Time Out by Michael Marshall Smith

Published by Subterranean Press on April 1, 2024

Time Out begins as a typical Last Man on Earth Story. It evolves into the story of a man who is forced to reflect on the content of his character.

The narrator wakes up on the morning after Christmas to discover that his wife and daughter are missing. He assumes they went for a walk. Then he notices that the internet isn’t working. Neither is the television. When he decides to look for his wife, he sees no other people. No cars are in motion. There are no airplanes in the sky. When he knocks on doors, nobody answers.

Within a day, animals have also disappeared. Yet things are different from day to day. When he breaks the glass in a door so he can enter a hardware store, the broken glass has been replaced when he visits the store on the following day.

Perhaps there has been a biblical rapture, but surely people exist who are less worthy of salvation than the narrator. Where are they? The narrator can’t understand why the electricity is still on and the water is still flowing, but cellphone service and the internet aren’t working. I was wondering that myself, but it turns out not to matter. This isn’t the kind of science fiction that’s supported by science, which makes it more of a fantasy, or perhaps a thought experiment.

As the narrator contemplates the new present, his thoughts turn to the past. He wonders whether he has been a selfish a-hole, too often absorbed in his own thoughts, too often unwilling to compromise with his wife and daughter. He knows he did something that could harm his marriage and, by looking at his wife’s cellphone, he knows his wife learned about it. Maybe none of this matters if he is the only person left on the planet, but it matters to the narrator, as it should. And that is perhaps the novella’s point. A time out — a period during which we are forced to reflect on our lives and consider how the absence of people we care about might make us feel — would benefit us all. The story makes that point in a scenario that is interesting and engaging.

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