I wonder if the urge to write time travel fiction somehow proceeded from the very act of remembering. Human languages have tenses for the past conditional and moods for the past subjunctive; we have always been able to imagine how things could have gone differently. We all have regrets, and they are painful; the resolution ‘to live life with no regrets’ would not be so common if it weren’t. Today, on the topic of time travel, we shall be discussing Hannah Fergesen’s (who uses they/them pronouns) novel The Infinite Miles, published by Blackstone Publishing in 2023.
The blurbs on this book keep comparing it to Doctor Who; as someone who has never watched Doctor Who, I am not in a position to properly judge that claim (yes, I am going to turn in my nerd card now). What it does have is time travel galore, and a memorably shaped mode of time travel, in this case a spaceship that can assume the form of any vehicle that is germane to its surroundings, such as a car on Earth or a broken-down spaceship on a lawless world where better ships are likely to be stolen (and that isn’t even the most clever of them). But Fergesen goes further than that; they wrote their story to get really, really meta, in a way that feels like a very nerdy twenty-first century take on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
Your main character is Harper Starling, a college dropout who, not long before the events of the novel, had a nasty falling out with her oldest friend Peggy. Harper and Peggy bonded over their love of the widely acclaimed science fiction television show Infinite Odyssey, of which they have come to memorize large parts. Harper leaves a promising course of study at Columbia out of the pain that ensued from the breakup, and now lives in misery in a small apartment in New York, until she sees Peggy again. Peggy appears possessed by … something, and Harper doesn’t know what to do. She has to flee, Peggy in hot pursuit, until she stumbles into a series of events that lead her to be thrown back in time to the New York of 1971, not long before Infinite Odyssey premiered on television.
You can tell Fergesen put a lot of research into this book; there’s a way that they immerse you in the grimy reality of New York of 1971 that really gets under your skin, something like if Martin Scorsese was a regular attendee of a science fiction convention. They are attentive to smells and sounds and the differences in the way that people interact with each other, not all of them for the best. You are thrust into this world, with all its differences ripping you out of the twenty-first century, but it’s familiar enough you’re never too lost (it helps, of course, that the seventies are, as of writing, still in living memory). Time travel works don’t often treat the period in the later decades of the twentieth century as a destination for adventures, which gives the whole thing a somewhat jarring undertone that really works. It’s familiar enough to lull you into a false sense of security.
There’s a strong metatextual element here; there is a part of this book set at the world’s first Star Trek fan convention. Much of the book revolves around Harper and Peggy’s love of Infinite Odyssey, what it has meant to each of them, and to both of them collectively, and what they have on some level imposed onto it. This is about what it means to be a creator, and to be a fan, and what the interaction between those two categories mean. But, for everyone except the most shut-in, the media we consume frames how we interact with others, and everything in the plot puts their friendship to the test.
Fergesen is willing to play with the various manifestations of time travel a lot, and to great effect. There is a time when Harper meets the same character at two different times in the past, but two different instances of their travel, which is something that feels logical given the tropes of time travel but I can’t recall ever actually being used. More broadly, there is a willingness to interrogate just how much damage the careless use of time travel can do, be it to the timeline more broadly, or to actual individuals, including oneself. Time travel intersects with immortality in this novel, and it can warp one’s psyche in ways that can be very harmful to everybody.
Another strand of this novel is the idea of escaping. We have all wanted to escape our lives, if only briefly. We have all experienced pain that has brought us to that point. The Infinite Miles asks how possible that truly is, and if it is truly desirable to begin with. Whether you are Harper trying to escape into a television show, or a boy in rural Iowa wanting to go beyond the suffocating atmosphere of his family. In different ways, both characters get to see that, and then they see the consequences of it. Sometimes this is deeply painful, but other times it is awe-inspiring; not wanting to spoil much, but the best scene of this nature is set in a museum. Blended with the very modern concerns is Fergesen’s good grasp on the ingredients of that good old sense of wonder, especially when the novel starts to become a space opera, of sorts (no singing, unfortunately, but the libretto is pretty big).
The Infinite Miles is a book that, by the end, earns the sobriquet of ‘beautiful.’ It is not just the high adventure or the loving paean to being a nerd, but the human factor underlying it. Everyone who reads this will have some sort of loss, some sort of regret, that this novel will tug on. Fergesen takes the universal and clothes it in the garb of science fiction conventions and long hours spent binge-watching genre shows, and the end result is something I found to be very moving. I recommend this book very highly.
