Alex Scarrow is another English author, although the story gets properly underway New York City, not in England. The chapters in TimeRiders are very short, fortunately.
Scarrow has signed a deal with Puffin for nine books in the TimeRiders series, six of which are already available. He's a fortunate author! There's an interesting interview with him in the British newspaper The Guardian which makes me think that, in some regards, he has his head screwed on right with his general approach to this series, but I have to wonder at his comments in that interview. "'I've worked really hard to make TimeRiders absolute cocaine". Cocaine? When he's talking about a series for children as young as 11 (which at the time was the age of his own son, and by whom he runs his story ideas!)?
Clearly Scarrow sees 'TimeRiders' as one weird word, yet his book covers deliberately split that into two separate words. This is yet another example of the unfortunate disconnect between what the author perceives and writes, and what Big Publishing™ does to that when they make the book! This is why I'm glad, for better or for worse, that I do my own covers.
You can argue, if you wish, that the covers are designed by professionals, and therefore ought to be better at reaching an audience and drawing people in, than something which an author might come up with by themselves, but for me, it's almost never the design on the cover which draws me in to a novel and I can’t remember ever buying a novel because the cover caught my eye. Once in a while, yes: with Ruby Red, for example, it was the cover which did catch my eye, but it wasn't the specific design of that cover, just the brightness of it and the title. Yes, I confess, I'm a magpie! And if I hadn’t liked the story, I wouldn’t have picked it no matter how pretty the cover was!
So now you're going to argue, "Well, at least the cover made you look!"? Think of it this way - if you're wandering through a bookstore or a library, you’re not looking for a pretty cover, you're looking for a title or an author, and you don't see the covers, you see only the spines, for the most part. Of course, more and more, people are discovering these books online, where the cover image is displayed and perhaps plays a greater part, but even there, the cover is usually a thumbnail, so it’s hardly leaping out at you! And if you're picking up a book because it’s the next in a series, or because it has good buzz, or because someone you trust recommended it, do you honestly care what the cover looks like?
Were the Harry Potter devotees going to flatly refuse to read the seventh book if it had had a plain black cover with grey lettering? No! Would those curious about 50 Shades of Grey declare "I'm not reading that trash!" and refuse to buy it if the cover had featured a wizened old man on it? I seriously doubt it!
But as long as we're ont he cover, what's with that little catch-phrase on the TimeRiders cover: "Mess around with time and the world you know could become a world you don’t"? Seriously? That's the best they could come up with?! You know, once in a while these guys who do this stuff come up with something really cool or funny. I can think of movie tag lines like "Chucky Gets Lucky" and "The Coast is Toast" (not that either of those was attached to a worthwhile movie, but he lines were fun). "Where there's a Willis there's a Wayans" was very amusing, but the movie was not so entertaining. It’s a pity they didn’t have something better for TimeRiders.
OK, enough whining! In the Guardian interview, Scarrow says, "No bad guy does the stuff he does just because he's evil. They do it because, in a warped and twisted way, they think they're doing the right thing. History is full of blokes trying to do the right thing and murdering millions." I have to disagree. They do it because they're selfish and paranoid swine, that's why they do it, thinking only of themselves and of satisfying their own compulsions. They're not thinking of doing good or of improving the lives of others! Later, Scarrow says, "...it would be great to have some really cool products, books that feel sexy..." Sexy? For books he runs by an 11 year old? Oooo-kay!
After reading that, I had to wonder if maybe his head isn't so well screwed on!
OTOH his books have been successful, so he's obviously appealing to someone no matter how inappropriate his descriptions of what he's doing might seem to me (and no matter how lackluster the covers might be!).
TimeRiders is a book that starts out well. We find ourselves on deck E of the RMS Titanic on April 15th 1912 around 2:15am, and trust me, this is not a place and time you ever want to be.
Unfortunately for 16 year old Liam O'Connor, he is there, and has just finished ensuring that the deck is clear of passengers, when he realizes that ice cold North Atlantic water now covers the exit and stairwell which would lead him up to safety (relatively speaking - this is the Titanic, after all!). As he starts to wade into the bitterly cold water, hoping he can still get out, an old man named Foster appears behind him, essentially giving him the Arnold Schwarzeneggar line from Terminator 2: "Come with me if you want to live".
Liam grabs his hand and wakes to find himself in the bottom of a set of bunk beds, with a strange woman stirring in her sleep across from him and a young girl in the top bunk opposite. Next we're with Madelaine (Maddy) Carter in an airplane and there's Foster informing her that the plane will very soon be bursting into flame and crashing, killing everyone aboard. She takes his hand. She finds herself waking to look at a 16 year old boy dressed like a ship's steward might in 1912....
