A Scientific Romance

From Barnes & Noble

Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance looks even further into the past -- all the way back to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and other futuristic romances from the Wells era. A museum curator named David Lambert learns from an old manuscript of Wells's that the machine was real, and is due to arrive in London at midnight at the turn of the millennium. Lambert waits for the machine -- which arrives empty -- and takes off for adventures in a future England reverted to jungles and barbaric tribes. There's a strong mainstream element to the novel as well, with Lambert interspersing his narrative with memories of an affair with a beautiful archaeologist who died prematurely. This is a first novel from a well-respected writer of nonfiction travel books, and it's a fitting tribute to Wells in this centennial year of The War of the Worlds.

—Gary Wolfe

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

English-born historian Wright, who lives in Canada, is the author of several celebrated works of nonfiction, including Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents, but his first novel is such a triumph that it's a wonder he didn't get around to writing one earlier. The plot is something of a curiosity: English archeologist David Lambert stumbles upon a Victorian time machinethe very one, it turns out, that H.G. Wells described in his famous novel. When Lambert discovers that he may have the same disease that killed his lover, he lights out for the future: A.D. 2500, to be exact. There Wright creates for him a vivid, compelling world, a depopulated, tropical dream of what had once been England. The book's central drama is Lambert's struggle to excavate and uncover the exact nature of the calamity that erased London. At the same time, he sifts through the shards of his own unhappy personal historywhich he is, of course, tempted to touch up a little with the help of the time machine. The narrative bristles with fascinating characters, both fictional and historical, and Wright furnishes it with a rich store of enthralling scientific Victoriana. His writing is charming, unpretentious and wonderfully literate. J.G. Ballard explored this same territory in his disaster novels of the 1970s, but never with Wright's psychological insight or pathos. (Mar.)

Kirkus Reviews

An era-hopping first novel takes a lovelorn London curator on an escape to the future via an H.G. Wellian time machine—only to find humankind not at home. Canadian Wright (Stolen Continents, 1992, etc.), born in England, builds on his award-winning nonfiction and travel writing in this fast-forward fantasy. Though it's long since ended, the romance of curator David Lambert with enigmatic archaeologist Anita has been the defining experience in his life—until a letter from Wells himself falls into his hands, leading him to be there when the time machine makes its fiery return in the first moments of the new millennium. Keeping his find of the machine secret, David works feverishly to understand and modernize it, spurred on in his desire to surge ahead by a chance reading of Anita's obituary (dead of mysterious causes at age 32) and by his own illness, diagnosed as mad-cow disease. Brought forward a half-millennium in a flash, he arrives in a now- tropical England and discovers London burned and overtaken by the jungle. David sets off for Edinburgh, hopeful that some people can be found in the cooler Highlands, keeping a journal all the while in which he ruminates about his former life with Anita and Bird, her other lover and his best friend. Still farther north, a herd of llamas leads him at last to the human contact he's so craved. Imprisoned and treated with suspicion at first, since he's fair-skinned and everyone else is black, David persuades his captor, Laird Macbeth, that he's harmless. Ultimately, he learns the fate of civilization, but not before renewed suspicions among Macbeth's devoutly Christian folk compel him to play Christ in a literal reenactment of theCrucifixion. Vividly elegiac in style and enveloping enough in its mystery, but for long stretches this remains a one-man roadshow—and suffers from a lack of substance in the supporting cast.