May 28, 2025 • 28 mins
On the surface, Kaliane Bradley’s debut is a time-travel novel; it’s speculative fiction meets romance and espionage. But underneath? It's a sharp, satirical exploration of institutional control—of what happens when government red tape meets the impossible. This week, Michael sits down for a conversation with Kaliane Bradley to discuss her bestselling book The Ministry of Time.
Reading list:
The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley, 2024
The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger ,2003
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson, 2013
Discworld (series), Terry Pratchett, 1983–2015
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Kaliane Bradley
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know as a writer that you've made it when
your surname gets turned into something adjectival or Wellian or
kafka esque. And somehow it's the writers who are good
at capturing systems, capturing bureaucracy that are the ones that
we most immortalize in this way. Of all the famous
literary works about bureaucracy, maybe nuns better known or more
(00:21):
cited than Franz Kafka's The Trial Joseph Kay an ordinary
man who wakes up one day to find himself accused
of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose
very nature is never revealed to him, and eventually finds
himself in a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps. The book
was published in nineteen twenty five, and yet even today
we're talking about its impact, its resonance, particularly anyone who
(00:45):
spent any time on hold to sent link but and
you contend to hit the shelves last year a new
example of bureaucratic ineptitude and wizardry tied into one. It's
a debut novel, and it became an instant best seller.
On the surface, it's a time travel novel. Speculative fiction
meets romance meets espionage, but underneath is a sharp satirical
(01:09):
exploration of institutional control of what happens when government red
tape meets the impossible.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
The book in.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Question is called The Ministry of Time, and it's by
Callie Anne Bradley, centering on a civil servant who's offered
a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering
expats from a cross history to test whether time travel
is feasible. Her role is to work as a bridge,
living with supporting and monitoring one of those expatriots, one
(01:41):
of those time travelers. He's referred to as eighteen forty seven,
and his commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer
adventurer by trade. The book follows Gore's attempts to adjust
to this bizarre new world of washing machines and Spotify
and feminism, following Gore and the Bridge during one long,
(02:04):
sultry summer as they move from awkwardness to friendship to
red hot passion. In Calian's futuristic world, time travel isn't
just dangerous, it's heavily surveiled and wrapped in layers of permissions, protocols,
and performance reviews. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read
This the show about the books we love and the
(02:26):
stories behind them. Tell me about your relationship with time travel,
because it seems to me that as far as a
storytelling convention or a genre trope goes, it is one
that is peculiarly characterized by its need for rules and
(02:48):
structure and rigidit here, and I'm interested in whether that's
something that appeals to you and whether it created a
challenge for you right out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I mean both things. Really, it appealed to me because
I think a lot of the stakes don't work without
a certain amount of rigidity and without certain rules. I
also think this is true of things like human relationships,
community interaction, like these things depend on both agreed rules
and certain level of stakes. So that definitely appealed to
(03:17):
me when I first started writing, because I was more
interested in the kind of after effects of having time
traveled than the science of time travel. So I was
being a bit vague about exactly how the rules worked,
and I got I think it was almost a thousand
words from one of my editors in a marginal note,
like you have to explain how this works because otherwise
it doesn't matter. You can hop back in time and
(03:38):
anything could happen, and you could you know, there's a timeline,
whether everyone is just a flying monkey, and everything's absolutely fine.
So even though I did the rules really appealed to me,
I was also messing around with the rules until someone
poked me with a stick to make me set them
up properly.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
It's such a funny thing because the rules matter in
an ideas sense, but they met her even more in
a narrative sense, like, as you said, to set up
the rules so you know where the stakes are. But
the other thing that you need to do, and I
think all time travel literature to a certain extent has
to do, is find its own limitations. How do we
ring fence this off so that it doesn't become completely weightless?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Absolutely, because also I think narrative demands a certain amount
of linear focus, and I think that things like character progression,
narrative progression, emotional progression requires a certain amount of as
you say, ring fencing of the timeline. So if you
were just throwing people around chaotically, there's nothing really for
a reader to hook into. You want to be following
(04:35):
someone watching the bounce around. I mean, maybe Calvino would
disagree with me, certainly for a book like this.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It strikes me that when we talk about rules or
structural stuff, the other way to talk about that is
the language. Settling on what the kind of agreed language
is for an imaginary thing goes a long way to
rendering it real. How quickly did the language of the
bureaucracy around time travel come to I'm.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
So embarrassed to say very fast. I would say maybe
the language of bureaucracy and the language of governmental rules
came faster than the big idea stuff about how time
travel works and therefore what affect emotional, psychological it has
on characters. I don't know, there's something dark inside me
that is really drawn towards bureaucracy. This is like with
(05:24):
John McCarey. Thing I read. I started being John lacay
very very young, before I really understood even the political context.
And when you read something like Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy,
where he's just refusing to explain what he means by
the Lamplighters and the scalp hunters and circus and the cousins.
Didn't know what was happening until a second reread when
I was much older but still was having a great time,
(05:47):
just a great time.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I think. And I'm glad you mentioned that because it
is and you know, that's one of the other genre
conventions that you play with in this book. But the
spy novel is always great for that, and is the
if it asserts a world with language that feels authoritative
enough you go along as a reader. It doesn't matter,
you know. It was only listening to an interview with
Mick Hare and I discovered that most of his terminology
(06:09):
is completely his own fabrication. The park is not real.
They don't talk about secondes, none of that stuff that
he created entirely for the world of the book and
just lives it straight faced enough that it feels like
something true.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
You've walked into a room where people are talking like this,
and you're like, well, I better not a long otherwise
they're going to kick me out.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
To embarrass myself. If I'd be like, oh, I didn't
know they were called the dogs, They're not. That's just
a convenient lie.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Oh my god, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
There is something about that that's nice. But leaving aside
the human element for a moment and leaving side the
polar explorer element for a moment, the kind of overlay
of time travel, bureaucracy and the spy novel in this book.