Unlike the Titanic, which was a real disaster, there were no big crashes of airplanes over the USA in 2010, according to wikipedia's List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft, so Scarrow made that one up, which makes me wonder why. Neither was there a Liam O'Connor on the Titanic. The third member of what becomes the Time Riders crew is Saleena (Sal) Vikram, a 13 year old girl who was rescued by Foster in 2026, so we can't check on that. Interestingly, hers is the only disaster about which we learn nothing other than that it was a fire.
After we meet the crew we're introduced to Dr. Paul Kramer and his team of paramilitary guys who are occupying the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which is closed and boarded up. Kramer wants to find the time machine which a guy named Waldstein invented based on theories by a Chinese guy. Waldstein, after taking only one trip back in his machine to visit his (by then) dead wife and child came back a changed man, having seen something horrible, and promptly (so he claimed), destroyed his machine. He didn't.
Now Kramer is making use of his machine for his own ends, and it's up to the Time Riders, of which this little New York contingent is only one element, so we're told (more on this anon) to prevent any misuse of time travel.
The further I got into this novel the more issues I had with it, but I'm a real sucker for a time-travel romp so, like the patient judge in a movie trial, I was willing to allow this line of questionable to see where it led. And I'm trying to keep in mind that it was written for people younger than I am, people who are perhaps less discriminating, or less demanding than I can be!
Moving right along now… after the intrepid three are gathered here together in unholy matrix-money, we learn that there's a fourth: some sort of cyborg, which is essentially nothing more than a copy of Arnold Schwarzeneggar's Terminator from T2. He was grown in a vat, and now he's dumped out, whereupon his brain boots up, and he has to learn a few things which somehow were omitted from his programming. They call him Bob and he talks about 'mission parameters' and such, just as Schwarzeneggar's character did. In fact, if I recall, isn’t the Terminator actually called Bob at one point in that movie?!
We also learn why these people were selected - supposedly. Liam is the adventurer who gets to go on missions with Bob, even though he's probably the least qualified to cope with this (being only 16 and coming from 1912). I have to wonder - other than that this is a YA novel - why they have these kids when they could have special forces-trained people, or CIA-trained people? Liam certainly steps up (to begin with) and surprisingly shows very little surprise or wonder about the technological marvels he encounters, which would have been impressive enough in the World War 2 era, let alone in 2001, but he appears to have little abiding fascination or curiosity about anything.
In fact, up through around chapter 40 (I did say they're short chapters!) the only one of the three who shows any personality or interest is the only one of them who actually is from the future (in relation to us), which is Sal, who says 'jahulla' a heck of a lot (just as Liam says 'jay-zus' a heck of a lot). I dont; know what jahulla means. It may refer to a disbelief in any gods, or even a depopulated village of that name. Intriguingly, given that Sal's from India, where only some 12% of the population speak English, she has an amazing grasp not only of English, but also of contemporary American idiom! Hmm! Maddy cluelessly claims that eveyone from India is bilingual. Wrong!
Anyway, whilst Liam is out there being manly, the two girls have to be stay-at-home moms, analysing the time line to see if they can discern any tampering. Yes, I know women tend to be better at this kind of detail work than men, but seriously? This is 2001, not 1901. Well, no, this isn’t 2001, but that's where they're inexplicably ensconced for this work - inside a continuously looping time-bubble which goes from September 10th, 2001 to September 11th, 2001, rinse and repeat. Yes, that 9/11.
The computer they have is from the future, yet they're relying on fallible humans to spot critical changes! That seems a bit weak to me. Why they're located in 2001 isn't really explained, either. The claim is that it’s because the events of that next day will serve to iron out any bumps in the timeline which they may cause by living there, but it seems to me that they could achieve that same aim by living out in the wilds of Montana or the plains of Africa, or some bushland area in Australia, or even by living a regular existence in the future where all this policing originated!
And having been told all this about the delicacy of the timeline, the first experiment they try, to see how good Sal and Maddy are at spotting and nailing down discrepancies in the timeline, is to prevent Oswald from killing Kennedy. They can do this because it 'resets itself' immediately afterwards, after that grassy knoll gunman makes up for Oswald's failure, but they never go back and re-reset it so that our own timeline - where the grassy knoll guy is a conspiracy theory at best, and Oswald is the sole shooter - comes back online! That was an inexplicable gaff.
