RogerBW's Blog

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.