In fact, I’d say that she uses time travel in a clever structural way, opening the book in medias res (the prologue) before skipping back (in parts one and two) - effectively putting the reader in the perspective of a time traveller, knowing something’s going to happen, knowing a bit of the world to come, but unsure of how exactly it all comes about. On the one hand, plot twists risk being too obvious too early on the other hand, attempts to follow the logic of non-sequential time often result in the narrative getting too complex. Time travel can be a tough thing to pull off without being overcomplex or overfacile. And through all these sections, the book is actually telling a love story, or at least the story of an unconventional relationship: another triptych, a polyamorous love between an alien and two humans. The third part, and the epilogue, wrap up the plot and solve the remaining mysteries. The second part gives us the tale of one of the alien refugees, up to the point where the prologue begins. The first part of the story proper then skips back to 1983, setting up a time travel plot.

Their integration into human society comes through working with a multinational organization called the Institute, physicists and linguists and other specialists, all given military training. The prologue sets up a near-future world in which alien refugees have come to earth. That’s essentially the structure of the novel: three parts, plus a prologue and epilogue. Usually the central part is the most prominent.

Both its flaws and virtues seem to me to follow from specific genre traditions, with the result that it feels oddly like an old-fashioned science fiction novel that happens to have some twenty-first-century attitudes about sexuality.Ī triptych is a work of art, typically a painting, in three parts. I’m not entirely convinced by the book, but I think it’s effective overall. Frey’s novel Triptych tries to tell a story with that awareness in mind.

An alien body won’t have human sexual responses. But sex necessarily is a thing of the body, and so will vary with the composition of the body. The second is a far more unlikely assumption language, or communication more broadly, is something one would expect to develop in intelligent species, and in a way defines for humans what intelligence is. Or, that they imagine gender and sex in ways familiar to us. For example, that they use language in ways we understand. Science fiction typically makes certain assumptions about alien races.

Triptych by J.M. Frey