John Crowley’s short novella is a great time travel fantasy about longingly clinging to empire. Caspar Last starts a fire of events when he gains means to time travel. Wanting some more money, he decides a scheme to travel to 19th century colonial Guyana, buy a stamp and mail a letter to his great great grandfather. The stamp, of which there is only one other known in his time of 1983, will be inherited by him, and he will be able to sell it for handsome profit.

This, however, has the unintended butterfly effect of creating a clandestine society called the “Otherhood” that aims to steer through the possibilities of parallel universes to maintain the British Empire. Ultimately, as causality folds back upon itself, factions emerge that want the parallel worlds to cease and reality to converge back into a singular timeline.

All in all it is a great meditation on colonialism and the vain sorrows of trying to cling to a waning empire. The novella fittingly concludes in 1956 with the Suez crisis, a locale and event to which a modern comparison is hard not to draw.