What concerns me too, about this, is that they appear to think that if they're contained within their two-day looping time bubble, then they won't be affected by a change in the timeline and will therefore be able to spot it and fix it, but since only their small cellar is bubbled, I have to wonder how they'd cope with changes to the immediate environment outside their bubble. What if their water or electricity cuts off? This may not seem important, since you think their time bubble always has the same exterior view, but this becomes a real issue when the timeline actually does change. You knew it would, didn’t you?!
There's one other problem. At one point, Foster quietly advises Maddy that Liam is going to age just as he has. Foster, despite being an old man, is evidently only 27, but he is going to die from the aging effect of time-traveling so much.
But that's not the problem. Maddy isn’t supposed to tell Liam about this aging issue until he's ready for the news, and he's apparently the only one it will affect, but the fact is that all three of them are actually traveling in time every two days by living in their time bubble. Why is the aging only a problem for Liam? Is there something else going on with his extra jumps? We're not told.
There's also a problem with the method by which they jump; to jump out, the traveler has to be submerged in a vat of water, wearing only their underwear (again taking the idea from Terminator), but to return, they just step through a shimmering window in the air, bringing with them whatever they’re carrying and wearing. Seriously? What’s up with that? The claim is that it's to prevent anything traveling back into the past and contaminating the time line. If that wasn't necessary when they moved the supercomputer from the future back to 2001 and occupied a cellar, then I don’t get why this persnikettiness with the clothes is necessary. Nor is it explained why they don’t have to get into a vat of water every 24 hours to travel back to September 10th!
Every time they jump they're sending back several thousand gallons of water full of bacteria not only from 2001, but also from whence the computer and all the materials came when they initially set up that cellar! Sending back that much water is also impacting the current time line to an extent, but I guess this is trivial enough to not be noticed. Oh well! Given how well the series is selling, I guess not too many people are bothered by these details!
So then we’re introduced to the villain of the piece, Paul Kramer, who has the brilliant plant to locate this time machine that was supposedly destroyed (but which he knows was not) and use it to change history and make a better planet.
How does he choose to do this? Does he make himself rich and invest wisely in things which will improve the world? Nope! Does he place himself in influential positions with world leaders to lure them into a wise and bright future? Nope! Instead, he finds the most brutal military in the world - the Nazis of World War 2 - and advises their leader, Adolf Hitler, not to embark on his disastrous invasion of Russia, and he gives them military technology from 2066, thereby consolidating their hold on Europe and facilitating the invasion of Britain, before setting sights on the USA, by which time Kramer has contrived to be der Führer, evidently by bumoping off Hitler, but Hitler's birthday is mentioned somewhere and he;s a ripe old age! I suppose they could have been celebrating his birthday even though he was dead. Anyway, all this slaughter and war is supposed to somehow make the world a better place.
Meanwhile, back in 2001, as they go about their daily business, Sal goes out for a walk every day, and gets to see the twin towers come down. Every day. Her job is to notice anything that's changed from her previous walks - as an early warning that someone has messed with the timeline. She's supposed to have been chosen for her observational skills, but that seems appallingly hit and miss to me, especially given that she's outside the protective time bubble during these walks!
After Sal's change of life alert (lol!), Maddy is supposed to scour the Internet to find out exactly what the change was and why it happened so they can fix it. Frankly, a computer from the future ought to be able to do this faster and far more efficiently than a human, but there you go! And of course, if the change results in the Internet going down or never being invented, then Maddy has no backup whatsoever. There are apparently no books in the cellar! Trust me, this happens.
So on one of her morning jaunts, Sal sees change occur all around her right when that first jetliner is supposed to hit the north tower and doesn't. Given that the change was initiated by Kramer in 1941, why she sees nothing for several days, and then sees it only as the jet fails to hit (and indeed the towers disappear, changing into something else), is a mystery! Everything changes around her and she heads back to their bubble, and here's where it starts to get really questionable! On a side note, the Kehlsteinhaus doesn't exactly look like it's the kind of place that you can assault successfully with just 24 men when it's guarded by machine-gun nests! But that's just my opinion!
Maddy discovers that all information about history prior to 1956 has been erased! She can’t learn anything about what happened before that date. So what do they do? Send someone back to a quiet place in 1955, so they can see if there were any warning signs portending change? Nope! They go back actually to 1956!
Do they at least try to go somewhere quiet so they can enter unobtrusively and complete a useful investigation? Nope! They deposit Liam and Bob right on the White House lawn! Seriously! The very place where no matter what happened, short of the White House being demolished, you would stand out like a sore thumb is where they send them, and as it happens they end up right in the middle of a Nazi assault on the White House! I'm sorry but this level of incompetence is not even remotely believable, not even in a sotry which is slipping as much as this one has been to this point.
