2020 science fiction, second in the Time Police sub-series in the
Chronicles of St Mary's continuity (time travel). Team Weird
continues to be the dangerous intellectuals of the Time Police.
Which is all very well as far as it goes, but last book there was
some very enjoyable background material about how the Time Police was
having to be pushed from its origins as an emergency boots-in-doors
paramilitary towards being an actual police force, and that's largely
missing this time.
It's still a decent romp, though I find the Time Police induction
system rather strange: for a probabionary period, every trainee is a
part of a four-person squad with whom they're expected to take on
various missions, experience danger and develop fellow-feeling, but at
the end of that time they're expected to go off in different
directions as their aptitudes take them—and apparently nobody has ever
before said "I'd like to stay with my buddies on the team" so it's a
complete surprise to the higher-ups.
Mostly this one's about Jane (terminally browbeaten and shy) and Luke
(wasterl playboy), who'd progressed a bit from that at the end of
Doing Time but seem now to have dropped part of the way back so that
they can have their personal development again.
There is a reference to the Moberly–Jourdain
incident
(which seems to lean perhaps too heavily on replicating the original
account into this setting, but does a decent job; an irrevocable
change for one character for which nobody sees the obvious way out
(cynfgvp fhetrel); and then the main event, an investigation of
illegal time tourism.
During which Matthew, the third trainee, irked because they Time
Police aren't acting to rescue the missing other two right now, sets
up an investigation of his own with help from St Mary's.
Max pulled Markham to one side. 'You do realise if this goes wrong,
none of us will ever be able to come home again.'
'Not a problem for me. I've been considering becoming a Time
Pirate.'
She stared at him. 'That's a thing?'
'It will be when I do it. Har-har, me hearties. Shiver me timber.'
'We've had this conversation before,' said Peterson. 'There isn't a
person on the planet who would touch your timber—far less shiver
it.'
Except that… Matthew has no reason to suppose that they're in his
present time, indeed plenty of reason to suppose that they aren't. So
there is no urgency. If you are in time T and they are in time P,
you can wait until T plus many and still rescue them from P, because
you have time machines. And yet all of a sudden time passing "now"
and "then" seems to be synchronised.
I enjoyed this while I was reading it but it's rather a tube of
Pringles experience: at the end, I wonder just what I was enjoying so
much and why I ate the whole thing.
There's good stuff here and I had a good time but I'm increasingly
unconvinced by the actual universe in which it's set. I'm not giving
up on the series yet, though.