Hypatia the Time Traveler: Unburning Alexandria by Paul Levinson

Unburning Alexandria by Paul Levinson is an enjoyable read, all the more fun because I teach a bit of Hypatia and Augustine in some of my philosophy classes.

This is a sequel to The Plot to Save Socrates, which is also fun, but there's a recap in this one so you could probably read Unburning Alexandria without having read the first one.

Sierra Waters is a mid-21st century grad student and time traveler who has (through a complex series of events) taken on the identity of Hypatia of Alexandria circa 400 AD. She's in search of her lover Alciabiades (yes, that Alcibiades) whom she has lost in time. It turns out there are other time travelers, including the mysterious Heron. Oh, and Augustine of Hippo shows up just for good measure.



That's the basic idea of the plot, but it's actually a lot more complex and intricate than that. The novel jumps around a lot between times and it's not always immediately clear when we are in the characters' personal time even when the exact date is given. At first I was a little annoyed at how discombobulated this made the reading experience, but then I reflected that time travel just is discombobulating, so it's actually a great example of using the text to put the reader in a similar state as the characters. It's also fun that the time machines are chairs--very H. G. Wells!

Historically, the novel maybe relies a little bit too much on the narrative about destruction of the library at Alexandria by ignorant religious types. Although the novel is a lot more nuanced than you get in New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, a lot of the historical sources are a bit less determinate and the political situation at the time was no doubt more complex than "ignorant savages hate learning." It maybe would have been interesting to hear more about the gender issues surrounding Hypatia's life as a powerful woman in Roman antiquity, too. I also find myself a bit cheated not to get to know the real Hypatia better, but instead to have her replaced by a 21st century time traveler. Oh, well. But it's historical fiction, and historical science fiction at that, so I'm happy to give some leeway.

Philosophically, I've never quite bought the idea that you can change the past, because if you changed anything in the past it would already be changed before you left (see David Lewis's magnificent article "The Paradoxes of Time Travel" for more). But again, this is science fiction and the idea of the changing the past is just too fun a plot device to give up. It is fun to see how the characters try to change things without altering the historical record too much (on that point I was reminded of other books like Connie Willis's hilarious To Say Nothing of the Dog).

I also love that the novel at least seems to be heading toward one of my favorite time travel ideas: the idea of causal loops, or that some things could have no discrete causal origin in time. I won't spoil it in the novel, but my favorite example is in the old Planet of the Apes movies where Zira goes back in time and gives birth to Caesar, who in turn founds the society from which she comes in the future. Another great one is Robert Heinlein's "-All You Zombies-"

So all in all, this is a fun read for fans of history (especially late Ancient Rome) and science fiction (especially time travel).


See also my Goodreads review.