The Winding

February 15, 2022
In this debut SF novel, an academic/inventor struggles through decades of losing, regaining, and losing the loves of his life due to a mysterious phenomenon. Datta's tale envisions an Earth suffering rare but disruptive "time turbulence" events. As a brilliant youngster in 1990s America, Vincent Abajian is orphaned, bullied, and becomes an outcast at school. He finds solace with Akane Egami, a Japanese Dutch classmate and music prodigy. But this incipient love of his life disappears into a sudden time turbulence in 1991. By 2024, still obsessed with Akane and what-ifs, Abajian is in the forefront of artificial intelligence and robotics advancements, leading a university research team. He finds patronage in superrich Philip Nardin, who holds the patent for intreton, "an element absent from the periodic table," which seems somehow tied to time itself. After the two men bond over a shared fascination with high-end watches, Nardin takes Abajian into his confidence, hiring the scientist to write his biography. Nardin has survived multiple time turbulences, emerging with insights into future and parallel timelines--which is vital, first because corrupt congressmen and military-industrial lobbyists seek to exploit and weaponize intreton. And second, because Abajian meets Emika Amari, a young, postdoctoral scientist and violinist attracted to him. Emika seems a parallel-universe incarnation of Akane, and, thus, Abajian's true love and happiness reborn. But Emika can also be petulant, jealous, and flighty. Who is she really, and what is Abajian's destiny in love and intrigue? Readers may find the leapfrogging, back-and-forth narrative chronology a bit turbulent itself. Datta's formidable mainsprings of deep thought, causality, horology, music, and shameless romanticism help set up this first installment of an SF series. It is not a time-travel novel that trades in pulp thrills and fighting Morlocks (despite political shenanigans). The book is closer to Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) in dealing with matters of the heart. But just when readers might have the plot strands all decoded, a concluding twist and a surreal-vision finale turn the storyline into a dense, snarled mesh of gears and escapements. The knotty narrative is captivating in stretches, but the engineering of Doctor Who's Time and Relative Dimensions in Space is more easily grasped. An engaging SF tale whose cause-effect plotline takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

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