SPSFC4 Review: Forward and Back by Michael Pickard

Blurb:

At the moment of his greatest professional achievement, renowned physicist Randy Weinberg
wakes up eight years in the future.

He is legally dead, divorced from his wife, and a stranger to his son.

Enemies threaten him for the secrets of time travel. As a victim of his failed experiment, Randy is clueless.

Randy must decide whether to invent a tool that could be used to corrupt history
or refuse and see his wife and son murdered.

Perhaps there is another way.
Turn back the clock.

Review:

It’s been a while since, with a handful of pages, I’ve had to rethink a book entirely. Michael Pickard’s Forward and Back is one of those books for me. With an interesting time travel plotline and well-defined characters, this is a solid book that will keep you engaged throughout—but get ready to think and rethink about it after its final pages.

Randy Weinberg is on the precipice of his greatest personal achievement on the day his wife goes into labor. A renowned physicist, his wife tells him to attend the experiment he has worked years toward that would attack and eliminate cancer cells. Promising he will return in time for his son’s birth, Randy is instead transported eight years into the future when he arrives at his lab. His experiment failed, he was declared legally dead, and now enemies unknown are threatening him—and the lives of a wife who believes him dead, and a son who does not know he exists—for the secrets of time travel. There is only one solution for him now: discover how to go back in time to prevent any of it from happening.

Forward and Back presents an interesting take on the time travel formula. Rather than the cop-out “press this button and you’re done,” Pickard spends time establishing the “science” of time travel. Randy is a genius, but he doesn’t immediately just figure it out. A large portion of the story is dedicated to Randy figuring out what went wrong on the day of his experiment, who was responsible, why it happened, and essentially reverse-engineering the whole thing to send him back to before his experiment took place.

The consequences of the forward time travel are really well-explored, too. A jump of eight years may not sound substantial, when many time travel stories explore jumping forward or backward decades or centuries, but the relatively small jump from 2011 to 2019 was a fascinating lens to peer through. We see a culture shock through Randy’s eyes, with technological advancements that would seem mundane to our eyes having lived through those intervening eight years, but to Randy are entirely foreign: things like smartphones to Uber to the wider viability of electric cars. It’s a clever approach that works really well.

And beyond the shock of technological advancements, we also see the social impact of Randy’s time travel. To Randy, the eight years felt like only a second had passed, but he is now divorced from his wife, his newborn son is now eight years old, all of his accounts have been closed, and he has no access to his laboratory. In these moments, we see the dimension to his character and those around him. He believes he can reappear in his wife’s life, not immediately aware of the mental distress his disappearance brought on him. His son is socially withdrawn, having no father figure and a mother experiencing serious mental and physical health issues. The issue of him not being dead cannot be immediately resolved because it would be more disadvantageous to say he time traveled, knowing that no one would believe him. Randy doesn’t universally tackle these issues correctly—he makes mistakes, he experiences failure, but at the same time, he learns what is at stake with each failure, making note of everything that needs to be fixed when he is able to return back to his previous time. The archetype of “genius scientist who time travels” sounds mundane on paper, but he’s been given a lot of depth here and it helps propel the plot forward.

The time travel plotline of Forward and Back offers a lot to think about that you might not immediately pick up on after a first read, and it’s probably a book that would benefit a lot from a reread. Randy is told that this was not the first time he time traveled—though he’s not aware of this fact—and there are little hints throughout the book that aren’t explicitly stated, but still feel a bit of a Chekhov’s Gun situation. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered if this is not just a time travel story, but also a time loop story, or a multiple converging timelines story. 

I’ve gone back and forth (or forward and back?) about the benefit of how much I’ve continued to think about the plot, and how much that recontextualizing of the narrative can allow you to overlook some parts of the plot. The ending is extremely abrupt, with this big buildup to saying “Hah, gotcha!” to the central antagonists, only for the story to take a sharp left turn and grind to a halt. Other parts, such as stopping the unseen antagonists (Russian oligarchs, naturally) from obtaining the secret to reverse time travel, feel unresolved, which again is owed to the abrupt ending which is essentially, “Well, I got this other important thing to focus on now, I’ll revisit this later.” It’s honestly difficult to decide if it all constitutes a deliberate open ending or if it’s a major plot hole.

Forward and Back gives you a lot to think about long after the final pages. The consequences of forward and reverse time travel are really well-explored, and it features a deeply human and flawed main character. But it’s also a book whose ending will force you to think and rethink and contextualize and recontextualize that it has somewhat distracted from how solid the rest of the book was. I have a feeling the book may be divisive based on the ending alone—but it’ll certainly drive conversation, which is something you want out of a book.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, all this recontextualizing has made me want to watch Inception again for totally unrelated reasons.