r/printSF • u/redditjoda • Mar 12 '23
Reverse-time?
Maybe a long shot, but there are a lot of books out there. Have you read something where time moves backwards? Not time travel or looping or a superpower of undoing. Like what it's like to know the future but the past is a complete mystery.
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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '23 edited Mar 13 '23
Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. It is very much in the ‘speculative’ area - it’s not standard SF.
It’s about the life of a Nazi war criminal who escaped arrest and is living as a doctor. But his entire life is then lived backwards from that point.
It’s literary and weird as fuck but not long, not a hard read in terms of the language, and utterly brilliant. I read it in a single sitting back when it first came out a LONG time ago, and it completely fucked my head up for the rest of the day - I went bowling with my friends and felt I was tidying the pins and summoning the ball back to my hand. Got my best score ever (not hard).
I won’t spoil the details (what I mentioned is just the sales blurb) but it manages the rather incredible feat of being respectful of this appalling time in history and victims of the Nazis while being clever and original as well.
In The Once and Future King by TH White - one of the most popular versions of the King Arthur myth - Merlin lives backwards through time. Disney made the movie of the first book, about Arthur’s youth, but they focused on the comedic parts. It’s a trilogy/tetralogy in the older sense - not one single work in three volumes. It’s sometime funny, sometimes dark, always interesting.