Skip to main content

Plan for the Worst (SF) - Jodi Taylor ****

The publisher classifies this book as fantasy, but as it is based on one of the classic SF tropes, time travel - and this is done by technology, rather than magic - it can sensibly be classified as science fiction.

 The book features St Mary's, an institute of history attached to a fictional university, where the historians research the realities of history using time machines. While not a particularly original idea - Bill and Ted did their history homework this way a long time ago - it's quite nicely set up with a Time Police organisation that is technically on the same side as the historians, but in practice is often in opposition, plus a couple of dastardly time travellers who are intent on messing with the St Mary's bunch, up to and including committing murder.

 I did have a slight problem coming to Plan for the Worst as it's book 11 in a series - I sympathise with Jodi Taylor in trying to make the opening accessible to someone who hasn't read the series before, yet not overdoing the old ground. It would have been useful to have a bit more background on St Mary's and the time pods, and I did struggle with the sheer size of the cast - this could have been kept down a little, at least initially.

 There was a real problem giving this book a star rating. It has some distinct flaws. It's significantly too long, spending far too much time on describing mundane activities in unnecessary detail. It's episodic - there's an opening visit to a store area in the pre-European Americas that really doesn't contribute anything, for example. It was only after this, around 100 pages in, that the book really seemed to get going. And the humour is juvenile, laid on far too thickly. I initially thought it was a children's book because of the relentless nature of the attempts to be funny in the narration, but the protagonist is a middle-aged woman and the themes sometimes adult, so I was a bit adrift on the target audience. I certainly didn't understand the way the blurb likens the book to Ben Aaronovitch, whose Rivers of London series may also have some humour, but are far more sophisticated and dark in the way it's used.

 Because of the above, I was all set to give the book just three stars, but what rescued it were the set pieces. The murder investigation, the Tower of London and Crete - particularly Crete - were really well handled and draw the reader in. These are five star sections, bringing up the overall score. There's also some quite clever playing around with time and time streams. This is something that, for example, Dr Who hardly ever does as it can be hard to follow. It's used effectively in the movie Looper, but that takes a couple of watchings to get on top of - it's handled well here.

 So, it's a strange mix. If I'm honest, I wasn't drawn in enough to go back and start the series from the beginning, but after initially being close to giving up when faced with the relentless jokiness, I  did enjoy those set pieces enough to make it a satisfying read.

Paperback:     
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more