Hollow World
Michael J. Sullivan
Tachyon Publications
trade paper $15.95,
ebook $7.99 Kindle, Nook
audio $24.49

I’m a sucker for a time travel story. After space opera and hard science, it’s my favorite subgenre of science fiction. So when Michael J. Sullivan contacted me and asked if I’d like a review copy of his latest novel, which involves time travel, of course I said “Yes.” I’d like to thank Mr. Sullivan for providing me with an ARC of Hollow World.

This is the story of Ellis Rogers. He’s discovered the secret to time travel. There’s only one problem. It’s a one-way trip.

Rogers doesn’t have the most ideal life. His son committed suicide some years ago, and he and his wife have been estranged ever since. They share a house, but not really a life. He has a best friend he hangs out with, a buddy from high school.

Even so, he doesn’t want to take that one-way trip. Then he gets a double whammy. First, it’s a terminal diagnosis from his doctor. Shortly after that he discovers that his wife had an affair with his best friend just after his son died.

And suddenly that one-way trip doesn’t seem so bad. Rogers sets the machine for 200 years in the future and throws the switch. Only there’s a flaw in his math, and instead of traveling two hundred years, he travels two thousand.

The world he finds is one that’s mostly underground, called Hollow World. There are occasional forays to the surface to various historical sites. Rogers comes out near one and stumbles onto a murder.

Murder is almost unheard of in this society. Hollow World is a type of utopia, one composed of neuter androgynes who have essentially had violence bred out of them. They’re almost identical to each other, and the only way to easily tell them apart is how they dress or paint their bodies. Not that all of them do.

Michael J. Sullivan

Sullivan’s prose moves easily, and he does a good job of describing Hollow World without lapsing into info dumps. Rogers is a sympathetic character, and so are the ones he meets in Hollow World. The threat Hollow World is facing turns out to be an interesting one. The book functions in part as a thriller, and I felt those portions were some of the best writing in the book. Rogers faces some pretty serious obstacles in discovering who is behind the killings and stopping them.

Where I had problems was with Hollow World itself. One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia. Hollow World isn’t a place I would want to live for a number of reasons, all of which have to do with my personality. That being said, it’s an interesting place to visit, at least for brief periods. After all, finding a killer when everyone looks alike is something of a challenge, don’t you think?

Sullivan has made his reputation writing fantasy. I’ve got his Theft of Swords on the shelf, and it’s moved up in the TBR pile.

Hollow World got me thinking. This book is part of the subgenre of time travel in which the protagonist comes up with some way of moving forward in time. As I made my way through the book, I began to consider the way these stories tend to unfold.

Usually this method of time travel, whatever it may be, is a one way trip, like it is in this book; sometimes the protagonist manages to find a way back. The earliest example of the trope I’m aware of is The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning in 1933. (I’ll be reviewing it for Black Gate in the near future.) A more recent example is Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine.

One trope is if the span of time traversed is large, then there will be some type of super-science the protagonist will encounter. That was the case here, but I’ll let you read the book to find out what that is.

Frequently, the culture the hero finds is a monoculture, or at best one or two world-wide cultures. That’s certainly the case here. Hollow World is definitely a monoculture.

The language spoken in this culture is either the hero’s language or is close enough to it that he (the protagonists I’ve seen in this type of story are typically male) can understand or learn it with relative ease. I find this to be one of the limitations of this type of time travel. Languages change. In the case of Hollow World, the language is essentially early 21st century English with some slang thrown in.

In fairness to Sullivan, he does have an explanation for why the language hasn’t changed much in two millennia. I give him credit for that. I don’t quite buy his explanation, but the fact that he recognizes the issue of communication and tries to address it is a major point in his favor.

While Sullivan didn’t make any radical departures from the tropes of this type of time travel story, he used them well. There is a lot of talk in some circles these days about the need to rebel against the tropes of genre. Sometimes the best writing isn’t an overthrow of what makes a certain type of story that type of story but masterful use of those things. Sullivan succeeds in the latter.