This gaff results in Liam getting captured. Bob, who has the chance to return and update Foster, Sal, and Maddy on what’s happening, deliberately misses his return window to try and save Liam who, he has decided, is his friend and therefore more important than the mission! You know, this sounds a lot worse now I'm reviewing it than it did when I was actually reading it at lunchtime!
Now Maddy, Sal, and Foster are completely and utterly in the dark about what's happened to change the world, and also have no idea what happened to Bob and Liam, and they can do nothing to fix the main problem, nor to help the errant explorers.
Worse than this, by opening the window when they expected Bob and Liam to return, they let a Nazi soldier through, and his injuries when they tossed him back out, have now alerted Kramer to the fact that someone might be able to time travel and might be able to interfer with Kramer's plan. Kramer destroyed his time machine so he cannot change his place in time any more, but he can erase all records prior to 1956 to try and disguise what he has done to change the timeline.
So do our heroes send someone back to alert Sal, on one of her jaunts outside, so she can avoid sending Liam and Bob back to 1956 and popping them out onto the White House Lawn? Nope. That never occurs to them! Nor does the question of what might have happened to Maddy in this new time line. If she didn’t get on that same plane, which might not even exist in this timeline, then how could Foster rescue her and bring her into the team? I guess history hasn't changed that much!
Part of Alex Scarrow's background is in developing video games, and this becomes quite evident in the final part of TimeRiders. I started out with hopes for this, especially when I realized that it is a series and if I like it, there would be more to come, but the more I read it, and worse, the more I blog it, the more my opinion of it deteriorates! At this point, I'm ready to assign this a rating of WARTY!
You recall what I said earlier, about the team not taking any steps to secure their location in terms of water and power supplies? Well this comes to haunt them as the city around them changes again. There's no explanation whatsoever in the novel as to why it changes a second time - until almost at the end, where long after they've seen the event's results, Kramer evdiently triggers the event that they have already seen! Better living through irradiation! And a major screw-up by Scarrow IMO.
The city is wiped out and rendered into rubble, and this results in their time-bubble losing power completely, but their little cellar remains utterly untouched by this nuclear devastation! It’s unharmed and completely free from nuclear fallout!
NYC is also infested with zombies now! Actually, they're not really zombies; they're apparently mutant humans who are cannibals. How this happened is conveniently not explained. At this point I got the distinct impression that Scarrow is not interested in writing a novel, but is, instead, intent upon cobbling together video game scenes from his previous career and weakly linking them together in the deserate hope of creating a coherent narrative. He fails. I also started to think that I don’t want to read another eight of these novels if they're going to be this clueless, this loosely wrapped, and this gratuitously gruesome in what's supposed to be a young adult novel for for an 11 year old.
Foster and the girls embark on a trip to the subway to find some diesel fuel to power the generator. Yes, this advanced computer from the future relies not on solar power or some other kind of alternative energy, but on a good, old-fashioned, stinky, polluting diesel generator! The team go in search of the diesel without even taking with them the means to haul it back, and so they can bring back only a few gallons - not enough to open a decent window until ther end of the novel, conveniently. These people personify incompetence: Foster doesn’t know squat about diesel or the generator, and he's their leader! But they do manage to get the generator running.
Meanwhile, back in 1957, Bob has become a superhero. Here's another inexplicable event: although it's been only a few days in 2001, it’s been six months in 1957! How this occurred, as usual, remains totally unexplained and makes no sense whatsoever. Having jeopardized their mission in order to save Liam, Bob is raiding prison camps to try to find and free his friend, at which he eventually succeeds, starting a minor insurrection in the process. Meanwhile, back in the airship, Kramer is losing it. He's hearing voices which are telling him to destroy the world by hooking an atom bomb to a time-travel field generator, which will effectively destroy the entire planet - or at least the life on it. Now won't that make for a better world?! Shades of Stargate the movie!
Bob gets a tachyon message from Foster giving him the time and coordinates in DC where the next window will open. Tachyons are actually still theoretical at this time, btu maybe the're discovered in 2066!
Bob takes this opportunity to inform Liam that he has an expiration date: if Bob doesn't return to his starting time within six months he will self destruct (with no override) to prevent his technology from falling into enemy hands. After six months???? Seriously, if he had been captured, in six months, every secret he ever had stored in his computerised brain would be public knowledge! But this means they only have a few days now to return to 2001 or Bobby go boom fall down dead!