Also, the title’s a pun.
The blurbs on this book keep comparing it to Doctor Who; as someone who has never watched Doctor Who, I am not in a position to properly judge that claim (yes, I am going to turn in my nerd card now). What it does have is time travel galore, and a memorably shaped mode of time travel, in this case a spaceship that can assume the form of any vehicle that is germane to its surroundings, such as a car on Earth or a broken-down spaceship on a lawless world where better ships are likely to be stolen (and that isn’t even the most clever of them). But Fergesen goes further than that; they wrote their story to get really, really meta, in a way that feels like a very nerdy twenty-first century take on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
Your main character is Harper Starling, a college dropout who, not long before the events of the novel, had a nasty falling out with her oldest friend Peggy. Harper and Peggy bonded over their love of the widely acclaimed science fiction television show Infinite Odyssey, of which they have come to memorize large parts. Harper leaves a promising course of study at Columbia out of the pain that ensued from the breakup, and now lives in misery in a small apartment in New York, until she sees Peggy again. Peggy appears possessed by … something, and Harper doesn’t know what to do. She has to flee, Peggy in hot pursuit, until she stumbles into a series of events that lead her to be thrown back in time to the New York of 1971, not long before Infinite Odyssey premiered on television.
You can tell Fergesen put a lot of research into this book; there’s a way that they immerse you in the grimy reality of New York of 1971 that really gets under your skin, something like if Martin Scorsese was a regular attendee of a science fiction convention. They are attentive to smells and sounds and the differences in the way that people interact with each other, not all of them for the best. You are thrust into this world, with all its differences ripping you out of the twenty-first century, but it’s familiar enough you’re never too lost (it helps, of course, that the seventies are, as of writing, still in living memory). Time travel works don’t often treat the period in the later decades of the twentieth century as a destination for adventures, which gives the whole thing a somewhat jarring undertone that really works. It’s familiar enough to lull you into a false sense of security.
There’s a strong metatextual element here; there is a part of this book set at the world’s first Star Trek fan convention. Much of the book revolves around Harper and Peggy’s love of Infinite Odyssey, what it has meant to each of them, and to both of them collectively, and what they have on some level imposed onto it. This is about what it means to be a creator, and to be a fan, and what the interaction between those two categories mean. But, for everyone except the most shut-in, the media we consume frames how we interact with others, and everything in the plot puts their friendship to the test.
Fergesen is willing to play with the various manifestations of time travel a lot, and to great effect. There is a time when Harper meets the same character at two different times in the past, but two different instances of their travel, which is something that feels logical given the tropes of time travel but I can’t recall ever actually being used. More broadly, there is a willingness to interrogate just how much damage the careless use of time travel can do, be it to the timeline more broadly, or to actual individuals, including oneself. Time travel intersects with immortality in this novel, and it can warp one’s psyche in ways that can be very harmful to everybody.
Another strand of this novel is the idea of escaping. We have all wanted to escape our lives, if only briefly. We have all experienced pain that has brought us to that point. The Infinite Miles asks how possible that truly is, and if it is truly desirable to begin with. Whether you are Harper trying to escape into a television show, or a boy in rural Iowa wanting to go beyond the suffocating atmosphere of his family. In different ways, both characters get to see that, and then they see the consequences of it. Sometimes this is deeply painful, but other times it is awe-inspiring; not wanting to spoil much, but the best scene of this nature is set in a museum. Blended with the very modern concerns is Fergesen’s good grasp on the ingredients of that good old sense of wonder, especially when the novel starts to become a space opera, of sorts (no singing, unfortunately, but the libretto is pretty big).
The Infinite Miles is a book that, by the end, earns the sobriquet of ‘beautiful.’ It is not just the high adventure or the loving paean to being a nerd, but the human factor underlying it. Everyone who reads this will have some sort of loss, some sort of regret, that this novel will tug on. Fergesen takes the universal and clothes it in the garb of science fiction conventions and long hours spent binge-watching genre shows, and the end result is something I found to be very moving. I recommend this book very highly.
Also, the title’s a pun.
--
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10
Reference: Fergesen, Hannah The Infinite Miles [Blackstone, 2023]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
