The set‑up of Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel, The Other Valley, is wonderfully simple. His characters live in a world of valleys, each identical in geography but separated from the others by increments of twenty years. Travel to the east, and they will find themselves twenty years in the future. To the west, and they will be twenty years in the past. Residents live their ordinary lives haunted by the possibility that at any moment, if the proper protocols for travel between valleys are not observed, they could blink out of existence: “A person goes west, he interferes, and then new time rolls over him like a wave, leaving nothing behind. It’s as simple and ruthless as that.”
To protect against such outcomes, each valley is governed by a Conseil, which maintains tight controls over the borders and processes requests to travel to either the past or the future. Generally, visits are allowed only in the case of bereavement: a dying man who wants to see...
André Forget is the author of In the City of Pigs. His new Substack is called Oblomovism.
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