Some debut novels arrive with little fanfare but pack an outsized imaginative punch. Josh Herner’s ambitious first book, “Memories of Tomorrow,” is this type of intoxicating, genre-blending odyssey. Part contemporary drama, part trippy time-travel tale, part techno-thriller, it’s an audacious high-wire act that marks the arrival of a bold new talent.
The setup has an electric charge of urgency and mystery. Tom Berski, a disgraced high school teacher turned struggling handyman, takes an irresistible but ominous job doing repairs at a remote mountain compound. The house is a high-tech marvel, with sophisticated electronics and security systems that would put the CIA to shame.
As Tom tinkers away at glitches and short circuits, he can’t help but feel like his talents are being wasted as some rich mogul’s glorified repairman. But he’s also increasingly unsettled by a palpable strangeness lurking beneath the house’s sleek surfaces. Something’s not quite right here—inexplicable power drains, reclusive owners, hushed conversations he’s not privy to.
The Enigma Deepens
When a violent thunderstorm rolls in one night, all hell breaks loose. An electromagnetic surge knocks Tom unconscious, and he awakens in a nightmarish scene – the house half-destroyed, his memory fragmented. And most shockingly, the year is now 1984. He’s a teenager again, stuck in communist Poland. Is this a hallucination? A glimpse of an alternate timeline?
What follows is a mind-bendingly twisty tale that ricochets between past, present and future with the propulsive energy of a well-oiled machine. In 1984, young Tom must navigate a repressive society while concealing his inexplicable knowledge of events to come. Meanwhile, in the present day, the adult Tom tries desperately to unravel the enigma of the mountain house and return to his own time.
Herner gleefully mashes up time travel tropes with Cold War espionage hijinks, while grounding it all in Tom’s gripping emotional journey to redeem his misspent life. The period details of 1980s Poland feel authentically lived-in, from the drab concrete housing blocks to the paranoid atmosphere of informers and secret police.
At the same time, Herner makes the high-tech house into a character in its own right, a labyrinth of wonders and terrors that seems to be manipulating events across multiple timelines. With each new revelation, the stakes get higher and the plot accelerates into a delirious ontological pretzel that will leave your head spinning.
Love and Algorithms
But what prevents the novel from floating off into pure abstraction is Herner’s gift for vivid, finely textured characterization. Tom is a beautifully shaded protagonist, a good man haunted by bad choices, whose desperation to fix his broken life is palpable on the page.
The supporting cast is equally well-drawn, from Tom’s family struggling through economic hardship, to Marta, his enigmatic English teacher, who seems to know more about his predicament than she’s letting on. Their slow-burn flirtation, spiked with paranoia and miscommunication, is one of the novel’s unexpected highlights.
The dialogue throughout has a punchy, street-level immediacy, whether it’s unspooling technobabble with his mysterious employers. Even the house itself seems to have a voice, constantly probing and testing Tom with its glitchy, passive-aggressive interfaces.
Quantum Leaping Into the Unknown
“Memories of Tomorrow” really takes off, though, when it embraces the full-tilt weirdness of its premise. There are exhilarating set pieces here that marry white-knuckle suspense with mind-expanding flights of imagination. These reality-warping scenes crackle with the anything-goes energy of the best science fiction, while still feeling grounded in the novel’s emotional core.
It’s to Herner’s immense credit that he keeps all these metaphysical plates spinning while never losing sight of the human drama at the center. Even as the plot gets more Byzantine, the motivations driving Tom and the other characters remain clear and relatable. We’re fully invested in whether Tom will find a way to mend the broken relationships of his past and create a better future for himself and his loved ones.
Untying the Temporal Knot
The novel’s final act is a narrative high-wire act, as Herner pulls together the myriad timelines and realities he’s constructed into a coherent, satisfying resolution. It’s a testament to his astonishing structural control that he’s able to pay off the story’s central mysteries while still leaving plenty of room for interpretation and ambiguity.
Some may grouse that certain enigmas are left unresolved, but that feels entirely in keeping with the story’s quantum indeterminacy. Like the best time travel tales, “Memories of Tomorrow” understands that some knots in the skein of space-time are too tangled to be neatly tied off.
Instead, the ending achieves a lovely grace note of hard-won wisdom and melancholy. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Tom comes to understand that changing the past is far less important than learning to live in the present. It’s a simple message, but one freighted with earned emotion and resonance.
A New Voice in Speculative Fiction
In the end, “Memories of Tomorrow” marks Josh Herner as an exciting new voice in speculative fiction. He’s got a bag of postmodern tricks that would make Haruki Murakami jealous, but he deploys them with the hardboiled grit of Michael Crichton and the humanism of Kurt Vonnegut. It’s an intoxicating combination.
Ultimately, “Memories of Tomorrow” is a dazzling clockwork contraption of a book, an intricately plotted page-turner that still leaves plenty of room for heart and soul. It’s the kind of brain-teasing, heartstring-tugging mashup of a story that you’ll want to revisit again and again, just to see how Herner pulls off his magic trick.
In his author’s note, Herner confesses that he’s not a “professional writer”, just someone who wanted to share a story he felt compelled to tell. Based on the evidence here, he may soon have to drop the “amateur” tag. “Memories of Tomorrow” is a stunning debut, a carnival ride through the quantum funhouse of memory, causality and consequence. You’ll never look at your own past the same way again.