A River Called Time

"It’s so timely—there’s the In the Black Fantastic exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at the moment, which has both responses to the legacy of colonialism and attempts at reconstructing the lost heritage of what we call African. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad recast an era of American slavery through science fiction and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift put a science fictional spin on a long history of Zambia; both won the Clarke Award in previous years. Recently there was Marlon James’s fantasy trilogy, which draws on African mythology and narratives. Newland uses beliefs from various African cultures, and you have to accept them as true within the context of the novel. It’s way of looking at the world, treating it as science. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In this novel, Africa has not been subjected to the horrors and traumas of European colonisation and it seems as if technology has developed faster than in our world. I think you could argue about this—the Industrial Revolution seems pretty solidly developed through imperial exploitation—but it’s clearly a divergence from our history, way back. There’s a timeline at the start of the book where Columbus reaches American in 1392 or thereabouts, so technologically, things have happened more quickly. There’s been some disaster in what we call London, a couple of centuries before the novel, around the time of the Regency . An Ark has been built—essentially a fortress—to protect the chosen citizens from poverty and the fall out of the disaster. The central character, Markriss Denny, aspires to join this elite and has discovered he can astral project himself. But he pretty quickly discovers that the Ark isn’t a utopia, and that he is part of a struggle which could destroy everything. I think the term goes back to William James in the nineteenth century, but a key name is the quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger—he of the dead-and-alive-cat thought experiment—who suggested that different events could be described or predicted by the same equations at the same time. He wasn’t happy about this. The writer Michael Moorcock then used the term—or maybe he came up with it independently, I’m not sure—to describe his individual and overlapping novels featuring versions of the Eternal Champion. He rewrites the different books with the same character, or vice versa. In a sense, the idea relates to the science fictional alternate world—such as in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle where the Nazis won the Second World War . In that novel, characters slide between versions of reality, and the same is true of A River Called Time . It’s not necessarily the same imagined world in each of the sections. In fact, in one case, clearly not. That could be a spoiler, so I won’t say any more. Newland plays it straight, but we as readers are trying to work out what is real and what isn’t. Funnily enough, I’ve wondered if Whitehead is doing something equivalent in The Underground Railroad; it’s as if each station opens in a different version of America. It’s an impressive science fiction debut, but Newland has been publishing for years. I need to get hold of his newish collection, Cosmogramma , which seems to include science fiction, and it might be that some of the stories predate the novel. I only knew his name from a couple of credits on Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series about Black experience in Britain. He’s clearly done masses of research and I hope he writes another scifi novel."

"Plus there’s Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time , a story of parallel worlds and astral projection—which offers a vision of a world in which there were no European empires, and in which a form of African cosmology has become the dominant world religion. A novel of epic proportions and massive ambition, A River Called Time is not a quick read but it is, as Wired magazine has noted, “speculative fiction that genuinely made me speculate.” One for fans of Octavia Butler and Ursula le Guin . A few. I recommended Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk last year when it was first released in the UK; it’s now available in the United States, published by Doubleday."