#time riders

Let’s start with the characters. We’ve got Liam from 1912, Maddy from 2010, and Sal from 2026, along with Foster, the old man that recruits them, and Bob, a clone with an AI in his brain who acts as muscle. Right off the bat, I can tell you that I love all of these idiots. Some get more focus than others - poor Sal gets kind of shafted in this first book, though later ones give her a bit more focus. It’s weird that, given that this came out in 2010, Liam seems to be more of the audience-insert; although given that Liam is the one we spend longer with as he actually goes back in time, that makes a degree of sense. One thing that bugs me about them is how little general knowledge they seem to have - it makes sense for Liam, but Maddy doesn’t know about JFK’s assassination for some reason, and they have to explain other concepts I would have thought to be common knowledge. I get this is for the reader’s benefit, but come on, I knew more than that as a teenager. Otherwise, though, they’re pretty strong characters - Liam is charming and funny, Maddy is responsible and practical. Sal is the emotional heart of the team, and is a bit younger - I do dislike that a lot of her writing is very ‘adult-man-writing-a-teen-girl’. It’s not awful, just a bit cringey.

The timeline of this world is very rigid. Time travel is invented in the 2060s, the world is already pretty much in ruins by 2026. And, apparently, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the 45th president of the USA. Can’t decide if I want this timeline or the real one. It’s a bold move, not leaving anything really to ambiguity, and opens up questions of ‘why do they want to preserve this shitty future’ that become a running theme of the series. A lot is set up here that I know will pay off later, and it’s very fun to catch the little bits of foreshadowing sprinkled throughout.

One criticism I had was how fast-paced the novel is. It works for the sections with Maddy, Sal, and Foster in the apocalyptic future, but with Bob and Liam in the past it does skip around a bit too much for my tastes. There’s time-skips of months, which leads to the alternate history not being as developed as perhaps it should be.

Speaking of underdeveloped, I didn’t think much of the antagonists of this either. Their plot is (spoilers!) to go back to Nazi Germany and make it so the Nazis won the war, so they can take over the world and ensure that the shitty, overpopulated, under-resourced, polluted future doesn’t occur. I think this would have been a lot stronger were it not for the Nazi thing? Like, they sided with the Nazis, ergo they are evil, but they never really had a strong reason for that to be Plan A. They could conceivably have taken over the world at a number of points in history, why the Nazis specifically? It just felt a bit lazy. Other than that, though, their plot is compelling, with the moral dilemma of whether it’s acceptable to change history in order to save it, with no idea of what the new future will actually hold.