The interplay is a linguistic one, you know. The ways
in which you allow those three things to make sense
and function relies entirely on that shared language and that reasoning.
(07:01):
And maybe no more acute than the idea of the
people who are out of their own time zones being
talked about as expetrates.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Absolutely, so that's a very deliberate political choice on the
part of the ministry to call them expatriates instead of refugees.
And I do think what the ministry are very insistent
on doing. One of the first things they start doing
is making sure the expats are using correct language, both
to describe the world around them, but also in terms
of politically correct language. And I think there's two things
(07:32):
that play for me there. One is the quite hopeful,
i think and quite positive idea that we create communities
by having a shared understanding of the world we're living
in a vocabulary that we can all easily refer to,
and so as a result, our sense of self is
kind of built out of these words that were given
for ourselves. So there's the expat Maggie Margaret Kemball, who's
(07:52):
from the Great Plague of London, who is given for
the first time in her life the word lesbian, and
it's wonderful for her. It's really liberating and really affirming.
Then there is also institutional language, which is often taking
the language of radical systems, radical responses to injustice, and
institutionalizing and defanging them. So it becomes about language that
(08:12):
is correct rather than language that is empathetic. And I
find there's an exciting contrast for me there because in
one case, you've been given new language, new taxonomies that
are really liberating, and then you're being given new languages
and new taxonomies that are actually quite deadening and are
encourage you to think of yourself as ticking boxes rather
than actually thinking about the realities of other people. And
(08:36):
that for me is like the big tension in the
ministry and the big tension for the narrator.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It is, I mean, the easy temptation is to look
to aw Well for that example of the way in
which an institution imposes language to deaden, but also to
other I think that relationship between those who are of
the project, whether it's the colonial project, whether it's the
corporate project, those who belong and those who don't, and
(09:02):
to create an outsider status through a language. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Absolutely, And I really like the all Wel comparison because
the Ministry of Truth is obviously. One of the reasons
this book is called the Ministry of Time is because
I was thinking about that. It's never actually called the
Ministry of Time in the book. It is just the
title of the book.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Espec. They will play it against Sam. They've heard it.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
It's not that they haven't heard it. They haven't heard it.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So how then do you build a protagonist as you
have with the Bridge, who is part of that system.
How do you find the human elements of a character
who chooses to speak and chooses to kind of live
in a system that kind of sends off the corners
(09:44):
of that humanity.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
She was such an interesting character to develop because when
I first started writing the book, she was nobody, She
was nothing, She was just a cipher. And in fact,
the whole first version of the book was written in
the second person, so that my friends who were reading it,
it was just as if they were they were experiencing
this funny game about living with a polar explorer from
nineteenth century. First of all, my agent said, I'm begging
(10:09):
you not to write a book in the second person.
I can't coward to sell.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Your agent's a coward. I'm going to say it right now.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Chris, if you're listening, please don't fire me. But he
also pointed out that like a love story where one
half of the love story is just a nothingness, and
a story about complicity where one half of that is
just nothing, it's just a blank space. It's just not
very satisfying. So when I started to write her, I
(10:37):
started to think about what in her past would mean
that first of all, she's attracted to the idea of
Victorian man, which is very separate to falling in love
with the person Graham or he is a person, he's like,
you know, he's a full human being. But attracted to
the idea of this Victorian hero, this dashing Victorian explorer.
(10:58):
And then what in her background would make her interested
in both afraid of and attracted to the kind of
control the ministry promises. And I often use the word
control rather than power, because I don't think it's so
much that she wants to wield power as she wants
to be in control. She wants to be in control
of a narrative. She wants to be in control of
(11:18):
the way the language that about her is used, and
in control of any given situation that she enters. So
when I was writing her, and I was thinking about
the fact that Graham Gore is entering a world where
the British Empire has collapsed, and that was for him
his kind of driving force. It's a background that's almost
not worth acknowledging because it was just it would have
just been over the navy like a tea cozy. I
(11:41):
thought maybe it would be interesting for her to be
British Burmese or British Indian, someone who has family who
were formerly colonized subjects and was a mixed race, white
passing person as I am, and therefore has like a
complicated relationship both to how they're perceived, how they're talked about,
and how they might be received by structural power. And
(12:04):
then I thought this, I'm just being readers and generals.
I'm just getting in my own way here. I'm British Cambodian.
I know that's not like a former British imperial colony,
it's a French part of the French Empire. But it
just seems like I am trying to make things difficult
for myself when I know what I could write well
is a British Cambodian person.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Do you think that trying to make things difficult for
yourself was about assuring a reid that projected autobiographical angst
or kind of personal storytelling in it, Like were you
deliberately loath to open the door to that kind of reading?
Speaker 2 (12:39):
That is exactly exactly why I was getting in my
own way like that, because yeah, I didn't want the
bridge to be she obviously isn't me. I've never alas,
I've never lived with her.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Well, I was going to say, the element of wish
fulfillment means that as soon as the bridge is rad
as you at all, it's like, oh, well, this is
just a personal fantasy.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
This is just a personal fantasy where I get to
be complicit with the British coming, which I love doing obviously,
we all love doing it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Our sacred dream where Australian's.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah I was. I was really really resistant to that,
and over the course of the like the editing the book,
because of what it was published, was I think draft
nine of all the edits there was putting things in
about Cambodia, taking things out, working out what of my
family story I wanted to draw on what I really
didn't what should be completely fictionalized. My mother occasionally says,
(13:30):
you know, it didn't happen to me like this. It's like, yes,
I know, it happened to like this to a fictional character.
This isn't you.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
After the break, Callahne cheers the audience she writes for
and explains why Terry Pratchett is so important to both
her reading and her writing life. We'll be right back.
