The Time Paradox

The Time Paradox is the sixth Artemis Fowl book, and by this point the series has earned a more personal kind of story. Artemis is no longer just a pint-sized criminal mastermind. He has fought beside Holly Short, lost people, gained twin brothers, and spent three years in Limbo while his parents thought he was dead. The Lost Colony left him with magic he barely understands and a family that has already been through too much. Now his mother, Angeline, is dying, and the only cure is an animal he personally helped wipe out.

That is a strong hook for a children's fantasy novel: the hero's greatest achievement is also the thing that might kill his mother. Eoin Colfer uses it to send Artemis back in time, where he has to outsmart the worst version of himself. The result is funny and fast, and more emotional than the premise suggests. It is also crowded, and the plot has a habit of solving its problems with one more set piece.

Spelltropy and the lie

Angeline is gravely ill at Fowl Manor. Dr. Hans Schalke, a specialist in rare diseases, tells Artemis that her organs are failing at once and that she has days, not weeks. Artemis does what he always does: he tries to fix it with science and magic. He uses fairy magic stolen during his time in Limbo to heal her, and the magic makes things worse. A clear gel oozes from her pores, the room smells of lilies, and Artemis's own magic is spent.

Holly Short arrives alone. Foaly, the centaur technical adviser, syncs with the manor remotely and runs a scan. He identifies the illness as Spelltropy, a fairy disease spread through magic. The only known cure comes from the brain fluid of the silky sifaka lemur of Madagascar. The lemur is extinct. Artemis confirms it. Almost eight years earlier, when he was a desperate child trying to fund an Arctic expedition to find his missing father, he stole the last silky sifaka from a private reserve and sold it to the Extinctionists for a hundred thousand euros.

The confession changes the room. Holly and Foaly want nothing to do with time travel. Artemis proposes it anyway. When Holly still refuses, he tells her that she infected Angeline years ago when she used healing magic on her. It is a lie. Artemis knows the illness came from the magic he used to adjust his parents' memories, and he uses Holly's guilt to get her help. She agrees because she believes she owes him. That lie sits under the whole adventure, and Colfer does not let Artemis off easily when it comes out.

No. 1, the young demon warlock from The Lost Colony, opens the time stream. He warns them that the link will hold for three days and that he has to stay in the present as a beacon. Artemis and Holly step through. The plan is simple: arrive in the study, get the lemur from the past Artemis before it is sold, and leave. Nothing about the plan survives contact with the past.

Eight years earlier

The time stream changes them. Artemis comes out older and much hairier, with bristles on his chin that were not there before. Holly comes out younger, physically reduced to adolescence. The changes are played for comedy, but they matter later. Holly is an adult elf with centuries of experience in the body of a teenager, and Artemis is a teenager who suddenly looks like a man.

They arrive in the study and wait for Butler to bring the lemur in. Artemis is sure the handoff will be quiet. Instead, Butler detects them during a security sweep, tranquilizes them both, and locks them in the trunk of the Fowl Bentley. The younger Artemis is not stupid, and he is not sentimental. He has a plan, and two strangers in his house are a problem to be solved.

Mulch Diggums gets them out. The dwarf is a career thief, and the older Artemis sent a note back in time offering him a reward. Mulch complains about the work and helps them follow the younger Artemis to Rathdown Park, a private animal reserve. This is where the book becomes a chase. The younger Artemis is always a step ahead, and the older Artemis keeps expecting his past self to behave like a reasonable person.

The animal park set piece has one of the book's best images. Mulch's tunnel comes up in the wrong cage, and a gorilla gets hold of Artemis. Holly heals him with magic, and the relief and fear of the moment make her kiss him. It is a strange beat. Holly is centuries old and currently looks like a teenager; Artemis is a teenager who has just almost died. Colfer plays it as a rush of feeling, and the series later treats it as a real thread. Readers who think too hard about the age math will find it uncomfortable. Readers who roll with the series will find it sweet and a little ridiculous, which is the usual Artemis Fowl tone.

