Well, I told you at the end of my review of On the Calculation of Volume (Vol II) that I'd be back with a review of Vol III very soon, and here I am. Volume III, unlike Volume II, changed everything in this mega-story, and was every bit as powerful as Volume I.
The key new ingredients were fellow travelers/inmates of November 18. Henry joining Tara was signaled in the teaser at the end of Volume II, and before Volume III is over, the two are joined by Olga and Ralf, and a new teaser at the end alerts us to more people who live over and over in November 18.
Henry, Olga, and Ralf arrive in the story at different times. Ralf's introduction is the most packed with possibilities. Tara learns about him in the first place from Olga, who is desperate to find him -- he went missing after he and Olga connected. I initially thought Ralf was missing from November 18 because he had found a way out, which I assumed made him unavailable for some reason in the November 18ths Olga -- joined later by Tara and Henry -- was searching. But he turns up, and the voices of Henry, Olga, and then Ralf give author Solvej Balle the opportunity to explore the metaphysics of loopism more widely than she did with just Tara.
Ralf sees his and the other three's endless presence on November 18 as a way they "can alert people on the brink of disaster". It's a logical and lofty goal -- if you know a car is going to crash in a particular place on November 18, you can prevent the crash by arranging for a road block on a subsequent November 18, or better, if the crash is due to something wrong with the car, by fixing it (assuming those kind of changes stick with November 18). Further, to do this on as massive a scale as possible, Ralf wants "to develop an interspace: a kind of high-speed bridge between the analog and digital worlds, capable of converting vast volumes of data back and forth with minimal effort, with no information loss and fast enough to save lives." A time-looped man with a plan indeed! We could use a "bridge" like that in our off-page real life world.
There are lots of other goodies in this third volume of Tara's adventure, including books by fictitious authors, focus on the city of Bremen where the four come to live (Cora Buhlert, a Hugo Award winner, lives there, too, and that's not fiction), and Raphael’s famous "School of Athens" fresco, which always reminded me of the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. And I'll be back here with more as soon as I finish Vol IV in this magical mystery tour through revolving time.
See also On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): The Irreducible Metaphysics of Time Loops ... (Book II): Life in the Loop Lane
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