(14:01):
I read another interview with you where you mentioned that
one of the talkings to you got from your editor
was that you needed to take yourself, you needed to
take the work more seriously. I want to know what
that is and what that lack of seriousness was. Was
it a confidence thing or was it a defense mechanism
(14:21):
that as long as you were playing on the page
the stakes were lower. As long as you were trying
to do something serious, there was something at risk.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
This is such a good question. It's something that I've
been asking myself quite a lot over the course of
you know, I'm here for the Melbourne Writers' Festival, the
Sydney Writer's Festival, the Ouplyan Writers' Festival. You know. I
go up on stage in front of all these people
who I've been seeing much bigger audiences than I ever
had in the UK, and I talk as if I
shouldn't be there or I'm slightly embarrassed to be there.
(14:49):
And my imposter syndrome is just like coming out of
my ears. And each time I do it, I think,
I don't know why I keep doing this. It doesn't
make people like me more. It's actually very honest, but
I can't stop doing it at the moment, and I
keep on trying to pull it back. It was the
same with the book that I was insistent, partly because
it came out of such a place of joy and
(15:10):
a kind of playfulness, and I was writing a playful
thing that became serious for friends who I didn't feel
would tell me that what I was doing was cringe
and silly. To take this game seriously and to start
thinking more seriously about what the stakes were. As soon
as I started to professionalize, what was that a game
(15:32):
just for friends? Again? I had that immediate instinct like, Oh,
someone's going to find this a bit silly. Someone's going
to think fantasy wish performan, this is really boring, this
is silly. I don't need to hear what this woman
wants to do with this frozen dead guy. But each
time that I kind of ran across that in me mentally,
(15:53):
I was being received by people who were interested, who
were interested in the work, who were interested in how
it might develop.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Well, that's why I fixate on that. You described the
ways in which this book's origins were a shared game
with friends, kind of shared pursued, and so those readers
weren't an abstract group of readers or of faceless readers.
There were people you knew who, presumably you were trying
to delight and amuse.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
That's the only thing I want. I wanted them to
hoot and holler. That was my entire intention for the
first draft.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Does seem like you've unlocked something slightly important. I think
from a ridally perspective, is about the reality of that reader,
rather than the abstraction of that reader.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah, the abstraction of the reader who might receive this
well or might receive this badly, rather than the friend
who is going to read me in good faith and
trusting me. I had an interesting conversation with Tory Peters,
author of stag Dance and De Transition Baby. I was
talking about my second book, which I panned in and
which has been quite a painful process and which has
received quite severe notes, as severe as a you know,
(16:57):
no editor is ever going to tell their also is
that there idiot, and that nothing they've written is worthwhile.
But it has had to have its publication date moved
so that I can do edits. But I was saying,
you know, it's just been I was doing it again.
They're like, oh, it's terrible. I'm I'm just a very
silly person. And she said, from what I understand, you
wrote the first book for friends, and now it sounds
(17:18):
like you've been trying to write the second book to
please this abstract idea of the follow up reader for ministry.
I think you need to go back and write it
for friends again. And it's sort of ridiculous that it
hadn't occurred to me to just think of it like that,
because it's true. I think I need to go back
to just thinking about the maybe five people who I
would show it to in the first place, rather than
the people who may or may not be disappointed by
(17:40):
a second book.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Now, arguably the most scandalous thing you've done in ministry
of time is you've written a book where you've made
smoking sexy again. Ah, like decades of people being like, no,
it's not sexy, it's not cool, you shouldn't do it,
and then you're like, okay, so I've got this charming,
arctic excit Laura who is just relentlessly smoking and it's kind.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Of heart Also, I wrote it during so in twenty
twenty one, where you know, we were still more or
less in lockdown in the UK, and I, yeah, I
really wanted a cigarette. It's one of those fascinating things
that is both terrible and might kill you. And there's
no such thing as like you can't have a mutual
amount of nicotine. You gotta have a neutral amount of
tar in your lungs. Also, it's great if you are
(18:25):
at a party and you know no one really smokes
indoors anymore, if you just want to be like, I've
got to go outside and have a cigarette, and then
you don't have to talk to people for the length
of the cigarette except for other people in the smoking area.
Who are your Kindred Spirits?
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, I feel like we've really broken important ground on
this podcast, absolutely, But it does, Like as much as
that's a very funny, very specific thing, it does get
to the heart of something I really love in this
book that is very deliberate, which is thinking about different
social moras in different times and the ways in which
(18:56):
they land so differently. It's one thing to think of
an idealized Victorian hero who's a particular kind of stoic
and kind of soulful and all these things at once,
but then to think about the politics of the day
and the way they probably played out, and the assumptions
and the baseline chauvinism and racism and unthinking bigotry that
(19:20):
is bolted on. How important was it to you that
you weren't actively ahistorical.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
It was so important. It's actually quite funny to remember
how important it was to me and how deranged I
became desperately trying to imagine what it would have been
like for this, for Graham Gore specifically, but to a
lesser extent also the other characters, how it would have
been like to experience the twenty first century Like I
was really taking this experiment very seriously, taking this game
very seriously. I was, you know, I was doing things
(19:47):
like reading this enormous book about the Victorian home because
I wanted to just imagine what the curtains would have
looked like, what the flooring would have looked like, and
just how a house would have felt different to a
man walking out of Victoria in England into twenty first
century London, just how his body would have reacted differently
to the weight of the clothes. Clothes used to be
much heavier and much denser, it was colder, and they
(20:08):
didn't have kind of modern innovations with textiles. But also
things like being interested in British polar expiration as I was.
As I am does eventually mean you have to admit
to yourself that what you're interested in is an imperial project.
There is no good reason for those men to have
(20:29):
been in the Arctic or Antarctic. There's no good reason
for them to have landed in the Inuit homelands and
died there in droves, just like for stupid reasons, for
stupid reasons that were never useful in fact for the Empire.
Because the Northwest Passage was not traversible, was just a
racist project. When you are confronted with that, I think
you can either say, well, I'm different, I'm different and
(20:53):
my interest is actually really good, or you can be
willing to interrogate why you might be interested and where
the friction lies. I spent a lot of time thinking
about how I would be received by these people who
I was studying with deep fascination and thinking of as
fully rounded humans who had different responses to being in
the Arctic, for whom their deaths were tragic. They were
(21:15):
completely preventable. They shouldn't have been up there, but it
was tragic. It's tragic when someone dies in awful circumstances. Nevertheless,
and the idea of a Victorian man being presented with
a mixed race woman who has a job, he still
would have done some real spicy microaggressions. I mean, you know.
