All of an Instant

by Richard Garfinkle

In his second novel Garfinkle shows again his own brand of large-scale imagination. All of an Instant is a groundbreaking SF novel that chronicles the discovery of a medium of existence outside of time--the Instant--from which one can influence all past and future history. War dominates this strange, abstract place--war among forces contending for control of all times and places.

Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

384 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 2, 1999

About the author

Richard Garfinkle grew up in New York and now lives in Chicago with his wife and children. His first novel, Celestial Matters, won the Compton Crook award for best first science fiction novel of 1996. Garfinkle was twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. He has written numerous fiction and nonfiction works on his interests of history, science, imagination, and the preternatural.

More information can be found at www.richardgarfinkle.com.

Garfinkle's blog is "Overdue Considerations,"

Reviews

[Alessandra]

My husband wrote this book, so I can't be objective. Please excuse my bias, and now I suggest going and reading the review of somebody with some perspective.

[Lloyd Earickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine that traditional, causal time is the seabed, and that you can leave causal time by jumping up into the ocean. Then, imagine that waves in that ocean cause changes to the seabed. Oh, and imagine then when you jump into the ocean you cease existing as a physical, humanoid entity, and instead become an eel-like creature of atemporality whose size is dictated by the amount of your life that jumped up into the ocean. Now, those waves that change the seabed? They can also cut your new, atemporal, serpentine body. Following me so far?

Alternative world (or secondary world) fantasy gets all the attention these days as the quintessential owner of the steepest learning curves, but those expositionary slopes are molehills compared to the mountainous terrain to be conquered in the hardest of science fiction that the genre has to offer, like Garfinkle's All of an Instant. There is perhaps no more appropriate descriptor for this book than "ambitious," because Garfinkle is not just playing around with time travel in the loose, shallow, ambiguous ways of more popular treatments in Star Trek, Dr. Who, or A Sound of Thunder; he dives fully into a novel dedicated to a vision of acausal, atemporal reality in which human existence is so foreign to our lived experiences as to be more alien than most of the actual aliens dreamt up in other authors' fiction.

You can feel, as you read through the book, Garfinkle struggling on the edges of his capabilities as a writer to convey this vision he has of the Instant, an acausal, atemporal reality conveyed through an extended metaphor comparing it to an ocean, and the flux, which is the causal, temporal reality with which we are familiar. It is how I've often felt when attempting to write a truly alien perspective, but Garfinkle sticks with it, and it works, barely. This is not a book for the impatient - I think I had to read through fully a third of the book before I could begin to understand what the plot was, how the Instant and the Flux worked and interacted, and found any characters to follow - but by its conclusion I not only was immersed in a fascinating vision of temporality, but also sympathizing with characters more interesting and complex than populate the pages of less ambitious hard science fiction like Rocheworld or Heavy Planet, and enjoying a plot almost as engaging as Foundation's.

I will readily admit that this book is not for everyone; you have to want to read this book to appreciate it, and not just because it seems to be out of print - I had to buy a used copy from a library that was offloading it. Though Garfinkle does an excellent job of leveraging his chosen extended metaphor for description, to really understand what's happening and all of the intricacies All of an Instant contains requires taking the time outside of the reading to think about the concepts, wrestle with the ideas, and craft the visualizations. That will by time well spent, however, because All of an Instant is one of the most interesting science fiction novels I've read in a long time. I hope you consider giving it a read this Instant.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough going but worth the effort. Here's the review to read:
https://www.sfsite.com/10b/all67.htm

A *very* strange book. 3.4 stars, as best as I can recollect.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book at Dollar General in their discount section. The read was certainly much better than the couple of bucks I spent on it. I found the story to be quite engaging, a different way of looking at time travel and the consequences of every action. Although I have not yet gotten around to it, this one is on the re-read shelf.

[Alex Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

All of an Instant by Richard Garfinkle is not a novel about time travel. It is a novel about time itself. The book begins with a metaphor: the world we experience every day is solid, like the floor of an ocean, and the true nature of time is liquid, like the ebbing and flowing of waters above the floor. Certain people enter this ocean, which is called the Instant, and by affecting the flow of time, they change the solid world below. Those who enter the Instant bring part of their lives with them and this acts as a tail with which they can swim around like eels. The rest of the book is about these time eels of the time ocean and how they are locked in a never-ending time war – each attempting to shape the solid world (the ocean bottom) the way they want. The premise is intriguing but the book is marred by two major flaws.

