The review first appeared on scifiandscary.com
I’ve not read a book like ‘Dreams Before the Start of Time’ in a long while. It’s that kind of insightful, subtle, human-centred science fiction that sticks with you despite its lack of aliens or spaceships. It reminded me a lot of PD James’ excellent ‘Children of Men’, with its similar focus of human reproduction. Charnock’s writing might not quite be up to James’ standards, but she certainly has the ability to convey complex and challenging ideas in an engaging way.
That’s good news, because ‘Dreams Before the Start of Time’ is much more about concepts and people than it is about plot. There are stories here, lots of them in fact, but they are woven together into a book without a single narrative thread. In the hands of a lesser writer that might have been a problem, but here it works almost perfectly.
The book takes place over almost a century, starting in 2034, and following multiple generations of the same family. Its focus on both the culture and the science of human reproduction is resolute and fascinating. As the decades progress, Charnock explores a range of possible alternatives to traditional, monogamous, heterosexual childbearing. Platonic co-parenting, artificial wombs, single parent reproduction and more all get considered through a series of stories. Charnock considers the emotions of the characters as they make decisions about how to build their families, as well as the impacts of those decisions on the children they parent.
One of the things that makes the book work so well is that so much of it is recognisable. The London setting gives it a great sense of place, and the familiarity of borough names and landmarks makes it all the more real. Current brands are included as well (in an early chapter a character drinks London Pride beer), which makes it feel less alien than much sci-fi. There is advanced technology here, especially later in the book, but it’s all credible and often feels like a natural extension of current consumer electronics. Home medical consoles and virtual assistant bracelets don’t feel like a huge leap and help to build a vision of a future that is believably similar to our own. Most importantly of all, the tech is treated as just a detail of everyday life. What matters in this book is the people and the way in which science and evolving cultural norms impact on their lives.
Despite the lack of a strong plot to pull the reader through it all, Charnock has written a book that is extremely readable and compelling. The ideas were the thing that kept bringing me back, my curiosity desperate to see what changes the next generation of characters would experience. Too much modern sci-fi is just stories from other genres set in a future world. Detective stories with robots, horror stories in space, thrillers on alien planets. ‘Dreams Before the Start of Time’ is sci-fi as it should be. It’s fiction about science, full of ideas and inventions and wonderful possibilities.
And it’s about people too, living characters whose stories are told with affection and emotion. Whilst there isn’t a central storyline as such, there is a satisfying looping back, with the connections between the characters becoming more apparent as the book progresses. The end result is a book that is satisfying despite the fact that it has more questions than answers. It’s a book with a blend of mind and heart that is rare and precious and that should be applauded and savoured. I loved it.

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I might have enjoyed this as a discussion more than a novel. The brief character sketches were too brief for me. There were some refreshingly unlikable folks in the line up but sadly no one who I felt invested in or could root for. The last bit wrangles with inequality issues but it's too little, too late. Most of the book is deep into the issues of the well off and excludes any mention of the implied mass population of poors. I like the language and the imaginative strides even if I couldn't warm to it. ( )

An odd book--not a novel, but not short stories either; rather, a collection of vignettes moving forward 100 years into the future, loosely interconnected by character and the theme of pregnancy. The stories begin with the pregnancies of two friends, Millie and Toni, and returns to touch on their lives and their families, while also taking detours into the lives of other people connected to them. The technology of pregnancy and childbirth evolves throughout, as does attitudes toward having children, and I suppose that is the main theme of the book, but what I enjoyed was the quiet, subtle writing that was more character study than anything else. There wasn't much plot to speak of, and many stories were left unresolved, just a moment in time and then the book moves on. While I found the technology fairly believable--not just pregnancy-related but also everyday technology--I would imagine that tech would be much less recognizable 100 years a now, especially when thinking back on what the world was like 100 years ago. And I found the complete omission of climate change--even just a side note about how it had been mitigated--took away from the believability. Overall, though, I think this was well-written if lacking some imagination. ( )

As someone who has never had children and never particularly wanted children the central thesis of this book is really only of academic interest. What is that central thesis you ask? The author posits how human procreation will change in the coming years. I do have friends who desperately wanted to have children and so I could see how some of the forecast technologies would make life simpler. There seems to me to be one hole in these interconnected stories though—will the world survive the ecological catastrophes that humankind seems to be bent on bringing to the planet? It was hard for me to envision a world in which a person’s chief concern could be whether to carry a child or have it grown to term in an artificial womb. What about whether the ocean levels will inundate many of the large cities of the world (I imagine London which is the location of many of these stories, being on the tidal Thames, might be in for some flooding)? What about whether there will be enough food production to fill the bellies of those children? Sure the author suggests that many people ride bicycles and use mass transit but she also has people flying off to China and India and Australia and air travel is a pretty major energy suck.
Maybe I’m asking too much of a series of short fiction. It just seems to me that another author might reference these matters in a succinct but cohesive manner. This author seems to envision a future that is pretty much what we have right now in 2018 but with new ways to make babies. I enjoyed the stories and the way successive generations dealt with procreation and child-rearing but it was just not a well-rounded story. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2976098.html

This story is told through a series of closely linked vignettes, following the two main characters, Millie and Toni, from their discovery that they are pregnant in 2034 to their old age, exploring how technology changes their relationships to their parents, lovers, children and grandchildren. I guess I rate it just a little lower because the ending is rather abrupt, but in other ways it's a book very much for the present day, when we are on the cusp of redefining a lot of these concepts. ( )