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

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more