Genre
Speculative Fiction
Setting and Context
The stories are set on Earth and Moon colonies in the years 1912, 2020, 2203, and 2401.
Narrator and Point of View
Third-person narration for the most part. First-person narration from Gaspery’s perspective.
Tone and Mood
Tragic, Mysterious, Playful, Anxious
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonists are Edwin, Mirella, Olive Llewellyn, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. The antagonist is pandemics and ripple in the space-time continuum.
Major Conflict
The stories vary in the minor conflicts the characters are facing but share a similar mysterious event. The encounter alters their lives and it is revealed that a single individual from the future connects all of them.
Climax
The climax happens when Gaspery as a journalist interviews Olive about the possibility of time travel.
Foreshadowing
“Fomites? Covid-19? Mirella had never heard either term, and the other two were frowning too. “Oh, right,” Gaspery said, seemingly to himself, “it’s only January.”
As a time traveler Gaspery foreshadows the events that will take place in the characters’ realities.
Understatement
“November 2203. Early days of the SARS Twelve pandemic. Don’t worry, you won’t get sick.”
Allusions
The narratives refer to historical occurrences, particularly pandemics such as the Covid 19 pandemic. The main character Olive resembles the author of the novel in terms of profession and the subject of her works.
Imagery
“My walk to school took me past the childhood home of Olive Llewellyn, an author who’d walked those same streets two hundred years ago, not too far out from the moon’s first settlers. It was a little house on a tree-lined street, and I could tell that it had been pretty once, but the neighborhood had gone downhill since Olive Llewellyn had been a child there. The house was a wreck now, half the windows covered up and graffiti everywhere, but the plaque by the front door remained”
Paradox
“Olive missed her husband and daughter with a desperate passion, but also she liked very much being alone in the empty streets of Salt Lake City”
Parallelism
The narrative parallels the four protagonists each from different timelines. The three main characters from the years 1912, 2020, and 2203 have a mysterious encounter that is connected to the character in 2401.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“I watched footage of that press conference”
Press is a metonymy for news media.
Personification
“A siren wailed and receded.”