They do get the lemur, briefly. The animal escapes to the top of an electricity pylon, and the older Artemis puts on a protective suit and crawls along the high-voltage cables to coax it onto his shoulder. It is a good demonstration of how far he will go. Then the younger Artemis arrives and orders Butler to shoot the lemur rather than let it get away. The older Artemis surrenders the animal to save it. That is the moment he sees his younger self clearly: brilliant and frightened, and capable of anything.

Tara, Root, and the road to Fez

On the way to the fairy shuttleport at Tara, Artemis confesses that he lied about Holly infecting his mother. Holly is furious, and the anger is earned. Artemis tries to make it right by giving her something he cannot get back. He uses a hologram projector to let her speak with Commander Julius Root, her old mentor, who is dead in their present. The conversation is short and quiet and one of the few moments in the book where the jokes stop. Holly comes out of it steadier. She thanks him, and the partnership is repaired enough to continue.

They commandeer a shuttle and fly to Fez, Morocco. The younger Artemis is there to sell the lemur to Dr. Damon Kronski, the president of the Extinctionists, a group devoted to wiping out species it considers useless. The money is meant to fund the Arctic expedition that might find Artemis's father. It is a cold calculation, and it is exactly the kind of thing the younger Artemis would do.

The exchange happens in a leather souk. Holly causes a distraction, and Mulch tries to take the lemur from below. The younger Artemis expected that. Butler is on the floor in disguise, and he captures Holly. The younger Artemis immediately sees a better deal: instead of one lemur, he can sell the Extinctionists a living, sentient fairy. Kronski is delighted. Holly is put on trial at a banquet, with a pit below the floor and flames that are supposed to be the execution method.

Artemis infiltrates the banquet as a fictional Extinctionist named Malachy Pasteur. He defends Holly by turning her pointed ears into a medical trick, using sleight of hand and fabricated evidence to argue that she is a surgically altered human. The room turns on Kronski for trying to pass off a fake specimen. It is a con, and a good one, and it gives Holly enough time to get free. Kronski tackles Artemis into the execution pit.

The pit and Opal

The flames are holograms. The pit is a door into a hidden laboratory. Opal Koboi is waiting there, and she is the reason the Extinctionists have been collecting rare animals. She has mesmerized Kronski and is harvesting biological material from endangered species to strengthen her own magic. Opal has been out of the picture since The Opal Deception, and her return is the book's big villain reveal.

Artemis fights the sedation, frees himself, and opens every cage in the facility. The stampede is chaos: extinct animals, ordinary animals, and at least one quagga that Artemis ends up riding. Holly arrives in the shuttle and pulls him out. It is a fun sequence, and it is also where the book starts to feel like a series of levels. The animal park, the souk, the trial, the lab: each one is well staged, but they do not build on each other so much as line up.

Opal escapes the stampede and reads Mulch's memories. She learns that the time travelers have to return to Fowl Manor to reopen the link. She follows them into the time stream, which means the villain gets to the present before they do. That is a good cliffhanger, and it sets up the second half.

The manor, the possession, and the chase

In the present, Opal arrived two days early. She has been possessing Angeline through an extreme form of the mesmer, simulating the symptoms of Spelltropy while her real body poses as Dr. Schalke's assistant. Opal has been making the illness worse and using it to get what she wants. She wants the lemur's brain fluid for herself, and she has been using Artemis's love for his mother to get it.

She reveals herself when Artemis is about to inject the cure. What follows is a good twist: the Artemis standing in front of Opal is the younger one, brought forward from the past. The older Artemis comes up behind her real body and tranquilizes it. Opal's control of Angeline breaks, but not before she has mesmerized Butler. He traps Holly and No. 1 in a barrel of rendered animal fat, which suppresses fairy magic, and the effort of resisting her orders gives him a heart attack.

Artemis revives Butler with a defibrillator. It is a blunt, physical scene, and it works because Butler is the one character the series has always treated as unkillable. Opal recovers, flees, and then comes back when she realizes how weakened the household is. Artemis takes the lemur and flies away in a solar-powered Cessna, drawing her off. She follows, destroys sections of the plane with her fists, and forces him to crash on the coast.

