Fanciful fun

For a long time I thought Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time was going to be a time-travel novel without any actual time travel. The 600-plus-page novel has three connected stories, each involving British author H.G. Wells, whose novel The Time Machine has just been published.

First a young man plans suicide after the woman he loves is killed by Jack the Ripper. His brother enlists the writer's help to fool him into thinking he has traveled back in time and killed Jack before he can kill the woman.

Then a conman inspired by the Wells novel develops an elaborate ruse to fool wealthy patrons into believing they have traveled to the year 2000 to watch the climactic battle that saves humanity from being destroyed by automatons. A young woman on one of those excursions to the future falls in love with the hero of that battle, and things get complicated when she meets the same man on the streets of London in 1896. Tom, the actor hired to play that hero, gets Wells to help him maintain the charade.

Finally, in part three, time travel becomes real, sort of, when a man from the future plans to kill Wells, Henry James and Bram Stoker and steal the only copies of the books each of them has just finished. Wells, aided by a letter from his future self, seeks a way out.

The stories weave in and out of each other, and Palma gives us plenty about alternate universes as well as time travel. As confusing as it may sound, he manages to make everything clear, or at least clear enough. The Map Of Time is fanciful fun.