“Meh” really does kind of sum up my reaction to this book. There wasn’t anything outright bad about it. I didn’t have any trouble reading it, and it never particularly annoyed me the way that some bad books do. There was nothing offensive about it. But it passed through me and left very little impression. I kind of expect in a few months I’ll have forgotten all about it.
It starts out ok, with people jumping through time and into alternate dimensions because of a science experiment gone wrong. I was hopeful for the first quarter or so of the book. It was startlingly non-linear, in that characters would run into other characters and no one (reader included) would know how off-sync they were, time-wise. “Am I talking to the you I was just talking to, or am I talking to you a week from now?” kind of thing.
(Most time travel stories, I realized in thinking about this, are very linear. Marty McFly might see his past self shredding Johnny B Goode, and he might run into Doc Brown in his 1955, 1985, and 1985+ versions, but we’re always seeing the story from the perspective of Prime Marty. The entire trilogy follows a very memorable few days in his life, but even though the temporal settings change, it’s a linear story with one day following the next, and that which has already happened remains having had happened, while that which is going to have happened can be prevented from being about to have happened. Ugh, I hate time travel story grammar.)
(To share one of my favorite quotes ever, from Red Dwarf: <Lister>: “We don’t exist here anymore!” <Kryten>: “Actually sir, we don't ever have existed here anymore, but this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past impossible never tense!”)
Anyway, to get away from questions of grammar, the book starts out somewhat interesting, and then goes completely off the rails. It’s kind of supposed to, in that you have multiple realities crashing together in unpredictable ways, but it doesn’t work in a way that makes sense to me. At all. And then at the same time, characters who had been sensibly seem to suddenly completely lose their minds and start behaving like idiot man-children. Throw in some very cliche villains, and it’s all just … meh.
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