Adriane Strohl, a seventeen-year-old high school student living in the near future in the North American States, a reconstituted United States including Canada and Mexico, expresses her curiosity about the world at the rehearsal of her graduation speech and is arrested for treason against the state and questioning authority.

Her punishment is to be exiled to a university in Zone 9. This turns out to be Wainscotia University in Wisconsin USA in 1959 where she is forbidden to offer any knowledge of the future or to enter into intimate relationships.

The idea of this transportation, of what it might be to exile someone to the past in the hope that their transgressive personalities might be changed through the loss of their family, friends and technology, makes Hazards of Time Travel a compelling idea. In reality, the book has a tendency to meander. It’s hard to grasp how the novel hangs together as its main character has a shifting awareness of her state. There is an experimental feel to the way the novel unfolds, at one point moving from the first person to an alternative group perspective. And whilst this experimental feel is true to the manipulative possibilities of science and governmental control, there is a part of me that longs for the novel to step outside of the confines of romantic obsession, or to form a greater cohesive narrative. In the end, I’m as unsure of what to feel or believe as Adriane and though this may be the point, it leaves a rather empty feeling on the palate of the mind.

I turned the pages of Adriane’s exile with great gusto, but in the end was left with a sense of deflation. This may be the move from the stereotypes of teenage passion to the middle-aged acceptance of mediocrity, a theme the novel touches on by disparaging Wainscotia as a university where promising students and ideas fail to create anything of lasting importance, but aside from this thematic introduction, the novel fails to explore the idea further. Is life about accepting what is rather than striving for what might be? What do we really need to continue to live and thrive? What, ultimately, is thought for? 

Certainly, Hazards of Time Travel wants to explore the idea of a soul, of something immeasurable inside living things that can’t be assessed or controlled purely through behaviour or external stimuli and yet it offers little obvious alternative. If life is about experiencing things one breath at a time - something Adriane’s father encourages her to do - then either the inner and outer life can be lived separately (not wildly satisfactory) or the inner life is expressed outwards at potential cost to the whole. It’s almost like a novel of increased diminishment that conversely brings increased contentment (though Adriane is as subversive in her forgetting  - you'll see what I mean at the end - as she is when she’s first exiled) and yet the whole idea of achievement, of the creation of things that have lasting importance for the world of the future, isn’t fully questioned. I think we are meant to understand that a kind of Buddhist acceptance of the moment, a love for the process rather than the outcome, is how we should strive to truly exist, but the novel struggles to fully dismiss the attractiveness of externally assessed achievement and success.

All of this and I haven't even talked about what the novel might be wanting to say about what our future would look like if questioning authority in any way - its version of history, its rule of law - becomes a thing of the past, something Hazards of Time Travel is really set up to question. Perhaps this is because it takes a side step out of this narrative and sets a pursuit of academic accolade against a need to conform and I'm not sure this comparison is the best way to question the need for critical thinking in society. The story line narrows Oates' chosen field of enquiry, or perhaps I'm just reading it all wrong.

I’m not sure what to think of Hazards of Time Travel. I’ve certainly preferred some of Oates' previous work, but this novel will entice many with its possible visions of life as it may be and it asks lots of interesting questions a reader can go away pondering.

Well, this is weird! As a huge JCO fan, one of the things that I love about her is that she's *not* simply re-writing the same book over and over - the variety in her output is hugely impressive. This one, though, is a bit of a puzzle...

It starts as a homage to 1984 with a kind of 'Sovietisation' of the US: acronyms of bureaucratic bodies abound, people can be 'disappeared' and free thought is severely circumscribed. Adriane, our 17 year old narrator, upsets the regime by openly (and naively?) questioning their authority and is punished by being whisked back to university in 1959 Wisconsin...

Cue some 'is that how people lived' scenes (typewriters! hair curlers!) and some interesting wandering down theories of selfhood. JCO seems to be taking a swipe at the plethora of YA dystopias where a young woman falls in insta- love and leads a rebellion: in this book, that 'love' is subjected to a subtle interrogation and the rebellion segues into student politics of the 1960s: anti-nuclear weapons, civil rights.

But then, things take a surprising turn and the ending reminds us that one of the qualities we love about JCO is her boldness.

