Book Review: Hazards of Time Travel, by Joyce Carol Oates

So I picked up Joyce Carol Oates Hazards of Time Travel simply because I liked the title and I'd enjoyed her 1995 novel Zombie. The book starts in a dystopian future and follows a young woman named Adriane Strohl through her last few days of high school and her subsequent imprisonment in a University in 1959 Wisconsin.

On the surface, the book felt a lot like 12 Monkeys to me, wherein our protagonist is punished by being sent somewhere that is arguably better than where they came from. Are there problems? Absolutely, Oates has found a great way to highlight the negatives of late '50s America by showing it as a University based on blandness, everyone working hard to be consistently forgettable. Renamed Mary Ellen, Adriane stumbles through her first year learning and relearning exactly how closed off America was during the period and for me, some of the greatest strengths of the book come from the character study of Mary Ellen/Adriane, rather than the dystopian future or the science of the time travel.

An interesting read that left me with more questions than answers, but honestly, isn't that what we want from speculative fiction?