Time-travel and Y2K in Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being

For those intrigued by offbeat days dedicated to strange pursuits, December 8 is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. By whom this was first declared, and why, remain unclear, but let’s celebrate here by considering Erin Entrada Kelly’s middle grade novel, The First State of Being.

It takes a visitor from the future for the protagonist, 12-year-old Michael Rosario, to find himself. The novel raises questions about what it means to be human and to live in a particular time and place, and about how history is fashioned and shaped out of the lives of people.

When the maintenance man, Mr. Mosley, says, “People do strange things sometimes to remind themselves they’re part of the world don’t they?” neither the reader nor Michael fully understands the weight of his words.

Michael’s mother unvaryingly affirms, when he asks her how her day was, “I took every breath.”  That’s got to count for something, right? Maybe, really, it’s all that matters. Every breath. Every moment. All that we have.

Then there’s Ridge, escaped on a whim from a time yet to come, feeling as guilty as Michael over his own transgressions. Delightfully, Ridge’s time-travel device is linked to Michael and his little end-of-90’s crew by the very human longing to traverse time backwards—only we won’t know how that connection is made until close to the end.

And is Michael’s preoccupation with Y2K a red herring or is it something more important? In 1999 the swirling questions were about the computing and storage of calendar data. Today, they’re all about AI. Given that the real Y2K fears turned out to be duds, what we’re left with is a sense of how limited our vision is in every advancing moment. In turn, that elevates the necessity for trust and community. Thematic notes like this ring throughout, becoming realized in incremental ways.

Here is the heart of this book. Tiny seeds planted early in its pages begin to carry meaning as the story unfolds. If I feel like a stranger in a strange land, I’m left with the impression that the effect is intended, which is a delicious way to be pulled into imagining the near future. In a way, it doesn’t matter if we get the fears wrong, or the imagined details. Living it as best as we can may be the entire point. Far from landing in cynicism, that places us in a kind of naively hopeful frame of mind—droll, self-aware, while opening up to possibility. In other words, twelve years old like Michael.