This is an allusive novel: 1984, Stalinism, the Divergent trilogy, The Matrix, Trump's America and the nostalgia for the 1950s when, allegedly, pesky women/non-whites/communists/Jews etc. etc. were kept in their place (even as, ironically, western society was agitating for more inclusive, socially-just ways of being).

There are places where this feels like it's lost its way; and then, bam, JCO hits us with a revelation that both amuses and also changes everything. I disagree with the early reviews I've seen which peg this as a YA novel: it may have a YA narrator and gesture towards some of the tropes of that genre, but it deconstructs as much as it re-uses and makes productive capital from the interactions.

This is not JCO at her best and may not be the best place to start if you haven't read her before - but by the end, I was entertained and stimulated by her witty and rather wicked take on contemporary literary trends and modern US politics.

The hazards of time travel is a curious book. I found the initial dystopian setting interesting and gave a good sense of world building in a future trumpAmerican way, but once the main narrative gets underway in 1959 I became increasingly less engaged. The final third was mildly irritating and I was left unmoved at the end.

I note others refer to it as YA- I hadn’t appreciated this, but feel young adults deserve better.

A story of several parts, hanging together in a rather contrived, unconvincing way, and with characters that didn’t much engage me. We start with observation of a future totalitarian regime in America - interchangeable, faceless leaders, airbrushed history, strict rules for citizens’ behaviour and close surveillance of their obedience or dissent. All very ‘1984’ and the part of the book that worked least for me. I know Adriane is only 17 but, even so, I found her narration clunky, especially as she is supposed to be an unusually free thinker in a highly restricted society.

Fast forward (or backward) to 1959 in a small Midwest college and I enjoyed this more. Shared dorm rooms, frat parties, female paraphernalia such as hair rollers and girdles, launderettes, manual typewriters, and smoking everywhere - old-fangled stuff but new to Adriane. Add in some anti-war protests, some tired old behavioural psychology experiments, a big dollop of romance and stir without much vigour or pace.

The novel was rather too disjointed for me, and lacking subtlety in its messages about behaviour and society, though I thought the ambiguous ending wrapped it up nicely enough. A disappointment overall, though, as I have enjoyed JCO’s writing in the past, but I wouldn’t rate this as one of her best.

Just about the first thing you see when you open this book is a list of other books by Joyce Carol Oates. There are 41 of them! 41! Plus she also writes under not one but two pseudonyms! Starting in 1964 when I was 3 years old and pouring out of her even since. How, I ask myself, have I got to be almost 58 years old, reading almost continually since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I have not come across any of them?

My thanks to HarperCollins UK via NetGalley for an ARC of this book which I requested as it seemed an ideal chance to finally find out about such a prolific author. I am not quite so sure I would have requested the book if I had realised that it is very much “young adult” in story and tone. As mentioned above, I am far from being a “young adult” and I have to acknowledge that I rarely read that type of book.

Adriane Stohl lives in a dystopian world where those who dare to engage in free thinking are exiled by being ”teletransported” into the past. It is never quite made clear why the state chooses this form of punishment, but I assume it is because it is cheaper than keeping people in prison in your own time. Adriane writes, but never delivers, a speech that asks unpalatable questions and finds herself back in 1959. It would be unfair to say anything further about the plot as that would probably spoil the book for readers, but it (unsurprisingly) involves love. There’s an ending that makes you pause for thought, but it would clearly be wrong of me to discuss that here.

Joyce Carol Oates is also prolific on Twitter. About this book, she tweeted: “If this novel--"Hazards of Time Travel"--had been published before 2016 it would seem like a dystopian future/sci-fi; now, a just slightly distorted mirroring of actual T***p US sliding, we hope not inexorably, into totalitarianism & white apartheid.”

Most of the book is Adriane’s experiences in exile, but there are often reflections back to the time and place from which she has been exiled. The book opens with an epigraph taken from “Science and Human Behavior” by B. F. Skinner: "A self is simply a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.". And it is this that the story focuses on. There are multiple references to experiments on both animals and humans investigating the area of free will vs. response to stimuli. Many parallels are drawn between these experiments and the way the totalitarian state watches (and conditions) its people. Adriane seems the kind of feisty young protagonist who inhabits a typical YA novel (at least, what I believe to be typical) as she seeks to assert her “self” against these oppressive rules. Except she isn’t all the time: she goes all weak and feeble in the presence of a man she yearns for. This surprised me and seemed out of character for her. Maybe this is a deliberate thing on the part of the author, but I am not sure I get it.