They return to DC and the window opens but it’s only the size of someone's head! Bob demands that Liam cut off his head and toss it through, but Liam, who I unfortunately described earlier as stepping up, wimps out. They could have shouted the information through the little window for goodness sakes, telling the rest of the team to destroy Kramer in April 1941, since they have the exact location, date, and time for his initial incursion by then, but instead, they whine and argue about cutting off Bob's head until the window closes. For heaven's sake, Bob could have stuck his head through the window and had it cut off as the window closed, leaving the invaluable information on the other side of the window, but he whines and argues with Liam instead! Incompetence, thy name is TimeRiders!
So Liam, in a flash of brilliance, now determines that the best way to communicate is to go the the natural history museum and write a message in the visitor book, which Sal will then miraculously think of looking for when 2001 comes around. And of course both the book and the museum will completely avoid destruction and burning during the nuking of NYC. Of course they will!
But do they write in the book that Foster and the girls must attack Kramer in 1941 so they can restore the timeline and save the world? No! Why on Earth would they do that when they can write the coordinates and the time they will be in the cellar in NYC, so that the window can be conveniently opened at low power to rescue the two of them instead?! And this is the team Foster praises as being the best?
The weird thing is that Foster tells his team at the start of the novel that they're not the only team: there are others dotted throughout the world in other places and at other times, yet apparently not a one of these other teams can step up and save the world! Nope, it's all on these incompetent airhead teenagers in 2001 in NYC!
So the 2001 team returns to the cellar (from their jaunt to read the miraculously preserved visitor book) only to be ambushed by the cannibals, and thirteen year old Sal is wrenched from them. A thirteen year old girl is torn away to be eaten by mutant cannibals and this is suitable reading for an 11 year old? And I worried about what's in Seasoning YA!? I need to reset my sights!
Moving right along now! They make it to the cellar thinking that if they reset the maladjusted timeline, Sal will be magically restored to them with no memory of being cannibalized, and to heck with the horror they just witnessed! They start preparing to open the window to rescue Liam and Bob, only to find that these enterprising and industrious cannibals, who are supposed to be smart, yet evidently can’t seem to think of evacuating the food-free nuclear wasteland of NYC, to go hunting animals in the wilds, are breaking down the walls of the cellar to get at them!
Well the story kinda fizzeled (more!) towards the end. Liam and Bob both get pulled back just in time to help Maddy and Foster fight off the cannibals, then they're sent back to 1941 (I guess that fuel was sufficient after all) where they kill Kramer and thereby reset the timeline back to where it was, no harm no foul!
Given how obsessed they are about not polluting the timeline, there seem to be no after effects of not only sending them back with no water and with out-of-period clothes, but also of leaving the bodies lying around back in 1941 in a case where, in the initial and 'pure' timeline, there never were any bodies. But there you go. Foster heads off into the sunset to live out his remaining time, leaving teenager Maddy in charge of teenagers Liam and Sal, running the New York office. And also in charge of deciding when she gets to give Liam the bad news about his death warrant, something Foster has clearly chickened out of. The end.
Yes, I have to say I was let down by the improbabilities in this; particularly that these kids are put in charge of a really, really crucial organization (and especially so with essentially no training), and by the fact that none of the other field offices seem to be of any use whatsoever, leaving all the work of fixing time lines to be done by these selfsame teens! Yes, it’s a YA novel and it would be stupid to have one with no YA's in it, but honestly?! There were ways I could see of telling this same story and getting these same situations and results without taking such huge leaps of faith or staining it quite so brightly with hamfistedness.
There's pretty much no information related at all about the three main characters, given that they figure hugely throughout the story. They almost dont; even interact with each other as normal teens would (is there such a thing as a normal teen?!). Why was Liam, a 16 year old from 1912, considered to be the best candidate for a field agent? Why are we told effectively nothing about Sal's rescue from her death whereas we're party to both Liam's and Maddy's rescue? Why go to the trouble, expense, and risk of failure in creating a 'Bob' when they could have simply had a special forces soldier, a SWAT cop, or a CIA or FBI agent, for example?
I had originally thought this might be nice new series to get into, but then I read it and now I can’t see myself reading another of these. It’s borderline at best, and had it been smarter, I would have been willing to try another shot even with some of the problems it has, but as it is, I have better things to do with my time. This is the first YA story I can remember feeling this way about, actually. Most of the others have been acceptable even if they weren't exactly overwhelming. Some of them have been really great. Maybe my kids will take it up at some point and then they can write the reviews!
