Time travel stories are difficult to write well. This one qualifies. However, it also feels short and a bit rushed in places. It would have benefitted from a bit of expansion. ( )

2.5 I guess? Time travel plots are very, very hard to do well I think - they're inherently an unpleasant blend of too complex and mostly arbitrary. The length of this one also works against it, giving the multiple storylines no time to breathe. The explanation of the peril to the mission (which in itself gets barely any time) is just tossed off at the end and feels like a damp squib. Theoretically this is competent but it just feels unsatisfying. ( )

A super good time travel novel without all the annoying paradoxes within which some writers seem to get themselves messily tie up in knots.

I can't really say much more without ruining the story.   So i'll just say, even if you don't usually enjoy the temporal sci-fi stuff, read this, it's good.

Next up in Alastair's literary journey is Polished Performance.

Bye for now. ( )

"There’s a final generation now, after World Health brought in the forced sterilisation programs. It was a kindness, not to bring more children into the world. I teach them, those last children. But they won’t have anything to grow into."

Sound like 2020?
~2082. Scientists mucking around with bioweaponry have released a nightmare that will mean the end of human life. It starts with the animalitos who live in the soil, and keep it fertile and are the means of decomposition. Dying, soil can no longer produce crops. Then, insects above ground die, so now the birds have no food. Who eats the birds? Moving up the food chain, all flora and fauna of the planet are meeting their death, and humans are no exception. A radical experiment, aided by the "Brothers, four AI machines named for the Karamazovs, and using second-hand MRIs scrounged from hospitals, will attempt a form of time travel to bring some genetically-modified seeds that will grow in sterile soil, to the future.

“Paradox,” Margaret said. “Black and white. Either present or absent. If you don’t observe, paradox hides its claws. If you attempt to observe, it kills you—metaphorically, mostly.”

A creative treatment for a time travel book to say the least, I enjoyed reading this novella.
( )

It’s the year 2080 and life on earth is all but gone, the soils sterile, the oceans empty. First to go were the insects, then green plants, marine life, all life; only a final dwindling generation of humans are left, half-starved and living on the last of the stored foods. So a project has taken shape, a single desperate attempt to save the day: the idea of Permafrost is to reach back through time more than half a century and retrieve the contents of one of the many seed-banks which still existed back in the 2020s, underground vaults dotted around the globe where the planet’s plant life, in effect, was being preserved. Something else that no longer exists by 2080 is countries (ahhh, if only… Much as I’d love a real-life time machine, “no countries” might actually do us a lot more good) and the only large-scale organisation left is World Health. They it is who are running the time-project from a base on the frozen rim of the Arctic Ocean where the great Siberian river Yenisei runs out into the sea.
   Permafrost is tricky to follow early on; there are scenes involving the same characters and locations, but in different decades, before it’s really clear where (or when) any of them belong, and I read the thing through twice over. Also, the kind of time travel involved is unusual—no simple Time Machines or Time Tunnels here, but (full marks to the author) something more ingenious and less direct. It’s well worth the effort though as this is a very good read, particularly if, like me, you have a soft spot for time-travel stories anyway.
   Admittedly there are (or may be…perhaps) a couple of inconsistencies in the structure: that fly for instance, for anyone who’s read it already, and those crows. Like many time-travel novels though, this one involves circles in time with events looping back around to alter themselves, and here time almost seems to have a mind of its own, gently shifting and settling to its simplest possible state to smooth away such paradoxes—even your memory of them. Which left me sitting here after my reread wondering if it had been exactly the same book second time around, or had altered in the meantime. I’ll never know. ( )