This is probably a good YA book, but I am not qualified to judge that, as already mentioned. Reading it as an “old adult”, it was OK but I couldn’t get excited about it. The story is rather predictable and the message about the totalitarian state a bit heavy-handed. I didn’t come out of it thinking “I must read more by this author”, which is a shame as it would have given me plenty more books to read if I had! 2.5 stars rounded down to 2 for the disappointment of discovering it was targeted at people 40-50 years younger than me..

My thanks to HarperCollins UK for an ARC via NetGalley.

I requested the ARC as I had seen this book listed as possible early contender for the 2019 Booker and as I understand that the author is a well known and well regarded literary author. Unfortunately to my disappointment this was a Young Adult novel, and very much at the young end of that market and not one with which I could interact.

The first part of the book posits a totalitarian state, which emerged from the USA as a result of the crackdown on civil liberties arising from the 9/11 attacks. The protagonist of the novel (and I choose that word carefully as YA novels tend to have protagonists) is Adriane Stohl, already under watch due to her father, a Doctor who has been demoted to a lowly medical job due to subversive behaviour. When Adrianne – a dangerously unconventional student at a time when conformity and unquestioning obedience is expected – rehearses a mildly questioning speech – she is herself detained and classified as an EI (Exiled Individual) transported into exile – an exile which as the title of the book suggests is actually (backwards) through time to 1950s middle-America.

In the first part of the book JCO (Joyce Carol Oates) in true YA (Young Adult) style describes in a FCW (Fairly Clunky Way) the DFW (Dystopian Fantasy World) she has created – one where the true horror seems to be the number of acronyms. A typical passage is

“There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below. (The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.””

Nevertheless the set-up was potentially intriguing – combining time travel (of which many great science fiction stories have been written but which is a trap for the unwary) and dystopian fiction.

It is a potential that is largely wasted in the remaining 85% of the book – as Adrianne (now Mary Ellen) lives in a college and is amazed at things like typewriters, hairsets and smoking while pursuing a rather dreamy romance with one of the tutors, who she believes to be a link to the world she has left. There are some rather half-hearted attempts to link the future totalitarianism to the anti-communist views of the day, as well as some more involved attempts to link them to the research at the time into conditioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning).

Overall a harmless book – which I can certainly imagine my daughter enjoying as a light read.

An interesting read. Sci-if and dystopian fiction is my genre of choice and I was thrilled to be able to review this one. It starts well, gritty, fast paced and it kept my attention going. It did however lose rhythm about halfway through for me and to be honest I got bored. Once finished however, I was pleased I had read it. The ending was a bit strange and not what I expected. Maybe that was the point. I enjoyed it but felt it lacking in some places.

Does a society where outspoken dissenters are vaporised or exiled seem so far-fetched in today’s USA? Adriane is a young woman with a mind of her own who finds herself exiled in the 1950s and a world where women knew their place. Will she find her kindred spirit and fight, or give in to mediocrity? I very much enjoyed this disturbing novel that seems not a million miles away!

Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates is a dystopian novel that gives a scary look into the future where everything you say and do is closely monitored. A young girl is sent to another time for four years as a punishment for going against the rules.
I found this book disturbing and thought provoking.
I would like to thank NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, 4th Estate, William Collins for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

The amazingly prolific Joyce Carol Oates has written her novel in response to President Trump. All totalitarian regimes are the same, and The Hazards of Time Travel is reminiscent of Orwell's 1984.
It is the future, and North America has become rigidly authoritarian and has a form of apartheid. Adriane is caught thinking for herself, and is exiled to another time.
Despite her punishment, Adriane is unable to be other than who she is. After a hideous depiction of her imprisonment and sentencing, Adriane is marooned in 1959. She discovers she is not the only person exiled there.
Oates, through the story, is telling us what the world could easily become if right wing populism continues its' march through the West.