Bradley, Kaliane
Entry updated 25 August 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1988- ) UK editor and author in whose first novel, The Ministry of Time (2024), the extraction of living historical figures via Time Travel has become possible. Commander Graham Gore (1809-1847), an historical officer attached to the doomed Franklin Expedition to the Arctic in search of a Northwest Passage (see Imperialism), has been reawoken in a Near Future London beset by Climate Change and other markers of a future radically different from the epistemic triumph of Empire the historical Gore might have anticipated. He is provided with a mentor or "bridge", a highly proficient woman of British/Cambodian stock, who narrates the tale; they fall in love. Not entirely in the flesh at first, he begins to acquire human density – which is to say that, "like a daguerreotype developing", he comes into focus with the world, like an accepted transplant – and eventually settles into passionately engaged Sex with his mentor. The tale complexifies after the fashion of Time Travel tales, with Identity issues adding Doppelganger twists to a slowly unpacking sequence of revelations: that the portal used in the twenty-first century comes from further up the line, where desperate attempts are being made to save the planet from final ruination. It is not made entirely clear in The Ministry of Time, whose use of the SF Megatext is acutely knowing, that salvation is possible. [JC]
Kaliane Mong Huxham Bradley
born London: 1988
works
- The Ministry of Time (London: Hodder and Stoughton/Sceptre, 2024) [hb/Andrew Footit]
links
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