Catherine Mayer’s New Book Release

Writer, journalist, and activist Catherine Mayer has published her bold and timely new book, Time/Life, available now.

Part love letter to science fiction, part urgent political intervention, Time/Life takes H.G. Wells' classic novella The Time Machine as its starting point and reimagines it for a world that feels, in many ways, more unsettling than any fiction. Where Wells used time travel to explore class conflict and the trajectory of civilisation, Mayer transplants the premise into a landscape shaped by the very real and very present forces of rising populism, democratic backsliding, and the fracturing of the political centre.

It is a natural creative territory for Mayer, who co-founded the Women's Equality Party and has spent years documenting and challenging the forces that threaten progress on gender, rights, and democracy. Her journalism and activism have always been rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of how power works and how quickly gains can be reversed. Time/Life channels that understanding into fiction, using the freedom of speculative storytelling to ask questions that straightforward analysis sometimes cannot.

The choice of Wells as a touchstone is itself significant. The Time Machine, published in 1895, was as much a warning as an adventure, a vision of what happens to societies that allow inequality to calcify unchecked. In Mayer's hands, that warning feels startlingly contemporary. The populist movements reshaping politics across Europe and beyond are not the distant future Wells imagined but the turbulent present we are already living through.

Time/Life is the kind of book that only someone with Mayer's particular combination of political urgency and literary ambition could have written. It is out now.