Imagine by Titan Frey sends you on a vivid tour of the past, future, and present, all churned up with science fiction, ’80s nostalgia, and the grieving psyche. The story stars Joe Miller, a New York City handyman, whose otherwise uneventful life takes a turn on the night of December 8th, 1980, when he watches his hero, John Lennon, being gunned down. Soon after, an orange light beams down and propels Joe forward through time, precisely 44 years, to 2024. Stranded in a future where nothing is familiar and nothing is as it should be, Joe must figure out how to get home to 1980.

It’s a compelling question. How would he get back to 1980, and what other secrets did this future hold? But, his journey becomes transfixing, harrowing, and disorienting. Joe reels under the shock of the distinctions between now and then, under the loss of so much he once held dear. Frey eloquently communicates Joe’s confusion and emotional pain, and Joe’s quest to return home becomes engrossing. Frey also demonstrates accessibility and immediacy in their style. Joe’s everyman narration and the story’s construction are something apart from the usual practices of science fiction storytelling. They drop us into a 2010 that Joe – and many NYC residents who are older than he is – simply cannot imagine, and the impact of that shock, that 1970 New Yorker’s experience of a 2010 that we see as normal, keeps the science fiction element under control. By the time Joe goes back to change history, the real tragedy is that even if he did achieve his goal, he would no longer have a home for all the people who loved him, including a man named John Lennon – a murder that is referred to at the end of the story. No special effects would have worked as well because Imagine is less an equal paradox of time travel than a tale of how time inevitably ‘fixes’ everything by grinding it into dust. The story’s strength and appeal lie in how it depicts the struggle for adaptation between the past and the future. This is a story about time travel as it is a story of identity and its reflection on memory and loss.

Imagine paves a unique path between science fiction and history and between science fiction and personal drama. It is an unforgettable tale about what it’s like to lose everything one has known and to what extent one man will go to recover it. Imagine reads at times like the Back to the Future trilogy of the 1980s and ’90s but with a much greater ability to philosophically integrate different dimensions of time and personality. Imagine is the kind of time-travel story that fans of the genre will absolutely love and, at the same time, is recommended to anyone interested in exploring the complex physiology between time and identity.

Pages: 315 | ASIN : B0CW2QQJYX