A Scientific Romance

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine was a social allegory described as “a
scientific romance.” Its narrator journeyed into the future, only to
discover “the evolutionary degeneration of life.” Award-winning
travel writer and historian Ronald Wright revisits this territory in his
first novel, which begins with the discovery, in 1999, of a letter Wells
wrote announcing the location and date set for the automatic return of
his time machine.

Unlike his predecessor, Wright’s time traveler is a fully developed
character. Dr. David Lambert is an archeologist and museum curator who
is emotionally entangled with the two people to whom he addresses the
records and journals that make up this book: a close friend and the
woman both of them loved. She is now dead, and Lambert may have
brain-rotting mad cow disease. If the Wells letter is not a hoax, could
he travel to a future where the disease can be cured, and perhaps into
the past to prevent the death of his lover?

Plunging ahead 500 years to the middle of the next millennium, Lambert
finds himself alone in a Britain that has become a jungle. Monkeys
thrive in the foliage that has enveloped the ruins of London, and most
windows in the remains of the famed Canary Wharf “are dark mouths
dribbling vegetation down their chins.” Lambert’s solitary weeks in
southern England precede a lonely trek north to Scotland, where he
discovers a clan of primitive illiterates.

Using his archaeological skills, Lambert tries to reconstruct what
happened from bits of evidence he unearths on his trek. Everything
points to a violent end in the mid–21st century, a time that produced
international organizations like Vatican Disney and race wars led by
such groups as The Final Solutions. Like the narrator, the reader of
this gripping and powerful tale may ask, “When do you suppose an end
like this became inevitable?”