A Spy In Time by Imraan Coovadia

A Spy In Time Reviews

• 
  Jason Furman

  A Spy in Time is a brilliant, thought provoking, engaging time tale spy saga by Imraan Coovadia that is a wholly original book that draws on afrofuturism and more cerebral spy fiction like Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, and the best of John Le Carré.
  
  Enver Eleven is a new member of the Agency, a covert organization devoted the preservation of the timeline—with everything good and bad that happened in history. He is heading back in time from post apocalyptic times where a supernova wiped out most of Earth except people living in mines deep below Johannesburg—all of them Black (but some albino). His first mission, to Marrakesh in 1955, goes badly wrong from the very beginning.
  
  Thus begins a time and place spanning novel that moves between Marrakesh, Rio, Johannesburg to Jupiter, the destruction of the Earth and as far forward the year 100,000. All the time it is not clear if Enver is on the right side of history or the wrong side, if the shadowy enemy Board is really the enemy, or who is on what side.
  
  The moral ambiguities and shadows concern race, history, conservativeness (in the sense of conserving even what is bad), and more.
  
  The epic saga—in a book that is actually on the short and compact side even if it conveys an almost infinitely voluminous feeling—culminates in a nicely drawn together resolution.
• 
  Molly

  A Spy In Time is a sci-fi book like I've never read before. There are some huge ideas in this novel that will tickle the fancy of even the MOST literate time travel enthusiasts. I personally loved Imraan Coovadia's super fun technical details about his version of time travel which, in this novel, is a government run program. There are lots of fun facts on the practical elements of how time travel works including how much energy round trips take, the cost of energy, and the effects on the human body. But what I also enjoyed were the moments with our hero inside the travel which sometimes felt like a dream and other times felt like nostalgia... as I imagine real time travel would. This book takes you on a fantastic journey that literally spans time and space, and even includes a short jaunt to Jupiter. Plus there's spies and intrigue and who doesn't love intrigue? Imraan creates a parallel universe so complete and unique in its complexity that you won't be able to put this one down.
• 
  Aqeelah

  Sci-Fi is one of the most difficult genres to write and I commend Mr Imraan Coovadia for the brilliant writing and fresh fictionally scientific world-building which fuses spies, space, time travel and contemplative philosophy. Coovadia managed to create a plot that was both thrilling and interdimensional, while simultaneously incorporating existentialism and racial discrimination across the broad perspective of time. This story is brimming with deep philosophical questions that pique your psyche and leave you contemplating the very existence and true power of humanity and machines.
  
  A story for true intellectuals! I was absorbed. However, I had to focus 100%, because if my attention drifted for a just few seconds, I would lose track of the plot. The writing could only be described as a mixture of poetic and academic. It was as if the writing itself was not bound by any specific time, but had its own unique flow (like the plot, which kept shifting through centuries and places). The depth in the explanations of the history and the technology were fascinating and one can conclude that the author either did excellent research or is a fountain of knowledge (or perhaps all the history and technology were purely fictional and it was simply the author's good descriptions and writing skills that made it so realistic).
  
  The timeline was often confusing and the ending was somewhat of a let down, but perhaps if you look at it from a mystical and metaphysical point of view, this all adds to the charm. This book has A LOT, and some may argue that it's too much, but all in all a really good 4 star read 🌟🌟🌟🌟
• 
  John Healey

  Coovadia has a way with words, thoughts, time and concepts. This Electric Cool Aid Acid Test of a novel is a roller-coaster ride difficult to describe and more difficult still to put down.
• 
  Mandisi Nkomo

  A good novel. Well written and conceptually heavy. Perhaps too much so, as it packs secret agencies, time travel, the multiverse, and mankind's barbaric racially inspired history into one book.
  
  The first person narrator holds it all together though, with the protagonist being as perplexed as the reader through much of the novel. The spy games are a great touch allowing a strong emotional connection with the reader, as the narrator is constantly trying to figure out what the reader is, in regards to the actions and words of the surrounding characters.
  
  Not sure how much I enjoyed the ending, but then again, it is a novel about time travel and the multiverse, so what is an ending really?
• 
  Tiah

  
  ~I never set out to be anybody's prophet.~
  
  ~Playing against a machine is never the same unless you have given them the freedom to consider all the assumptions.~
  
  ~Every person has something which is more important than mere life. He or she may not know what it is until the time comes to make a decision.~
  
  ~The past is a foreign country and it is a country of the imagination.~
  
  ~In my experience, everybody wants to tell his story. Everybody, in the end, wants his story to be told.~
  
  ~The infinite is the only thing that a human being may not survive. That is what lies behind our hatred of the multiverse and repugnant causal loops.~
  
  ~I thought it was my strange destiny to go from one century to the next and tell stories.~
  
  ~In Abacha Reef Home, you were kept as safe as humanly possible - assuming it is safe to bored out of your wits.~
  
  ~We borrowed our ideas, defined them according to the energy required to copy the blueprints form another epoch. We copied fashions and literatures, legal doctrines, the political beliefs of better centuries, and even our top twenty hits. We didn't need - we didn't think we needed - authors, inventors, composers. For my father, it was different. Each one of his creations was like a prank. He was playing jokes on the universe.~
  
  ~I wasn't turning out to be the hero I had hoped.~
• 
  Felix Pütsch

  I found the premise very similar to Asimov's "The end of eternity" which I would recommend to read instead. A spy in time has a similar story, except it plays in a future where white people (albinos) are shunned.
• 
  Gasparde

  C'est un 3,5
• 
  Alison Smith

  This is the first Coorvadia novel I've been able to finish and enjoy. Its more SF/fantasy than political drumbeating, which makes a welcome change.
• 
  Drfaten

  I want to read this book.