Dispel Illusion is the final story in Mark Laurence’s Impossible Times trilogy. In the first novel, One Word Kill, teenage Nick meets his future self, Demos. Demos helps Nick save his crush, Mia, who will become Demos’ wife, but they pay a high price for her life.

As Nick gets closer to Demos’ age, he wonders if there’s a way to get out of an established path that he knows will have a tragic end, without abandoning Mia or shredding the timeline into the disasters in Limited Wish.  The story plays with ways Nick wants to separate himself from Demos, and without revealing too much, it works well with the established timetravel rules and with Nick/Demos character. 

I enjoyed the way Nick planned to escape Mia’s accident, there was almost a Greek myth aspect to how his plans to protect her kept putting them back on the same path. Nick’s plan to send her right through 2011 and pop her straight into 2012, thus avoiding the year Demos told him she’d have the accident, was particularly good.

I just loved when John, Simon, Mia and Nick finally got a chance to play D&D again, partly because the author connects the tabletop themes with the overall themes, but also because it felt so realistic to have the old friends trying to make time to meet up for a game as working adults. I meet with friends for gaming sessions, and like these four, we try to make it every month, but if we see each other for drinks and a game 5 or 6 times a year, it’s a success. It was a lot easier in college, but having old friends to save the world with is pretty great, even if we don’t get to do it too often.

Dispel Illusion also muses on aging, because Nick is becoming the older version of himself he remembers from his teenage days. His relationship with Mia is also changing and maturing. The high drama of first love found in the first novel, all angst and dramatic declarations, has mellowed into teamwork and partnership, and this is particularly clear in the last scenes.