The first flaw is that Garfinkle, like light in a black hole, can't escape the gravitational pull that is thinking temporally: the ocean of time is implicitly governed by linear time. There exists a person who is first to enter the Instant even though the concept of first can only exist if linear time exists. There is a history of the Instant. Battles in the Instant are compared to a sequential series of moves on a chess board. On a few occasions Garfinkle does write that this view of the Instant is an illusion and time only seems to pass. In reality the Instant is a sequence of states where one state follows another state. But, and I don't know if Garfinkle realizes, this "true nature" of the Instant is the same thing as regular old time.

The second flaw is caused by Garfinkle taking the ocean metaphor too seriously. The description of warfare, tactics, tail lengths, tides, flows, and so on makes this book read like Watership Down but with eels instead of rabbits. The only adjustments really needed are the few passages where the characters leave the Instant to land in solid time. Ninety five percent of the prose could be kept identical. The plot: an eel from the shallows finds garbage washing up on his shore, swims deeper to learn more, teams up with a minnow and a giant eel from the depths. Using their different senses and abilities they learn the value of teamwork and clean the ocean they all inhabit.

All in all there are there are seeds of fascinating ideas in All of an Instant but for the most part they never sprout. What we end up with is a fairly engaging book about eel society and eel warfare interspersed with discussions on the nature of time.

[Marco · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ambitious novel trying to deal with something more daring than plain time travel: a different conception of time, or rather a plurality of conceptions of time. Beside our classic view of a linear timeline (the "Flux"), in Garfinkle's fiction coexist the liquid, everchanging, ever-present ocean of possibilities (the "Instant") with shallower regions where variation is slighter and more hazardous depths where nothing ever stays the same, and rare regions where change (almost) doesn't exist (the "Now" at the beginning of human history, and the mysterious "Broken Island" on whose existence most of the novel is centered up).
Even more than about the different "times", the novel is about the different inhabitants of this manifold landscape. Time-warriors — those who live in the Instant — can be just "one minute long" or have a conscience which spans on an entire century... And this, together with the differences in their senses, dramatically changes both their way of life and their perspective on time itself.
As with his previous novel "Celestial Matters" (which I strongly recommend!), at the core of "All of an Instant" lays the theme of the subjectivity of truth and non-categoricity of world views. All main characters sense and conceive time in different, mutually exclusive ways. The universe they see is different, and communication is difficult. Yet, none of them is wrong and none of them is right. All of their perspectives are adequate and none of them is "the best" or able to encompass every aspect of the others. This strongly parallels and expands the situation in "Celestial Matters", where the scientific frameworks of the two main contender — Artistotelic Science and Daoist Alchemy — were impossible to conciliate but both described properly and usefully the universe of the story.
The key reflection I take from what I know of Garfinkle's narrative is then: how can we say there is just one truth? A universe where multiple totally coherent explanations for the same phenomenon might not just be possible, but necessary, and more beautiful.

[Brs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book when I was four early in Kindergarten and was extremely impressed maybe it is not as interesting as I recall but the idea of time as visualizations of “tails” was incredible

[JaneAustin'sPetticoat · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most mind-stretching books you will ever read! Be warned, it demands a lot of the reader, but it is well worth it!

[Kookatchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book two to three times up to now and am sure to pick it up again in the future.
Richard Garfinkle creates one huge metaphor for time travel and works with it to the last consequence.

Time travel is done by a chosen few tribes, who swim in the ocean of time, every movement they make creating a wave which in turn changes the world of normal people.
These changes are secondary to the travelers, change in the real world is constant, no one knows what the original history has once been. But every tribe tries to install it's own version of it, and so every tribe is in constant war with the other tribes.

The story and the writing are pretty speacial - most of the time you don't even think about the fact that you are reading about time travel. And I understand if not everyone can come to terms with this.

But I think that if you manage to engage in the story, you get a very creative and new look on the whole time travel-thing which is absolutely worth a try.

[Paul Madarasz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book strips away the glamor of the usual time-travel tales, with whole galactic civilizations disappearing, replaced by a stone-age earth -- thanks to bands of time-travelers who take it upon themselves to improve things by altering the past. It seems to me to be more realistic (if one can call time-travel realistic) than any other books in this sub-genre.

[K.R. Gadeken · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books ever. Demands a lot of the reader, but it is well worth it! One of the books that truly changed my perspective on life, time, language, meaning, and how individuals interpret experiences.

[Scott Ross · Rating 1 out of 5]

i bought it for the title and the premiss. hard to follow. i keep putting it down for months at a time. not sure if i will finish it.

[T Dale]

Crap. I got just a few pages into this before I gave it up as a bad experience. The style is impossible for me to follow.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gad this was struggle to finish. I've no idea why I kept going.

[Rohitashva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mindfuck. One statement says it all. The hardest to imagine is the unimaginable.

[Fresno Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

hmmm, interesting without being completely enjoyable