Review: Oops! There Goes the Timeline
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 1, 2014
Stan and Jack are the last two time agents of an underfunded and soon to be terminated time-travel program in the middle of the 21st Century. Their last mission should be simple. All they need to do is pick up a candy bar accidently dropped by a previous team in the Mesozoic Era, which the common ancestor of all domestic dogs will otherwise eat and soon after die, thus preventing the evolution of all dog breeds other than Pekinese. Unfortunately, Stan and Jack are bumbling incompetents. Because of their slapstick ineptitude, Leonardo da Vinci is accidently scooped out of early 16th Century Europe and dumped outside mid 18th Century London. The effects on the timeline may be irreparable.Although the story flips between times, settings, and point-of-view characters, it is easy to follow and engaging in a `what happens next?' kind of way (although `next' is a very conditional thing when it comes to time travel). The main characters aren't especially admirable or even likeable. For the most part, they come off as either stupid or petty. Even da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin (in England at the time) are portrayed as less than the giants of history we now imagine them to have been. What makes readers care about what happens to these characters is that the fate of the world is disturbingly in their hands.The story is a creative mix of science fiction, steampunk, alternate history, and comic adventure. The prose style and dialogue are most suited to the last of these and sets the tone of the story. The copy editing is good, with only a few apparent minor errors. The only real detractor worthy of mention is the abrupt ending. The Last of the Time Police is part one. Part two is Return of the Time Police. Both are relatively short and could have been published together as one novel.Full disclosure: I obtained a promotional digital edition of this book through Awesome Indies for review.