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Lost Futures
Lisa Tuttle
Grafton, paperback, 208 pages, £4.99
Published June 1992
ISBN 0586212949
Review by Steven Blake (1992)

The future. What is it? The same goes for the present. In Lisa Tuttle’s new SF novel (her first novel since Gabriel, published in 1987) Clare Beckett gets a glimpse. In fact, she gets a few, seeing into alternate realities, the futures she could have had but somehow lost: the man she should have met, or would have met if she’d travelled to England when she had the chance after finishing college. She sees the life she could have had, if she’d turned out the mathematician she should have been, and she also sees the past.

Lost Futures concerns itself with the mid-life crisis/mental break down of Beckett, an accountant who still feels guilty for the death of her brother years back, undecided about her unsatisfactory love-life, that’s left her, she feels, on the shelf at 33.

Lost Futures takes us into familiar Tuttle territory. It’s the territory explored in her short stories ‘Flying to Byzantium’ and ‘No Regrets’. The protagonist, an intelligent woman, considers her past and finds it drawing her back, dragging her downwards. Allowed into Clare’s mind, we feel ourselves almost overwhelmed by her melancholia. Tuttle continues to mine this territory with great success.