The Ministry of Time

“Assuming that the ‘expats’ survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor. When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it’s better not to think of them as people. It messes with the paperwork.”

The narrator’s sarcastic tone here calls into question the ethics of the Ministry’s time-travel experiments, revealing how government representatives, like the narrator, compartmentalize and rationalize their unethical actions. The book often uses satirical absurdism to add humor to weighty topics, as it does here by stating that the problem concerns paperwork rather than human lives and dignity.

“‘Don’t you think,’ said Simellia, ‘that throwing them into the world when they think they’re in the afterlife or on the western front might impede their adjustment? I ask both as a psychologist and a person with a normal level of empathy.’”

Simellia’s question probes the more specific ethical dilemmas relevant to the expatriation project. Simellia’s considerations emphasize the narrator’s lack of attention to such concerns. The narrator willfully ignores them because she benefits by aligning herself with the Ministry’s interests. On a broader level, this statement suggests that the government’s standards of empathy differ from those of the general population.

“He didn’t know about the First and Second World Wars or the Cold War, the sexual liberation of the 1960s, or the war on terror. They had started by telling him about the dismantling of the British Empire, and it hadn’t gone down well.”

Bradley began writing The Ministry of Time as a way to imagine what it would be like to have her favorite polar explorer living with her. She develops this thought experiment by depicting expats’ experience of culture shock. This brief list of significant historical events and movements introduces the novel’s thematic examination of social and technological progress.