Of course, the narratu of the bridge also gets it
wrong because she's so institutionalized, and again her ideas are
(21:37):
more about being correct than being empathetic, and so she's
teaching him stuff that isn't quite right. And then he's like,
I don't really understand because what you're saying things to
contradict the world were actually in. Yeah, that was a
lot of fun. Yeah, I just don't think it would
have been interesting to me to have Graham Gore, as
you know, turning up to me like I actually have
always thought of feminism was brilliant. Yeah, in my heart,
(21:59):
it's always been the case.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
But it also as far as romance genre tropes go,
you actually need that person with whom you disagree or
you have a fundamentally different worldview. Part of the friction
of that kind of mounting desire comes precisely from the
ways in which he is alien.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Absolutely, And I think this is the thing about romance,
right there has to be a reason that they don't
immediately make out. Now that now that we're in a
in a world where it is possible to just swipe
write on someone, meet them immediately like them, that's it.
There was no friction, there was no at tension, there
was no difficulty to sustain a romance novel. There does
have to be that there has to be something in
(22:41):
the way of them.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
You've worked in publishing for years. There is clearly an
intimate relationship between your reading and your writing. Tell me
why Terry Pratchett is such an important writer to you, Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Where do I begin? So? I first started reading Pratchett
entirely by accident when I was nine or ten, because
I picked up a copy of Interesting Times, Actually, which
is for anyone who isn't familiar with the Discord series,
and Terry Pratchett is quite late on in the Discworld series,
talks about characters who have already been established very much
earlier on in the series, and is the kind of
(23:15):
in the middle of a storyline kind of book. But
I was very attracted to the bright colors and of
the cover I started reading it. I didn't really understand
what's going on, but he's just he's so funny. He
doesn't patronize a reader, he doesn't talk down to them,
but he does expect you to keep up. He expects
you to be in on the joke. He'll make the
(23:35):
joke and he expects you to be.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
In on it.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
And that's such a deliciously welcoming thing, especially when you're
a ten year old girl.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
I do remember one time I met him to get
the truth his twenty fifth Discworld novel signed, and he
just knew exactly how like a slightly cookie I think
I would have been twelve by the twelve thirteen, how
a slightly kooky teenager wanted to be spoken to. He
was just a very empathetic man. The thing I like
about the Discworld series is both that they are like
(24:03):
just very funny. He was very very funny. He used
a humor like a you know, he could play a
humorous joke like a trumpet, and he could use it
to make a very serious point. I liked that they
were funny. I liked that they were also very serious,
which is not to say that they were not funny
in places, but rather than that, he took his characters seriously.
(24:24):
He took his characters seriously and their realities and the
responses that they would be engendering in a reader. And
I think he took his readers very seriously as well.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Actually, what as a writer do you hope you've taken
from him, given that he was such a formative rider
for you?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Partly that a sense of joy is going to compel
both the reader but also the writer. I really think
he enjoyed writing his books. I really hope so that
joy is a perfectly valid and perfectly brilliant way to
be launched into a story. And also the funniness can
(25:02):
be serious, that humor can be serious, and that it
isn't lesser, and you don't have to apologize for being
a humorous writer. You can, in fact have something serious
to say and still be very funny.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah. No, I think that's all right. And I think
for me, the other thing to come back to the
structure of time travel or whatever is he was very
good at having set up an entire world with its
own internal logic, its own traditions, and presenting them in
a way that was matter of fact. If he wasn't
interested in an element, he wouldn't over explain it, but
he would set up the rules have them be there
(25:33):
as the underlying reality. There's no imposter syndrome in a
Pratchet book.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
No, absolutely not. He knows what he's doing, and he
knows that you're you know, you're you feel like you're
in safe hands with the Pratchet book. Actually, this is
something I think about with magic, the way he dealt
with magic, which feels like a really pragmatic and thoughtful
series of limitations, because quite often he says that there
used to be raw magic when sorcerers existed and anyone
(25:58):
could do anything, just throwing fireballs world. In fact, now
in what is contemporary discworld, magic is very limited. There's
a limit that you can do with it because it
is a depleting resource. And there is like a very
clear parallel to the way we use technology and the
way we think of technology with the way he treats magic.
It has unfortunately slightly changed the way I read other
(26:20):
books with magic, and because every time I see someone
who's just a wizard doing magic, I'm like, where is
where is that energy coming from? Like, what's going on?
What are the rules with magic in your in your universe?
Explain it to me?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And like it in a Bureaucred's just swinging into action,
all that a pen and a pair. Then you're like,
well this won't do.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Sorry, we have to tax this and there are tariffs
on this song.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Sorry, you are misbehaving and we are going to ride
you up. It's the only way. Thank you so much
for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Kelly and Bradley's best selling novel, The Ministry of Time
is available everywhere. Now, before we go, a couple of
time travel shout outs that I wanted to give as
a big fan of the time travel genre. The Time
(27:11):
Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. If you haven't read it,
it is well worth reading. Don't see the stupid film
with Eric Banner and Rachel mccadams. The book is romantic
and sad and divine, and also a mention to Kate
Atkinson's life after life. It's a kind of littery groundhole day,
but its tricksiness with timelines and time travel are very good.
(27:33):
I mean Terry Pratchett ready to mention in this. He's
very good at time travel too. So there are three
time travel recommendations if you don't want to watch Back
to the Future again. Also, before we get out of here,
if you haven't heard the news, Michelle Ducretze was awarded
the twenty twenty five Stellar Prize for her fantastic theory
and practice. We were lucky enough to have her on
(27:53):
read this earlier in the year, so if you haven't
given it a listen yet, go back to the archive
and while you're there, rate, review, share, listen again all
of the things put read this into other people's ear holes.
