Manhattan and couldn’t get him back? What if you fell in love with the astrophysics grad student you hired to get back your best friend? What if you and she started using the time machine to visit dead relatives and old girlfriends? How much could you resist fixing the broken parts of your life?
Every Anxious Wave isn’t so much a science fiction novel as it is a relationship novel that heavily depends on time travel. Our protagonists (Karl Bender --- the ex-guitarist for a mildly successful indie band who finds the wormhole, Wayne ---the best friend who gets lost in time, and Lena ---the grad student who, at the start of the novel, has decided to live her life as an emotional zombie) are troubled people who have all shut down some portion of themselves until they get involved with time travel.
Now, one big note. Even if this isn’t a science fiction novel in the classical sense (it is at times radically unclear how anyone determines to travel to a specific point in time), it uses time travel a ton. The protagonists travel forwards and backwards in time, we get time traveling emails and texts, and a huge part of the novel is the creation of alternate timelines and questions of causality.
At the same time, the focus is still the relationships and how people change (with and without the help of time travel). And that brings me to the problem I had with the novel. Our main character, Karl Bender, does change throughout the story (especially with regards to how to use the wormhole responsibly), but most of the time he just yearns for Lena. And yearns. And yearns. Combining that with some of the inevitabilty you see in events (thanks to a future perspective), there isn’t a lot of meaningful plot points. I mean, a lot happens --- it’s a dense book --- but I didn’t really see an arc in Karl’s life so much as an sequence of predestined events. There are changes in the other characters (with Lena taking a much more proactive stance on self improvement through time travel), but since we follow Karl all the time, the plot feels a bit hollow at times.
Still, it’s a fascinating read, especially in the first part of the novel (where we get discussions between Karl and Lena on both the physics of time travel and whether or not appreciation of Morrissey is necessary for a full life). I don’t think I’ve ever read such an indie/punk influenced time travel story (although I think of Dan Clowe’s [b:Patience|25652706|Patience|Daniel Clowes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1434480981s/25652706.jpg|45472855] as a distant cousin).
Every Anxious Wave isn’t so much a science fiction novel as it is a relationship novel that heavily depends on time travel. Our protagonists (Karl Bender --- the ex-guitarist for a mildly successful indie band who finds the wormhole, Wayne ---the best friend who gets lost in time, and Lena ---the grad student who, at the start of the novel, has decided to live her life as an emotional zombie) are troubled people who have all shut down some portion of themselves until they get involved with time travel.
Now, one big note. Even if this isn’t a science fiction novel in the classical sense (it is at times radically unclear how anyone determines to travel to a specific point in time), it uses time travel a ton. The protagonists travel forwards and backwards in time, we get time traveling emails and texts, and a huge part of the novel is the creation of alternate timelines and questions of causality.
At the same time, the focus is still the relationships and how people change (with and without the help of time travel). And that brings me to the problem I had with the novel. Our main character, Karl Bender, does change throughout the story (especially with regards to how to use the wormhole responsibly), but most of the time he just yearns for Lena. And yearns. And yearns. Combining that with some of the inevitabilty you see in events (thanks to a future perspective), there isn’t a lot of meaningful plot points. I mean, a lot happens --- it’s a dense book --- but I didn’t really see an arc in Karl’s life so much as an sequence of predestined events. There are changes in the other characters (with Lena taking a much more proactive stance on self improvement through time travel), but since we follow Karl all the time, the plot feels a bit hollow at times.
Still, it’s a fascinating read, especially in the first part of the novel (where we get discussions between Karl and Lena on both the physics of time travel and whether or not appreciation of Morrissey is necessary for a full life). I don’t think I’ve ever read such an indie/punk influenced time travel story (although I think of Dan Clowe’s [b:Patience|25652706|Patience|Daniel Clowes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1434480981s/25652706.jpg|45472855] as a distant cousin).