Artemis runs across a rope bridge to a sea stack called Little Sister. Opal follows and takes the lemur, only to discover that it is Professor Primate, Beckett's toy monkey, fitted with a heat pack to fool her. Artemis fires a laser into the boulder she is standing on and reveals it as the shell of a kraken. The methane inside explodes, and Opal is buried. The LEP digs through the rubble and finds an empty helmet. She is gone.

The paradox and the goodbye

No. 1 synthesizes the lemur's brain fluid and cures Angeline without harming the animal. That is the tidy part. The messy part is the time loop. No. 1 mind-wipes the ten-year-old Artemis and sends him back to his own time, even though the older Artemis promised not to. The younger Artemis wakes with red sparks fading from his vision and one thought left: fairies. Something about fairies. That thought is what will eventually make him kidnap Holly in the first book, which is what will eventually make him the person who goes back in time to save the lemur. The story is a closed circle, and the book calls attention to the fact that the circle has no starting point.

There are two paradoxes in the title, and Colfer explains them in the last few pages. The first is the small loop: Artemis goes back to save the lemur, and in doing so he sets up the chain of events that will eventually send him back. The second is the larger one: the younger Artemis's lingering interest in fairies starts the series, and the series is what makes the time travel possible. It is a neat idea, and it is more fun to think about than to watch being explained.

Angeline is left with all of Opal's memories. She knows about the fairy world, the time travel, and the son who has been lying to her for years. She demands the truth, and Artemis gives it to her. That is the real ending: not the kraken, not the cure, but a mother and son finally talking. Holly kisses Artemis on the cheek and leaves. It is a small gesture, and the book is smart enough not to make it more.

What holds up and what does not

The best parts of The Time Paradox are the ones that slow down. Artemis confessing his lie to Holly, Holly talking to Root, Butler's heart attack, Angeline demanding honesty: these scenes have weight because the series has spent five books earning them. The younger Artemis is also a great creation. He is not a cartoon villain. He is a smart, scared kid who has decided that the world is a transaction, and the older Artemis has to look at him and recognize the person he used to be.

The plot is the weak part. It is crowded, and the crowding is not always productive. The Extinctionists are broad satire, and Kronski is a cartoon with a cause. Opal's scheme is needlessly complicated: she is a genius who could have taken the lemur in the past, but instead she builds an elaborate fake illness, possesses Artemis's mother, and waits for him to bring the cure to her. The time-travel rules are convenient. The three-day limit creates urgency, but the aging and de-aging mostly create jokes, and the final mind-wipe works only because No. 1 happens not to know about a promise Artemis made.

The romance between Holly and Artemis is the thing most readers will either accept or bounce off. Holly is centuries old and physically de-aged to a teenager; Artemis is a teenager. The kiss after the gorilla attack is played as a surge of relief, and the series treats it lightly, but it is one of the stranger threads in a children's book. It does not ruin the story. It does make the later books' emotional geometry more complicated than Colfer seems to intend.

The ending is rushed. The kraken is a fine image, but it arrives as a solution rather than a discovery, and Opal's escape in the epilogue undoes the satisfaction of her defeat. The paradox explanation is delivered in a rush, and the ages do not add up: the younger Artemis is ten, the older one is a teenager, and the gap is described as nearly eight years. Colfer asks you not to check. Readers who want hard, consistent time-travel logic will find the rules frustrating, and readers who prefer a clean standalone adventure should start elsewhere.

None of that stops the book from being fun. It is a fast, funny middle-grade fantasy with a real emotional core, and it gives Artemis a chance to be more than the smartest person in the room. It is not the place to start the series. A new reader should begin with the first book and work forward, because so much of the pleasure here is in seeing old relationships pay off. For readers who have followed Artemis this far, The Time Paradox is a good, messy entry that swings for something more personal than usual and mostly gets there.