That's it for this week's show. You can find all
the books we mentioned at your favorite independam bookstore read.
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible with the
(28:15):
generous support of the OUR group. The show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Posey mcacky edits our transcripts.
Thanks for listening, See you next week.
You know as a writer that you've made it when
your surname gets turned into something adjectival or Wellian or
kafka esque. And somehow it's the writers who are good
at capturing systems, capturing bureaucracy that are the ones that
we most immortalize in this way. Of all the famous
literary works about bureaucracy, maybe nuns better known or more
(00:21):
cited than Franz Kafka's The Trial Joseph Kay an ordinary
man who wakes up one day to find himself accused
of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose
very nature is never revealed to him, and eventually finds
himself in a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps. The book
was published in nineteen twenty five, and yet even today
we're talking about its impact, its resonance, particularly anyone who
(00:45):
spent any time on hold to sent link but and
you contend to hit the shelves last year a new
example of bureaucratic ineptitude and wizardry tied into one. It's
a debut novel, and it became an instant best seller.
On the surface, it's a time travel novel. Speculative fiction
meets romance meets espionage, but underneath is a sharp satirical
(01:09):
exploration of institutional control of what happens when government red
tape meets the impossible.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
The book in.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Question is called The Ministry of Time, and it's by
Callie Anne Bradley, centering on a civil servant who's offered
a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering
expats from a cross history to test whether time travel
is feasible. Her role is to work as a bridge,
living with supporting and monitoring one of those expatriots, one
(01:41):
of those time travelers. He's referred to as eighteen forty seven,
and his commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer
adventurer by trade. The book follows Gore's attempts to adjust
to this bizarre new world of washing machines and Spotify
and feminism, following Gore and the Bridge during one long,
(02:04):
sultry summer as they move from awkwardness to friendship to
red hot passion. In Calian's futuristic world, time travel isn't
just dangerous, it's heavily surveiled and wrapped in layers of permissions, protocols,
and performance reviews. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read
This the show about the books we love and the
(02:26):
stories behind them. Tell me about your relationship with time travel,
because it seems to me that as far as a
storytelling convention or a genre trope goes, it is one
that is peculiarly characterized by its need for rules and
(02:48):
structure and rigidit here, and I'm interested in whether that's
something that appeals to you and whether it created a
challenge for you right out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I mean both things. Really, it appealed to me because
I think a lot of the stakes don't work without
a certain amount of rigidity and without certain rules. I
also think this is true of things like human relationships,
community interaction, like these things depend on both agreed rules
and certain level of stakes. So that definitely appealed to
(03:17):
me when I first started writing, because I was more
interested in the kind of after effects of having time
traveled than the science of time travel. So I was
being a bit vague about exactly how the rules worked,
and I got I think it was almost a thousand
words from one of my editors in a marginal note,
like you have to explain how this works because otherwise
it doesn't matter. You can hop back in time and
(03:38):
anything could happen, and you could you know, there's a timeline,
whether everyone is just a flying monkey, and everything's absolutely fine.
So even though I did the rules really appealed to me,
I was also messing around with the rules until someone
poked me with a stick to make me set them
up properly.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
It's such a funny thing because the rules matter in
an ideas sense, but they met her even more in
a narrative sense, like, as you said, to set up
the rules so you know where the stakes are. But
the other thing that you need to do, and I
think all time travel literature to a certain extent has
to do, is find its own limitations. How do we
ring fence this off so that it doesn't become completely weightless?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Absolutely, because also I think narrative demands a certain amount
of linear focus, and I think that things like character progression,
narrative progression, emotional progression requires a certain amount of as
you say, ring fencing of the timeline. So if you
were just throwing people around chaotically, there's nothing really for
a reader to hook into. You want to be following
(04:35):
someone watching the bounce around. I mean, maybe Calvino would
disagree with me, certainly for a book like this.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It strikes me that when we talk about rules or
structural stuff, the other way to talk about that is
the language. Settling on what the kind of agreed language
is for an imaginary thing goes a long way to
rendering it real. How quickly did the language of the
bureaucracy around time travel come to I'm.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
So embarrassed to say very fast. I would say maybe
the language of bureaucracy and the language of governmental rules
came faster than the big idea stuff about how time
travel works and therefore what affect emotional, psychological it has
on characters. I don't know, there's something dark inside me
that is really drawn towards bureaucracy. This is like with
(05:24):
John McCarey. Thing I read. I started being John lacay
very very young, before I really understood even the political context.
And when you read something like Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy,
where he's just refusing to explain what he means by
the Lamplighters and the scalp hunters and circus and the cousins.
Didn't know what was happening until a second reread when
I was much older but still was having a great time,
(05:47):
just a great time.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I think. And I'm glad you mentioned that because it
is and you know, that's one of the other genre
conventions that you play with in this book. But the
spy novel is always great for that, and is the
if it asserts a world with language that feels authoritative
enough you go along as a reader. It doesn't matter,
you know. It was only listening to an interview with
Mick Hare and I discovered that most of his terminology
(06:09):
is completely his own fabrication. The park is not real.
They don't talk about secondes, none of that stuff that
he created entirely for the world of the book and
just lives it straight faced enough that it feels like
something true.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
You've walked into a room where people are talking like this,
and you're like, well, I better not a long otherwise
they're going to kick me out.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
To embarrass myself. If I'd be like, oh, I didn't
know they were called the dogs, They're not. That's just
a convenient lie.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Oh my god, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
There is something about that that's nice. But leaving aside
the human element for a moment and leaving side the
polar explorer element for a moment, the kind of overlay
of time travel, bureaucracy and the spy novel in this book.
The interplay is a linguistic one, you know. The ways
in which you allow those three things to make sense
and function relies entirely on that shared language and that reasoning.
(07:01):
And maybe no more acute than the idea of the
people who are out of their own time zones being
talked about as expetrates.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Absolutely, so that's a very deliberate political choice on the
part of the ministry to call them expatriates instead of refugees.
