Quarter Finalist
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: In book three of the Heartless series, the author takes readers on a lightning-fast, whirlwind journey that will challenge their sense of what is possible. This installment sees climate scientist Quinn, who lives on a boat outside the city of Usus, struggling to adapt to the experience of new motherhood.
Prose: Lahey's prose blends rich description with matter-of-fact storytelling that establishes and quickly immerses readers in the unique world her characters inhabit.
Originality: Time Is Heartless is a sparklingly original futuristic sci-fi tale set in a world that features cyborgs, AI meerkats (yes, meerkats), cutting edge tech, time travel, and exists in the midst of surging climate change.
Character/Execution: Despite the invigorating and expertly crafted worldbuilding, it's the characters and humanity of the novel that make it a true standout within the genre. Lahey infuses the story with practical and relatable concerns (such as Quinn seeking balance between career and raising a child), providing readers an emotional anchor to offset the fantastical circumstances.
Date Submitted: April 14, 2024
The surprising, emotionally resonant third entry in Lahey’s near-future Heartless Series blends thoughtful, inventive science fiction with romance, family drama, and a heartwarming commitment to love and family, even for hard-working scientists, time-traveling cyborgs, and Super AI-Plus meerkats. In 2053, Quinn Buyers, a climate scientist living in a boat outside the floating equatorial city of Usus, finds that her “every kilowatt of energy, every joule of motivation” is going to Molly, her young daughter, while her work and her marriage suffer. Her husband, Tig, is a complicated man/machine—they met on time-travel adventures earlier in the series, and he just might be the ancient Sumerian king Gilgamesh. His government work takes him away too often, and he’s also caught up in some personal missions he won’t tell Quinn about. But she’s off on missions of her own, raiding a government lab to track down a friend and later infiltrating TechCom, Earth’s biggest technology fair, where her now-sentient AI meerkat companion Mori—"the most advanced machine on the planet”—has escaped to after expressing a deep desire for love. That’s just a few of the heady, inventive threads tangling up Quinn and her friends and family in a novel that pulses with both ideas, humanity, and (at its start and ending) adventure. Lahey’s storytelling circumnavigates a fascinating Earth of heat surges, advanced tech, dark secrets, and deeply human connection—a capacity shared even by some non-human characters.
Future politics power elements of the plot, as the increasingly militant Authentic Human Association, outraged at “Transhumans,” crashes TechCom. Action involving HOTRODs (the “mean machines”), mercs, komodo dragons, and more is crisp and exciting, but what’s most engaging is Quinn’s connections with others and the world Lahey is still revealing. Accounts of TechCom’s splendors and horrors are marvelous, and Lahey, in inviting prose, deftly binds the conceptual to the emotional. The richness of relationships, backstories, and worldbuilding mean readers new to the series should start with the first book.
Takeaway: Richly emotional and inventive near-future SF drama of a heat-choked Earth.
Comparable Titles: Cassandra Rose Clarke’s The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,, Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: B+
