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A review by ury949
Watching the Clock by Christopher L. Bennett
5.0
This was good - very good. I don't know how anyone could write something like this, but it surely must be someone who's life is so steeped in Star Trek and time travel that these story sequences just come naturally. Mr. Bennett is someone I'd like to meet and talk to, I think!
Love it, love it. I love that adrift feeling you get when your trying to find your way around through three dimensions of time - as is done in this book. Never have I fought through such a mishmash of past, uptime, has happened, might happen, parallel and converging timelines. But it's not a mishmash; indeed, when you finish up and step back it ends up being a complete mosaic of a very complicated story. Not only are there multiple timelines and people displaced in time, but it also jumps forward and backwards telling present story-lines intermixed with backstories, all while incorporating a battalion of characters from dozens of different species each with their own sub-groups, historical races, and temporal investigators. This book might touch on every time travel episode in Star Trek canon. Knowing your Star Trek (ships, species, characters, time periods) is helpful (necessary?) to keeping the story from becoming totally muddled. And yet with the right amount of focus and ability to push through without getting bogged down, this book comes together with a nice tidy ending (not very likely in time travel, but something you come to expect in Star Trek, making the two genres a bit of a juxtaposition.)
The time-travel doesn't get too paradoxy until the last quarter, but man is it worth it. At the crux of the action everything is so mixed up and happening so fast, I really don't think there is a correct or original timeline to ever get back to. It almost becomes an effort just to keep your own history intact so you don't cease to exist!
Perhaps my favorite character was Meneth, the Simperian civet familiar (yes, like witches have) of one of the Aegis agents (ancient preservers of the timeline). This non-canon cat growls and squeaks, yet is somehow a step ahead of most of the Starfleet officers and temporal agents when it comes to problem solving, and is hands-down (paws-down?) superior at negotiations.
Unfortunately a great deal of the story circles around a Deltan agent and his time-displaced human partner who is ga-ga enthralled with him. Deltans are known for their powerful sexual relationships - a form of emotional bonding that is vital to their mental and physical health and well-being. I say this is unfortunate because it creates a quite pathetic and child-like reaction in his partner, Teresa, who is human and thus mentally inferior and would be ruined for life if she ever got involved with him. Even though she's well aware of that, it's such a cliche, "I must have you at any cost/Sorry, I'm just too hot to handle/Waa - it's not fair!" situation, strait down to his Herculean gorgeousness, that I kinda just wish I didn't have to read it, let alone it be an integral part of the plot. But then I watch any early Star Trek episode and am reminded just how women are portrayed in Star Trek's advanced civilization, even in the light of all the backwards chauvinism found in other non-Federation species, and I guess having this theme in the story is right on target.
I'm trying to think if there's anyone I know who I'd recommend this book to. No, I guess not, but gosh I wish I did - that person would be awesome to nerd out with! I'm absolutely going to seek out the next and following books in this series, although something tells me the order in which I read them will not matter since sequential time is basically and illusion. ;P
Albert Einstein once reportedly said that "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." Unfortunately, that was no longer true in Professor Vard's lunar facility. Something had turned the timeline into a mulidimensional knot. Past, present, and future had become interchangeable, completely nonlinear. Lucsly deeply hated that. It left him feeling adrift, unsure of himself.
Love it, love it. I love that adrift feeling you get when your trying to find your way around through three dimensions of time - as is done in this book. Never have I fought through such a mishmash of past, uptime, has happened, might happen, parallel and converging timelines. But it's not a mishmash; indeed, when you finish up and step back it ends up being a complete mosaic of a very complicated story. Not only are there multiple timelines and people displaced in time, but it also jumps forward and backwards telling present story-lines intermixed with backstories, all while incorporating a battalion of characters from dozens of different species each with their own sub-groups, historical races, and temporal investigators. This book might touch on every time travel episode in Star Trek canon. Knowing your Star Trek (ships, species, characters, time periods) is helpful (necessary?) to keeping the story from becoming totally muddled. And yet with the right amount of focus and ability to push through without getting bogged down, this book comes together with a nice tidy ending (not very likely in time travel, but something you come to expect in Star Trek, making the two genres a bit of a juxtaposition.)
The time-travel doesn't get too paradoxy until the last quarter, but man is it worth it. At the crux of the action everything is so mixed up and happening so fast, I really don't think there is a correct or original timeline to ever get back to. It almost becomes an effort just to keep your own history intact so you don't cease to exist!
Spoiler
Fortunately, albeit hilariously, even after the fierce battle in which many people died, some numerous times, "there were enough temporal and quantum spares that the final survival rate was effectively one hundred percent."
Ducane-3 studied his own tricorder. "It's a subspace fracture. An after-effect of the temporal disruptor."
"You mean a before-effect," Noi said. "Retrocausal echoes of an event that hasn't happened yet."
"Like the ones that drew us here in the first pace," Elfiki said.
"And tipped off everyone in the future about this 'secret' conference," Noi added.
Worf frowned. "But are they not the ones whose intervention caused the distortions?"
"They were," Rodal said. "They just didn't know it yet."
"The disruptor will interact with the other temporal fields," Ducane-3 went on, "warping spacetime severely enough to create rifts bracketing the detonation time. Don't know why the quantum lock isn't stopping them . . . we must have shifted back to before it was activated."
Perhaps my favorite character was Meneth, the Simperian civet familiar (yes, like witches have) of one of the Aegis agents (ancient preservers of the timeline). This non-canon cat growls and squeaks, yet is somehow a step ahead of most of the Starfleet officers and temporal agents when it comes to problem solving, and is hands-down (paws-down?) superior at negotiations.
Unfortunately a great deal of the story circles around a Deltan agent and his time-displaced human partner who is ga-ga enthralled with him. Deltans are known for their powerful sexual relationships - a form of emotional bonding that is vital to their mental and physical health and well-being. I say this is unfortunate because it creates a quite pathetic and child-like reaction in his partner, Teresa, who is human and thus mentally inferior and would be ruined for life if she ever got involved with him. Even though she's well aware of that, it's such a cliche, "I must have you at any cost/Sorry, I'm just too hot to handle/Waa - it's not fair!" situation, strait down to his Herculean gorgeousness, that I kinda just wish I didn't have to read it, let alone it be an integral part of the plot. But then I watch any early Star Trek episode and am reminded just how women are portrayed in Star Trek's advanced civilization, even in the light of all the backwards chauvinism found in other non-Federation species, and I guess having this theme in the story is right on target.
I'm trying to think if there's anyone I know who I'd recommend this book to. No, I guess not, but gosh I wish I did - that person would be awesome to nerd out with! I'm absolutely going to seek out the next and following books in this series, although something tells me the order in which I read them will not matter since sequential time is basically and illusion. ;P