And I do think what the ministry are very insistent
on doing. One of the first things they start doing
is making sure the expats are using correct language, both
to describe the world around them, but also in terms
of politically correct language. And I think there's two things
(07:32):
that play for me there. One is the quite hopeful,
i think and quite positive idea that we create communities
by having a shared understanding of the world we're living
in a vocabulary that we can all easily refer to,
and so as a result, our sense of self is
kind of built out of these words that were given
for ourselves. So there's the expat Maggie Margaret Kemball, who's
(07:52):
from the Great Plague of London, who is given for
the first time in her life the word lesbian, and
it's wonderful for her. It's really liberating and really affirming.
Then there is also institutional language, which is often taking
the language of radical systems, radical responses to injustice, and
institutionalizing and defanging them. So it becomes about language that
(08:12):
is correct rather than language that is empathetic. And I
find there's an exciting contrast for me there because in
one case, you've been given new language, new taxonomies that
are really liberating, and then you're being given new languages
and new taxonomies that are actually quite deadening and are
encourage you to think of yourself as ticking boxes rather
than actually thinking about the realities of other people. And
(08:36):
that for me is like the big tension in the
ministry and the big tension for the narrator.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It is, I mean, the easy temptation is to look
to aw Well for that example of the way in
which an institution imposes language to deaden, but also to
other I think that relationship between those who are of
the project, whether it's the colonial project, whether it's the
corporate project, those who belong and those who don't, and
(09:02):
to create an outsider status through a language. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Absolutely, And I really like the all Wel comparison because
the Ministry of Truth is obviously. One of the reasons
this book is called the Ministry of Time is because
I was thinking about that. It's never actually called the
Ministry of Time in the book. It is just the
title of the book.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Espec. They will play it against Sam. They've heard it.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
It's not that they haven't heard it. They haven't heard it.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So how then do you build a protagonist as you
have with the Bridge, who is part of that system.
How do you find the human elements of a character
who chooses to speak and chooses to kind of live
in a system that kind of sends off the corners
(09:44):
of that humanity.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
She was such an interesting character to develop because when
I first started writing the book, she was nobody, She
was nothing, She was just a cipher. And in fact,
the whole first version of the book was written in
the second person, so that my friends who were reading it,
it was just as if they were they were experiencing
this funny game about living with a polar explorer from
nineteenth century. First of all, my agent said, I'm begging
(10:09):
you not to write a book in the second person.
I can't coward to sell.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Your agent's a coward. I'm going to say it right now.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Chris, if you're listening, please don't fire me. But he
also pointed out that like a love story where one
half of the love story is just a nothingness, and
a story about complicity where one half of that is
just nothing, it's just a blank space. It's just not
very satisfying. So when I started to write her, I
(10:37):
started to think about what in her past would mean
that first of all, she's attracted to the idea of
Victorian man, which is very separate to falling in love
with the person Graham or he is a person, he's like,
you know, he's a full human being. But attracted to
the idea of this Victorian hero, this dashing Victorian explorer.
(10:58):
And then what in her background would make her interested
in both afraid of and attracted to the kind of
control the ministry promises. And I often use the word
control rather than power, because I don't think it's so
much that she wants to wield power as she wants
to be in control. She wants to be in control
of a narrative. She wants to be in control of
(11:18):
the way the language that about her is used, and
in control of any given situation that she enters. So
when I was writing her, and I was thinking about
the fact that Graham Gore is entering a world where
the British Empire has collapsed, and that was for him
his kind of driving force. It's a background that's almost
not worth acknowledging because it was just it would have
just been over the navy like a tea cozy. I
(11:41):
thought maybe it would be interesting for her to be
British Burmese or British Indian, someone who has family who
were formerly colonized subjects and was a mixed race, white
passing person as I am, and therefore has like a
complicated relationship both to how they're perceived, how they're talked about,
and how they might be received by structural power. And
(12:04):
then I thought this, I'm just being readers and generals.
I'm just getting in my own way here. I'm British Cambodian.
I know that's not like a former British imperial colony,
it's a French part of the French Empire. But it
just seems like I am trying to make things difficult
for myself when I know what I could write well
is a British Cambodian person.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Do you think that trying to make things difficult for
yourself was about assuring a reid that projected autobiographical angst
or kind of personal storytelling in it, Like were you
deliberately loath to open the door to that kind of reading?
Speaker 2 (12:39):
That is exactly exactly why I was getting in my
own way like that, because yeah, I didn't want the
bridge to be she obviously isn't me. I've never alas,
I've never lived with her.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Well, I was going to say, the element of wish
fulfillment means that as soon as the bridge is rad
as you at all, it's like, oh, well, this is
just a personal fantasy.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
This is just a personal fantasy where I get to
be complicit with the British coming, which I love doing obviously,
we all love doing it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Our sacred dream where Australian's.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah I was. I was really really resistant to that,
and over the course of the like the editing the book,
because of what it was published, was I think draft
nine of all the edits there was putting things in
about Cambodia, taking things out, working out what of my
family story I wanted to draw on what I really
didn't what should be completely fictionalized. My mother occasionally says,
(13:30):
you know, it didn't happen to me like this. It's like, yes,
I know, it happened to like this to a fictional character.
This isn't you.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
After the break, Callahne cheers the audience she writes for
and explains why Terry Pratchett is so important to both
her reading and her writing life. We'll be right back.
(14:01):
I read another interview with you where you mentioned that
one of the talkings to you got from your editor
was that you needed to take yourself, you needed to
take the work more seriously. I want to know what
that is and what that lack of seriousness was. Was
it a confidence thing or was it a defense mechanism
(14:21):
that as long as you were playing on the page
the stakes were lower. As long as you were trying
to do something serious, there was something at risk.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
This is such a good question. It's something that I've
been asking myself quite a lot over the course of
you know, I'm here for the Melbourne Writers' Festival, the
Sydney Writer's Festival, the Ouplyan Writers' Festival. You know. I
go up on stage in front of all these people
who I've been seeing much bigger audiences than I ever
had in the UK, and I talk as if I
shouldn't be there or I'm slightly embarrassed to be there.
