The Time Door by Shannon McDermott
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

“One thing I know…God did not bring us this far, and save us from so much, for nothing. There is more for us. Let’s go discover it.”

The Time Door is exactly what I’m always looking for on the rare occasions I venture into hard science fiction, though it’s something I rarely find. This book is by turns fanciful and believable, philosophical and propulsive. It swept me away while also keeping my mind fully engaged, and I never found myself drowning in the science or the politics that were both so vital to the story. I drew comparisons to both The Martian and Project Hail Mary as I read, which is some of the highest praise I can give any work of science fiction as I adored both novels.

Four intrepid explorers have become America’s—and the world’s—first manned mission to Mars. Five years after leaving Earth, and four years into their stay on Mars, they are expecting to be retrieved. Or, at the very least, resupplied. But in the wake of the Great Collapse and the shambles in which it left America, the nation that commissioned them has abandoned the Mars team to their fate. One man, Rueben Jackson, seems to be the only person on the planet who cares about getting these four explorers home, but he is up against seemingly insurmountable odds against powerful politicians and hidden conspiracies. Our story alternates between the Mars team’s travails and Rueben’s efforts to bring them home.

The Time Door was a gripping, transportive tale from start to finish. The plot is expansive in scope and incredibly cinematic in its portrayal of the story being told. I often find myself struggling when reading hard science fiction to stay engaged with the plot without getting lost in the weeds, so to speak. That was never a struggle with The Time Door. Early in the book I was more engaged in the storyline on Mars than that taking place on Earth, especially since politics played so vital a role in Rueben’s half of the story. But soon I found myself almost equally gripped by his plot line as I was by that of the Mars team. The state of America in the wake of this fictional Great Collapse seemed eerily probable.

I found McDermott’s prose incredibly readable. Her writing is incredibly well-crafted while not being in any way distracting. She was never calling attention to her prose, but instead used her prose to support and undergird the story being told. It’s the kind of writing that disappears as you read, and I mean that in the best way possible. This story truly became a movie in my mind. And within less than 300 pages, we get a taste of so many great sci-fi tropes: dystopia, apocalypse, space exploration, first contact, and more. While this is technically Christian sci-fi, the faith element is very light. It’s a subtle but beautifully utilized thread in the much larger picture of the story.

The Time Door captivated my imagination from the first page to the last. It’s one of my favorite works of science fiction in years, alongside Above the Circle of Earth by E. Stephen Burnett and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. All three of these books brought faith into the story in different ways and to varying degrees, and that inclusion made them even more engaging for me. I enjoyed every aspect of this, from the plot to the pacing, from the prose to the character work. I’m excited to see what the continuation of the duology, Singularity, has in store.

“[He] understood, in his self’s deepest core, why a man would hang his life in the balance, rejecting what was certain for hope of what was better…Because he knew—he had always known, even when danger filled him with a desire to live—that merely keeping one’s life was never the most important thing.”

You can purchase a copy of this book directly from the publisher, from Amazon, or from Audible.

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