Complicated cause-and-effect shenanigans put a fresh spring in the step of time-travel SF.
After a surprisingly accessible time-travel method is discovered, agents of the Time Management Agency try to thwart a conspiracy of meddlers who get their thrills from changing human history.
Author Unwin, trained as a theoretical physicist, offers a sequel to his time-travel antic One Second Per Second (2021). In an increasingly rare virtue for this type of SF, close familiarity with the first novel is not absolutely necessary to follow its tale of a semisecret government facility called the Time Management Agency. Back in the 20th century, generating faster-than-light tachyon particles—resulting in time travel— was achieved via chemical means, not vast supercolliders. Now a subculture of miscreants (similar to anarchist computer hackers) know the secret and proceed to vandalize the eons, breaking Lee Harvey Oswald’s trigger finger, thwarting John Lennon’s murder, and generally delivering wish-fulfillment vigilante space/time justice. They rationalize that any historical damage is automatically sorted out by a morally indifferent universe (once a monstrous dictator called von Hayek was erased, an upstart named Hitler merely took his place). That’s not good enough for the TMA, who try to fix tachyon irregularities, both natural and human-made. Top time cop Joad Bevan has undercover agents and contacts within the ranks of the “Allfours,” the time renegades, including his own son, Dart. Their chief concern: a rogue mastermind with intimate TMA ties is organizing his devoted followers to perpetrate “the Big One,” a truly fiendish alteration to known events. What is the Big One? And what are the ramifications? Unwin's Vonnegut-type sense of humor about the essential absurdity of the situation yields some murky intrigues, double crosses, traps, and betrayals leapfrogging across the ages. The skulduggery reaches a crescendo with dire jeopardy, deaths, and a few prehistoric monsters. Dizzying plot twists centering on secret-identity subterfuges resemble something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta but are potentially more confusing. A few diagrams might have helped readers understand the action. This novel may appeal most to those who’ve enjoyed fictional time-tripping with intricate cult favorites like Barrington J. Bayley’s The Fall of Chronopolis.
Complicated cause-and-effect shenanigans put a fresh spring in the step of time-travel SF.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-8195-3607-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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