Being a highly scientific species, the Kemyates see colonization as a grand experiment, one they control by trapping the planet in a giant time field and manipulating its history, rerunning certain scenarios and cancelling out others. Many thousands of years ago, the Kemyate people decided Earth might be a good place to resettle, and so planted a few colonists on its surface – the first humans.

Then, she encounters Win, a slightly odd boy who, it turns out, is an intergalactic time-traveller from a desolate planet called Kemya. It’s terrifying, but thinking otherwise is just deluding yourself.” She comes to this conclusion while being hunted by hostile aliens at the scene of a notorious 18th-century massacre of Native Americans, which gives a sense of how Crewe’s story operates.įor most of her life, Skylar was just an average-seeming girl living in the American Midwest. Near the end of the book, Skylar waxes philosophic about her newfound wisdom: “After everything I’ve seen in the last couple days, I can say pretty definitively that life is messy, and inexact, and unfair, full of so many variables I could never take half of them into account. One of the most remarkable features of this tale of interplanetary colonialism and teenage derring-do is how often even the most heroic deeds result in failure, frustration, and death. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, this isn’t.Įarth & Sky is a satisfying and impressively unusual, if not entirely graceful mash-up of gee-whiz adventure story and bleak existential drama. And the negative effects aren’t all physical: hopping around in time also makes Skylar more aware of humanity’s bottomless talent for cruelty and stupidity. Every trip made by 17-year-old Skylar, the book’s protagonist, causes her to almost throw up.

A lot of cool things do happen in Earth & Sky, the first instalment in the new sci-fi trilogy by Toronto author Megan Crewe, but the actual time travelling that animates the story is a thoroughly unpleasant and decidedly uncool experience – at least for the characters. Being able to leap into the future or the past makes no sense whatsoever, so authors might as well make it seem cool, right? No amount of exposition can explain away the plot issues that are created the instant wormholes are introduced. One fact holds true across all stories that feature time travel as a narrative hook: time travelling defies logic.

Earth & Sky by Megan Crewe