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Dreams Before the Start of Time

written by Ardis June 19, 2018
Dreams Before the Start of Time

The Arthur C. Clarke award will be announced July 18, 2018, at this year’s Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. This post is part of a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novel. The other nominees are Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, American War by Omar El Akkad, Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed, and Borne by Jeff VanderMeer.

And just as Anna created a new start to Dominic’s day, she made a change to Dominic’s routine of working in his garden studio after dinner. Connie had regarded his studio as a private lair and rarely ventured in. She took him tea occasionally, didn’t linger. So Anna takes wine and stays to chat. She loves the smell of his studio. She loves Dominic, and she loves the idea of him too. The artist in his studio. He calls it his shed, but she refuses to follow this lead – it’s his right to be self-deprecating, not hers.

Normally, I’m not a very enthusiastic champion of multi-generation stories (unless they’re on generation ships!) and I would not have picked up this book had it not been on the short list for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award.

Anne Charnock’s poignant story explores what it means to be a parent, as, through 5 generations, Charnock explores the evolving science and culture of having children. Each character’s struggle illustrates another phase of the evolution of parenthood, and many characters experience multiple phases during their lifetimes.
Charnock writes characters whose experiences are as thoroughly human in emotion as they are increasingly alien in science and culture. As inception and childbirth change and change again, we see that the one constant is the impact parenthood has on people. Her ability to convey a wide range of emotion in a short time consistently surprised me throughout this book.
Not everything is a sweeping success, however, as many of her vignettes feel disjointed, rendering previously familiar (and usually loved) characters unrecognizable and clumsy for the first part of a new scene or chapter. While the underlying narrative about parenthood is lovely and cohesive, this repeated disjoint in Charnock’s story obscures much of what it has to offer.
Dreams Before the Start of Time is beautiful, careful, tightly-focused science fiction.
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