Review: As Born to Rule the Storm by Cate Baumer
Blurb:
The star-crossed temporal romance of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR meets the vintage setting and yearning of DIVINE RIVALS in AS BORN TO RULE THE STORM.
Cadet Charlotte Amsel will trade her life to win a war- but not all at once. As part of an elite group of experimental soldiers, she can move through time, with each jump taking months from her own fated lifespan as she struggles to prevent the cold war from boiling over into an apocalypse. With her own side just as untrustworthy as the enemy, the only thing she cares about is keeping her best friend and fellow soldier (and in some timelines, lover) safe. But each time loop adds violent complications, and saving anyone before she runs out of life to give may prove impossible.
Review:
By way of potentially unnecessary disclosure, Cate Baumer’s As Born to the Rule the Storm is in the same SFINCS judging pool (team Secret Scribes, which includes fellow SFFI contributor Dave Lawson. Hey, Dave!) as my own novella (which Dave has told me he will not judge for the contest, for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons). As with SPSFC3, I want to be a team player, and so sought out a few of my fellow contestants’ novellas to do what I could to give them a boost, and to ideally find a good pool of new indie authors to read! And I’d say that on this first attempt, I have been wildly successful.
I was drawn first to As Born to Rule the Storm over some of the other books in the Secret Scribes allotment because of the World War II fighter pilot texture of its cover (literally sitting on my desk next to me right now is a copy of David Mondey’s The Concise Guide to American Aircraft of World War II). The story follows a trio of genetically enhanced soldiers—Charlotte (or “Lottie” as her friends call her), Stephen, and Min—as they attempt to prevent all out war with the neighboring sovereign state; though the main thrust of this responsibility falls to Charlotte, since her power is of the greatest import in this effort. You see, Charlotte can move through time. Her importance to the story is cemented in the story’s presentation, as Charlotte is the single POV character in the novella, and all the events of the story are recounted inner-monologued-ly in first person.
The back cover pitches this novella as This Is How You Lose the Time War crossed with The Umbrella Academy (though the Goodreads description swaps out Umbrella Academy for Divine Rivals); but since I’ve not read or seen any of those (yet!) I would pitch it like this: As Born to Rule the Storm is like a mid-century Edge of Tomorrow. Both stories are quite clearly works of imaginative science-fiction, but their sci-fi elements are really just a vehicle to get to the interpersonal relationships contained therein. As Born to Rule the Storm is not really even about time travel but is much more about how such power can and will affect your life and the lives of those around you.
Time travel is an interesting tool in the science-fiction author’s toolbox. Oftentimes the first question one asks before writing or partaking of a time travel story is: how much of an explanation are we going to get? Because inevitably, the depth of the explanation can have a profound effect on our enjoyment of the story. Overcomplicate it, and you open yourself up to the scrutiny of “plot hole” enthusiasts. Underbake it, and you might be accused of lazy writing. But luckily we’re at a time in history where enough time travel fiction has been produced that new writers of it don’t really need to explain it at all. It has, after decades of use in the genre, become ubiquitous. Few modern authors would feel like they’d need to explain a wormhole or a hyperdrive any more than they’d need to explain a hammer or a telephone. Audiences (or at the very least the audience of this kind of genre fiction) know what these things are now, and how they traditionally work; and so perhaps then the writer might even lampshade our unconscious acceptance of it, like in Rian Johnson’s 2012 time travel thriller Looper, where Bruce Willis’ “Joe” is talking to his Joseph Gordon-Levitt’ed younger version of himself and—when asked about how the logistics of such an interaction is possible—says:
“If we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it and making diagrams with straws. It doesn’t matter.”
And at the end of the day, Bruce Willis is right. It doesn’t matter, and so Baumer spends little time outlining the specifics of how Charlotte’s gift works. The first jump occurs, we absorb the texture of it, we accept these newly established rules of the story, and the narrative progresses. Time travel is a means to an end, and the end to which Baumer deploys it is an exploration of the relationship between Charlotte and Stephen. That’s what matters.
And that relationship is, as I said in a tweet immediately after I finished reading this novella, exceptionally tender. Due to the time-jumping construction of the narrative, the story of Charlotte and Stephen spans decades, but the breadth of storytelling is not merely chronological. I was shocked at just how dense Baumer was able to make this novella. For as thin as the spine of this book is, Baumer has packed it with far more of Lottie’s potential futures than I ever expected; more of which surprised me than didn’t. Given the texture of the early chapters and the art direction of the cover, I entered into this novella with certain preconceptions about where its story might lead, and I’m happy to say that Baumer shattered those preconceptions at every available opportunity.
But perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. In hindsight, it was unreasonable for me to think that a book like this wouldn’t contain at least an implicit anti-war message (its anti-war message is quite explicit). After all, a story about two lovers doomed to be repeatedly separated by a war that, not only did they not begin, but also are unwilling participants—if such a thing ended in a jingoistic hurrah it would surely be unsatisfying.
But the war comes, again and again; and Charlotte’s attempts to stop the war fail, and fail, and fail. With each failure the stakes increase—because there’s a bit of worldbuilding we haven’t discussed yet. You see, unlike Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, time does not simply reset the moment Charlotte dies. No, she does not have infinite time with which to experiment. Every jump takes time off of her own life; so we know that at some point, there will be a final failure from which she cannot reset. This failure looms large as the narrative progresses; casting long shadows over what moments of happiness she is able to find amidst the storm of time. Her life then becomes, despite her best efforts, defined by these numbers, as she remarks:
“Most awful things in the world boil down to calculations. Even our weapons come not from the men on the fields, but from a dozen engineers in a dozen rooms drafting ways to murder on blueprint.”
A knot tightened in my gut as, far too early in the book, Charlotte settled into a series of far happier scenes than anything that had come before it. But I could see how many pages were left, and so each new page turn was done in fear, knowing something must end this. And something did. And time reset. And my melancholy became all consuming.
Despite how dour all this must seem from how I’m describing it, Cate Baumer has written an extraordinarily beautiful book, heart-wrenching and uplifting in equal measure; but some of the most painful moments in the book though are the most simple—the times just after Charlotte jumps back through time and is confronted by Stephen or Min and their timelost ignorance of the world she just left. Charlotte remembers moments with them that will no longer happen, and she must carry those memories in solitude. She cannot share her happiness and she cannot share her grief; for it would not be fair to them to know. It would not be fair to tell them about what happiness will never come. To know the future is not a gift, it is a curse—an omnipresent weight upon the mind and heart of the bearer of that power.
I loved this book, and I think you’ll love it too.
