Great Work of the Time

Backwards time travel doesn't make sense: you'd either have to pop out of the universe or somehow travel back in time through your own body, for those first moments; and once in the past everything you do will affect your environment in ways that would presumably change the future enough that you won't be the exact same person you were when you went back in time--therefore won't be the you you are in the past! That makes no sense. Along with normal fiction performance pressures, time travel stories have to distract the reader from their impossibility. Crowley comes up with a very novel way to do this, one I'm not sure I've gotten my head around but very fun nonetheless. More importantly, he tells a lovely story, and in his best Stevensonian prose.

Combining several diverse themes, Great Work of Time explores time travel, British imperialism, angels, the life of Cecil Rhodes, and an unimaginable future world tangled and snarled with impossibilities made real by the alteration of countless destinies. Partly a twisted history lesson and partly a chronicle of regret, at its simplest level Great Work of Time is a morality play that exposes the flaw in the argument, "If only humankind could rewrite its own history." A work of aching beauty, this short novella is a small gem from a gifted writer.