This latest series installment delivers an intricately recursive time-hopping tale of heartache and skullduggery.
In Datta’s SF series entry, a trillionaire tech entrepreneur and inventor in the near future is hesitant to use his superpowers to “reset” the universe, as he might delete his loved ones.
The series’ central conceit is that certain humans are born with innate “Time Corrector” powers that allow them to halt or reverse time and thus rewrite reality. This talent is bound to a rare Earth substance called intreton—a key element in everything from clean energy technology to cybernetic limbs, digital mind transfer, and artificial intelligence. In the early 21st century, super-genius Vincent Abajian is the incredibly wealthy leader of the cutting-edge Quantum World, a company that makes positive and progressive use of intreton. The inventor is a Time Corrector—intreton is part of his physiology, in fact—but his life hasn’t run like clockwork. As a bullied orphan, he bonded with Japanese Dutch violin prodigy Akane, who disappeared in a strange space-time storm. As an adult, he met the alluring but inconstant classical pianist Emika. Terrorists and traitors targeting Vincent and Akane turn out to be manipulated by Philip Nardin, a mega-tycoon who has an alter ego named Oliver Journe from a different reality. Nardin is covetous of Vincent’s power, and Oliver turns out to have an important connection to the Quantum World CEO. Vincent can radically manipulate the timestream and do a “reset,” saving numerous victims, foiling Nardin’s bad guys, and maybe even erasing himself. Taking such a drastic step would also delete the existence of Nozomi, Vincent’s cherished daughter with Emika. Scoundrels in the governments of the United States and Japan are converging on the dueling trillionaires, attempting to exploit intreton and its ramifications for the weapons market. Vincent must find a path through the tangled relationships and cause-and-effect paradoxes.
Characters frequently maintain multiple identities, and there are diverging/merging timelines, illusions, ever-shifting rules, and even double take–inducing walk-on roles by Zeus and other figures of Greek mythology (especially Chronos, the personification of time itself); indeed, readers will find that the narrative is more intricate than the inside of a complex pocket watch. In order to help readers through the curlicues of multiple perspectives, flashbacks, flashforwards, and do-overs, Datta provides a plethora of footnotes (“This is a continuation of a scene from ‘Omurice,’ chapter 15 of The Winding, Time Corrector Book 1,” reads one), which makes one wonder whether the e-book version ought to have been tricked out with some helpful hyperlinks. In the home stretch, after leading readers through corporate shenanigans and combat-SF, the plot becomes a drama of second-chance destinies and romantic what ifs, guiding readers through histories that have technically already occurred. It should be predictable, but for those hardy adventurers who tough out the loopier bits, the storyline will hold their interest as the many gears, cogs, and coils of fate mesh and unwind. If Back to the Future is elementary time travel, this is the stuff of doctoral theses.
This latest series installment delivers an intricately recursive time-hopping tale of heartache and skullduggery.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 526
Publisher: Bublish, Incorporated
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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