The Movement, the second book in Avi Datta’s action-packed Time Corrector series, opens in dramatic fashion in April 2027 as Vincent Abajian agonizes over possibly lacking sufficient time to save an unnamed female with catastrophic injuries while himself needing to be rescued from an attack by a villain known only as Vandal. Then, just when it seems that salvation might be at hand, the story shifts backwards in time to September 2026 and the situation of Emika Amari, Vincent’s former lover, following the dramatic conclusion of The Winding, the first book in the series.
Having made the decision to leave Vincent and give up on a career with Nardin Robotics, Emika knows that she needs to maintain distance from her former life, although doing so is proving increasingly difficult as her baby daughter Nozomi is increasingly reminding her of Vincent. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Vincent is unaware that he is now a father, something that Emika fears she will be unable to keep hidden if/when she bumps into him at a forthcoming conference on cutting-edge artificial intelligence, where Vincent and his team are due to showcase the Mind, their signature helmet, and a new development known as the Neurolink.
Once at the conference, Emika quickly reconnects with her former colleagues, who cautiously welcome her back into the fold, although the tension with some of them is clear and Emika suspects that they might be keeping something from her. Even stranger, when the moment she long feared and secretly hoped for arrives and she speaks to Vincent again, he seems to barely know who she is. When she learns that he has partial amnesia due to an unexplained loss of consciousness around a year ago, Emika determines to find out what happened, whatever the risk. For his part, Vincent wants to recover his memories and learn more about the woman who haunts his dreams. Will they be able to find each other again while further developing the Neurolink and fighting Vandal’s evil machinations?
The Movement is another tense and thrill-packed installment in Datta’s innovative science fiction series. The action is once again set in the very near future, which enhances the immediacy of the story and renders the technologies and innovations scarily plausible. This time round, however, Datta tells the story from perspectives other than solely that of Vincent, which allows for greater insights into the various characters’ thoughts and motivations. The dialogue is also much more fluid and engaging in this second book, which again allows for a greater connection with the characters and greater empathy with their plight. Worldbuilding and plotting have always been Datta’s strengths, and his character development and dialogue have now caught up with those aspects.
Blending mythology, cyberpunk, and hard science fiction, The Movement offers a mind-bending mix of realties and timelines that both boggles the brain and entertains the mind, and given the thrills and spills in this installment of the story, it’ll be fascinating to see what Datta next has in store for the legendary Time Corrector.