(14:49):
And my imposter syndrome is just like coming out of
my ears. And each time I do it, I think,
I don't know why I keep doing this. It doesn't
make people like me more. It's actually very honest, but
I can't stop doing it at the moment, and I
keep on trying to pull it back. It was the
same with the book that I was insistent, partly because
it came out of such a place of joy and
(15:10):
a kind of playfulness, and I was writing a playful
thing that became serious for friends who I didn't feel
would tell me that what I was doing was cringe
and silly. To take this game seriously and to start
thinking more seriously about what the stakes were. As soon
as I started to professionalize, what was that a game
(15:32):
just for friends? Again? I had that immediate instinct like, Oh,
someone's going to find this a bit silly. Someone's going
to think fantasy wish performan, this is really boring, this
is silly. I don't need to hear what this woman
wants to do with this frozen dead guy. But each
time that I kind of ran across that in me mentally,
(15:53):
I was being received by people who were interested, who
were interested in the work, who were interested in how
it might develop.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Well, that's why I fixate on that. You described the
ways in which this book's origins were a shared game
with friends, kind of shared pursued, and so those readers
weren't an abstract group of readers or of faceless readers.
There were people you knew who, presumably you were trying
to delight and amuse.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
That's the only thing I want. I wanted them to
hoot and holler. That was my entire intention for the
first draft.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Does seem like you've unlocked something slightly important. I think
from a ridally perspective, is about the reality of that reader,
rather than the abstraction of that reader.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah, the abstraction of the reader who might receive this
well or might receive this badly, rather than the friend
who is going to read me in good faith and
trusting me. I had an interesting conversation with Tory Peters,
author of stag Dance and De Transition Baby. I was
talking about my second book, which I panned in and
which has been quite a painful process and which has
received quite severe notes, as severe as a you know,
(16:57):
no editor is ever going to tell their also is
that there idiot, and that nothing they've written is worthwhile.
But it has had to have its publication date moved
so that I can do edits. But I was saying,
you know, it's just been I was doing it again.
They're like, oh, it's terrible. I'm I'm just a very
silly person. And she said, from what I understand, you
wrote the first book for friends, and now it sounds
(17:18):
like you've been trying to write the second book to
please this abstract idea of the follow up reader for ministry.
I think you need to go back and write it
for friends again. And it's sort of ridiculous that it
hadn't occurred to me to just think of it like that,
because it's true. I think I need to go back
to just thinking about the maybe five people who I
would show it to in the first place, rather than
the people who may or may not be disappointed by
(17:40):
a second book.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Now, arguably the most scandalous thing you've done in ministry
of time is you've written a book where you've made
smoking sexy again. Ah, like decades of people being like, no,
it's not sexy, it's not cool, you shouldn't do it,
and then you're like, okay, so I've got this charming,
arctic excit Laura who is just relentlessly smoking and it's kind.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Of heart Also, I wrote it during so in twenty
twenty one, where you know, we were still more or
less in lockdown in the UK, and I, yeah, I
really wanted a cigarette. It's one of those fascinating things
that is both terrible and might kill you. And there's
no such thing as like you can't have a mutual
amount of nicotine. You gotta have a neutral amount of
tar in your lungs. Also, it's great if you are
(18:25):
at a party and you know no one really smokes
indoors anymore, if you just want to be like, I've
got to go outside and have a cigarette, and then
you don't have to talk to people for the length
of the cigarette except for other people in the smoking area.
Who are your Kindred Spirits?
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, I feel like we've really broken important ground on
this podcast, absolutely, But it does, Like as much as
that's a very funny, very specific thing, it does get
to the heart of something I really love in this
book that is very deliberate, which is thinking about different
social moras in different times and the ways in which
(18:56):
they land so differently. It's one thing to think of
an idealized Victorian hero who's a particular kind of stoic
and kind of soulful and all these things at once,
but then to think about the politics of the day
and the way they probably played out, and the assumptions
and the baseline chauvinism and racism and unthinking bigotry that
(19:20):
is bolted on. How important was it to you that
you weren't actively ahistorical.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
It was so important. It's actually quite funny to remember
how important it was to me and how deranged I
became desperately trying to imagine what it would have been
like for this, for Graham Gore specifically, but to a
lesser extent also the other characters, how it would have
been like to experience the twenty first century Like I
was really taking this experiment very seriously, taking this game
very seriously. I was, you know, I was doing things
(19:47):
like reading this enormous book about the Victorian home because
I wanted to just imagine what the curtains would have
looked like, what the flooring would have looked like, and
just how a house would have felt different to a
man walking out of Victoria in England into twenty first
century London, just how his body would have reacted differently
to the weight of the clothes. Clothes used to be
much heavier and much denser, it was colder, and they
(20:08):
didn't have kind of modern innovations with textiles. But also
things like being interested in British polar expiration as I was.
As I am does eventually mean you have to admit
to yourself that what you're interested in is an imperial project.
There is no good reason for those men to have
(20:29):
been in the Arctic or Antarctic. There's no good reason
for them to have landed in the Inuit homelands and
died there in droves, just like for stupid reasons, for
stupid reasons that were never useful in fact for the Empire.
Because the Northwest Passage was not traversible, was just a
racist project. When you are confronted with that, I think
you can either say, well, I'm different, I'm different and
(20:53):
my interest is actually really good, or you can be
willing to interrogate why you might be interested and where
the friction lies. I spent a lot of time thinking
about how I would be received by these people who
I was studying with deep fascination and thinking of as
fully rounded humans who had different responses to being in
the Arctic, for whom their deaths were tragic. They were
(21:15):
completely preventable. They shouldn't have been up there, but it
was tragic. It's tragic when someone dies in awful circumstances. Nevertheless,
and the idea of a Victorian man being presented with
a mixed race woman who has a job, he still
would have done some real spicy microaggressions. I mean, you know.
