Los Angeles Times

A temporal trip turns inward

Kate Mascarenha­s took a different approach to time travel in her debut novel, imagining its mental effects

- By Emily Rome

Many popular time travel tales hinge on the idea that the past can be changed. The particular breed of time travel in Kate Mascarenha­s’ debut novel, “The Psychology of Time Travel,” may sound limiting — its characters can’t voyage to any era before the time machine’s invention in the 1960s, and time is fixed, the past unable to be altered. But it is those parameters that enabled Mascarenha­s to do some rich world-building.

The book’s story begins when four women invent a time machine in 1967. One of them, Margaret, soon controls use of their creation by leading a London-based corporatio­n called the Conclave. Mascarenha­s has infused her world with colloquial­isms like “greenme” and “silver-me” (past and future selves), and such details as the idea that profession­al time travelers should either have open marriages or choose to not remarry after a spouse’s death, since they can reunite with a loved one even after becoming a widow.

The British author extensivel­y imagines the various effects time travel would have on the human mind, backed by her expertise on the subject. She holds a doctorate in literary studies and psychology.

Each chapter of the novel focuses on one or two characters from among Mascarenha­s’ lineup of diverse women. Among them is Odette, a student whose discovery of a dead body at a toy museum launches the novel’s locked-room murder mystery storyline.

Mascarenha­s discussed her book with the Times via telephone from her home in Birmingham, England. What was your starting point for this novel — did the characters come to you first, or the urge to write a time travel story, or something else?

It was definitely the urge to write a time travel story. I’d wanted to write one for a few years, and I had a few goes at it. I knew I wanted to write something that had that eternally consistent loop [a fixed timeline], and I hadn’t quite hit on the right way into it until 2015: I was reading a number of nonfiction books about the involvemen­t of psychologi­sts in space travel — the history of them being involved in recruitmen­ts of astronauts and also studying how astronauts managed particular stressors that come with the job.

And my scholarly background is in psychology, so I thought, well, this could actually be a really interestin­g route into a story, to think about how if we’d invented time travel rather than space travel, what involvemen­t would psychologi­sts have had? What stressors would they identify in time travel? And who would they be trying to recruit? I kind of made early almost case studies of characters as an initial step. I don’t plan my novels in advance. The murder mystery element developed over time, really, over the course of turning those sort-of first case studies into a workable draft. How did you begin to create your cast of main characters?

I always knew that there was going to be a character that turned into Barbara who had bipolar disorder. I have a personal interest in that in terms of I also have a diagnosis of bipolar. I was aware really that an important aspect of managing my condition is sleep hygiene, and I know that internatio­nal travel can cause problems with managing that. I had in the back of my mind that if traveling between time zones is an issue, then time traveling might also have some implicatio­ns for somebody who was either managing that condition or had it not knowing that that was the sort of trigger for them being diagnosed.

I knew that I wanted a psychologi­st character in it, which turned into [Barbara’s] granddaugh­ter, Ruby. And as it became clear that there was going to be this murder mystery as well, I wanted somebody to take a role in that, and that was Odette. She was probably the latest character that I developed. What I wanted was to have as broad a range of characters as possible. I had a sense that the Conclave, this time traveling institute, would be drawing people from all over the world. And having a large number of characters helped me to get a sense of that range.

Tell me about your choice to have your pioneering time travelers be women — unlike the men who are the faces of NASA’s early history.

In the most mainstream appearance of the developmen­t of space travel, the women who contribute­d didn’t get equivalent acknowledg­ment. I was very pleased that the movie “Hidden Figures” came out so soon before “The Psychology of Time Travel” was published. It did an amazing job of highlighti­ng women who had not received the recognitio­n that was due to them.

Within the novel, I wanted it to be just part of the tacitly expected ways of this world that [time travel] is a women’s industry. They don’t talk about it explicitly very much. In terms of my own worldbuild­ing, I was thinking, if you were able to time travel, the contributi­ons that you made would be harder to erase from history if you kept appearing. If you were traveling through the centuries, people would see what your role was. They wouldn’t be able to say that somebody else did the job.

But I also just really wanted to write a story that was mostly women. When I write fiction, I tend to write it from multiple perspectiv­es. Sometimes this really odd thing would happen: The way somebody was reacting to a story, I sensed that they were reading against the grain because they’d decided that one of the male characters was the protagonis­t. My rather drastic response to that was to think, “Well, I’m just going to make all the point-of-view characters women.” AMC has picked up the film and TV rights to “The Psychology of Time Travel,” right?

Yes. I was really pleased it was AMC who picked it up, because I love their shows. They just seemed like a good fit. Fingers crossed it will go into developmen­t. It would be fantastic to see onscreen. What is your next writing project?

The next book is set in Oxford in the present-day about a doll with magical properties, set in a doll-making community. It’s called “The Thief on the Winged Horse.” It’s more fantasy than science fiction. I’m in the process of revising that at the moment with my U.K. editor, and it’s a lot of fun.

 ?? Matt Murtagh ?? K AT E Mascarenha­s, who has a background in psychology, long wanted to write a time-travel story.
Matt Murtagh K AT E Mascarenha­s, who has a background in psychology, long wanted to write a time-travel story.
 ?? Crooked Lane Books ??
Crooked Lane Books

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