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The Other Valley: 04/23/24

The Other Valley

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard (2024) is a debut speculative fiction thought exercise on the ethics of time travel. Odile is at the age when she has to think about her future career. She decides to try for the Conseil, the governing body of the valley that keeps people from traveling to other valleys unsupervised.

Imagine a set up similar to the Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, except that instead of the multiple Earths being different versions of the same place at the same time, this is the same place at different times. Each valley is separated by 20 years of time, in some infinite string of valleys.

In a human scale of things, the Conseil mostly deals with its nearest neighbors: the Oest and Est valleys. Conseils coordinate visits from one valley to another. Both valleys have to agree to a visit before someone is allowed to visit (under highly controlled circumstances).

To complicate things further for Odile, before her vetting begins, she sees a pair of visitors near her school. She also happens to recognize them and therefore knows a friend of hers is likely to die soon.

There are no surprises in this novel to anyone familiar with time travel stories. Odile's initial failure, her time living with her failure, her second attempt to fix things, and her ultimate sacrifice, are all tropes of the genre. That doesn't mean the book's predicability is a bad thing. Quite the opposite; it is a satisfying journey through a philosophical discussion.

What differs here is the book's pacing and it's scale. This thought piece exists across a city sized valley, a lake, and a mountain range that connects and divides the landscape from it's infinite copies. As it's just a single city, there are only a handful of characters and a very controlled time line.

The difference in time, gaps of twenty years on either side, mean that characters have to wait and plot and often run the risk of not being physically able to make the journey when the past has caught up to the even that they have been stewing over now for a significant portion of their lifetime.

Because there's no instant travel between years or the option to go back days, hours, or anything more or less than spans of twenty years, the book only has one central time loop for us to be concerned about. Sure, Odile takes people on other trips before her loop, but these are exemplars of the difficulty and danger of making the journey.

For all the waiting and suffering one does along side Odile, the book has a satisfying ending. It's one of those paradoxical ones that one expects from this type of book. It ends too with the final reveal, the final secret the Conseil keeps from its citizens. It's bittersweet but necessary.

As this is a time travel book, it sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. Odile is an orphan traveler (FF). Her destination is uhoria (CC), a time different from how things originally played out. Her route there is the Blue Highway in the form of the path one takes between valleys.

Five stars

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