Of course, the narratu of the bridge also gets it
wrong because she's so institutionalized, and again her ideas are
(21:37):
more about being correct than being empathetic, and so she's
teaching him stuff that isn't quite right. And then he's like,
I don't really understand because what you're saying things to
contradict the world were actually in. Yeah, that was a
lot of fun. Yeah, I just don't think it would
have been interesting to me to have Graham Gore, as
you know, turning up to me like I actually have
always thought of feminism was brilliant. Yeah, in my heart,
(21:59):
it's always been the case.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
But it also as far as romance genre tropes go,
you actually need that person with whom you disagree or
you have a fundamentally different worldview. Part of the friction
of that kind of mounting desire comes precisely from the
ways in which he is alien.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Absolutely, And I think this is the thing about romance,
right there has to be a reason that they don't
immediately make out. Now that now that we're in a
in a world where it is possible to just swipe
write on someone, meet them immediately like them, that's it.
There was no friction, there was no at tension, there
was no difficulty to sustain a romance novel. There does
have to be that there has to be something in
(22:41):
the way of them.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
You've worked in publishing for years. There is clearly an
intimate relationship between your reading and your writing. Tell me
why Terry Pratchett is such an important writer to you, Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Where do I begin? So? I first started reading Pratchett
entirely by accident when I was nine or ten, because
I picked up a copy of Interesting Times, Actually, which
is for anyone who isn't familiar with the Discord series,
and Terry Pratchett is quite late on in the Discworld series,
talks about characters who have already been established very much
earlier on in the series, and is the kind of
(23:15):
in the middle of a storyline kind of book. But
I was very attracted to the bright colors and of
the cover I started reading it. I didn't really understand
what's going on, but he's just he's so funny. He
doesn't patronize a reader, he doesn't talk down to them,
but he does expect you to keep up. He expects
you to be in on the joke. He'll make the
(23:35):
joke and he expects you to be.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
In on it.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
And that's such a deliciously welcoming thing, especially when you're
a ten year old girl.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
I do remember one time I met him to get
the truth his twenty fifth Discworld novel signed, and he
just knew exactly how like a slightly cookie I think
I would have been twelve by the twelve thirteen, how
a slightly kooky teenager wanted to be spoken to. He
was just a very empathetic man. The thing I like
about the Discworld series is both that they are like
(24:03):
just very funny. He was very very funny. He used
a humor like a you know, he could play a
humorous joke like a trumpet, and he could use it
to make a very serious point. I liked that they
were funny. I liked that they were also very serious,
which is not to say that they were not funny
in places, but rather than that, he took his characters seriously.
(24:24):
He took his characters seriously and their realities and the
responses that they would be engendering in a reader. And
I think he took his readers very seriously as well.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Actually, what as a writer do you hope you've taken
from him, given that he was such a formative rider
for you?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Partly that a sense of joy is going to compel
both the reader but also the writer. I really think
he enjoyed writing his books. I really hope so that
joy is a perfectly valid and perfectly brilliant way to
be launched into a story. And also the funniness can
(25:02):
be serious, that humor can be serious, and that it
isn't lesser, and you don't have to apologize for being
a humorous writer. You can, in fact have something serious
to say and still be very funny.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah. No, I think that's all right. And I think
for me, the other thing to come back to the
structure of time travel or whatever is he was very
good at having set up an entire world with its
own internal logic, its own traditions, and presenting them in
a way that was matter of fact. If he wasn't
interested in an element, he wouldn't over explain it, but
he would set up the rules have them be there
(25:33):
as the underlying reality. There's no imposter syndrome in a
Pratchet book.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
No, absolutely not. He knows what he's doing, and he
knows that you're you know, you're you feel like you're
in safe hands with the Pratchet book. Actually, this is
something I think about with magic, the way he dealt
with magic, which feels like a really pragmatic and thoughtful
series of limitations, because quite often he says that there
used to be raw magic when sorcerers existed and anyone
(25:58):
could do anything, just throwing fireballs world. In fact, now
in what is contemporary discworld, magic is very limited. There's
a limit that you can do with it because it
is a depleting resource. And there is like a very
clear parallel to the way we use technology and the
way we think of technology with the way he treats magic.
It has unfortunately slightly changed the way I read other
(26:20):
books with magic, and because every time I see someone
who's just a wizard doing magic, I'm like, where is
where is that energy coming from? Like, what's going on?
What are the rules with magic in your in your universe?
Explain it to me?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And like it in a Bureaucred's just swinging into action,
all that a pen and a pair. Then you're like,
well this won't do.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Sorry, we have to tax this and there are tariffs
on this song.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Sorry, you are misbehaving and we are going to ride
you up. It's the only way. Thank you so much
for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Kelly and Bradley's best selling novel, The Ministry of Time
is available everywhere. Now, before we go, a couple of
time travel shout outs that I wanted to give as
a big fan of the time travel genre. The Time
(27:11):
Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. If you haven't read it,
it is well worth reading. Don't see the stupid film
with Eric Banner and Rachel mccadams. The book is romantic
and sad and divine, and also a mention to Kate
Atkinson's life after life. It's a kind of littery groundhole day,
but its tricksiness with timelines and time travel are very good.
(27:33):
I mean Terry Pratchett ready to mention in this. He's
very good at time travel too. So there are three
time travel recommendations if you don't want to watch Back
to the Future again. Also, before we get out of here,
if you haven't heard the news, Michelle Ducretze was awarded
the twenty twenty five Stellar Prize for her fantastic theory
and practice. We were lucky enough to have her on
(27:53):
read this earlier in the year, so if you haven't
given it a listen yet, go back to the archive
and while you're there, rate, review, share, listen again all
of the things put read this into other people's ear holes.
That's it for this week's show. You can find all
the books we mentioned at your favorite independam bookstore read.
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible with the
(28:15):
generous support of the OUR group. The show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Posey mcacky edits our transcripts.
Thanks for listening, See you next week.
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