Outlaw by Edward W Robertson

Rating: WARTY!

This was a sci-fi novel which is evidently part of the 'Rebel Stars' series and I should really have paid attention to that - not just that it was a series starter, and therefore I probably wouldn't like it, but also that name of the series which struck me as half-baked and overdone at the same time. I also should have been warned off by the blurb, which, despite this novel being published in 2014, starts out, "in the year 2010, an alien virus nearly wiped out the human race." Funny, but I don't recall that happening!

This is the second story by this author that I've read and I've been pleased with neither of them sdo I guess I'm done reading his material from this point on. He doesn't plot well, and so this idea in this particular story of an alien virus was poorly planned. No such virus is likely to harm humans because viruses, parasites, and bacteria evolve and specialize, so unless this alien virus evolved alongside humans, how is it going to even begin to affect us? Was it genetically engineered? There's no word on that, and the events of the novel tale place a millennium after the virus, so how is it relevant? Maybe it all 'falls together' later, but I didn't have the patience to read that far. To me it just felt like his signature style: poorly thought-out plotting. If you're going to write sci-fi, you really ought to have some knowledge of science!

As I mentioned, the story jumps from the wipe-out to a thousand years hence when humanity ("mankind" according to the genderist blurb, not 'humankind'), has recovered from this virus, so why even introduce the virus in the first place? Aren't we immune to it now? And if it's a thousand years with no return of the virus and no aliens in sight, then why is everyone so jumpy thinking aliens are lurking around every corner? That would be like us, in 2019, living in fear of Attila the Hun. And how are you going to shoot that alien virus anyway, if it returns? LOL!

The novel was a tedious read and after these people got into two bar fights in the first few pages, I decided I had better things to do with my time than plow through this anymore. I can't commend it except as trash-ready garbage.

The Cutting Room by Edward W Robertson

Title: The Cutting Room
Author: Edward W Robertson
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"pods'" should be "Pod's" since it's a possessive of the singular 'pod' referred to earlier.

This is a novel which originally appeared in episodic form, but which is now compiled into one complete volume. The premise here is that there are parallel universes (or at least parallel Earths!), but in only one of these is it relatively easy to travel back in time (which means you know that the plot is going to hinge on there being another one of these worlds where time-travel has also become possible). The inhabitants of this special one call it Primetime, which I found hilarious.

The problem is that the Primetime line isn't any better than ours: there are still sick and twisted people there who think it's wonderful to mess with other time-lines in destructive and murderous ways. How this interference and time travel is possible isn't explained, nor is it explained why these events seem to take place in the past of the parallel time-lines rather than concurrent with the present in Primetime or in the future. In fact, a lot of things go unexplained here, unfortunately.

It's the job of the time police in Primetime to go back and prevent these disruptions, so in some regards, this story is very much that of the Jean Claude Van Damme movie Time Cop (minus the parallel streams, of course), a movie which I happen to love. The story is narrated by one such cop, Blake Din, who is, when we meet him, back in a time somewhat prior to our present trying to prevent the (unsolved) murder of a child in that time-line.

It evidently takes far too much energy to travel back much further than the relatively recent past, which immediately begs the question as to how the villains manage to generate the energy and why the time cops aren't actively searching for such energy use. Another unexplained plot hole. Din believes that the murder was perpetrated by a time-jumper who simply left the time-line to escape being caught, and so he's following the child (and whatever leads pop-up) in an effort to figure out who this murderer is, to prevent the murder, and to reset the time-line back to its original path.

How they determined that this isn't the original path isn't ever explained. They seem to know when there's a violation, which means they have a record of the time-path in its pristine state, for each of the parallel worlds. That's a heck of a lot of data storage! The problem is that there are other times when they act like they can't be sure if there was s violation or not, which means they don't have a good record. Again this is bad plotting and confusion. It's really poor writing, and very annoying, when the story's internal rules change to accommodate the plot rather than vice-versa.

There's always a real problem in time-travel stories which I do not believe anyone has solved yet. Indeed, it may well be insoluble because of the cat-out-of-the-bag nature of time-travel: it's very effectively a get-out-of-jail free card. You can always go back and undo (or re-do) whatever anyone else has done/undone. Steven Moffat had great fun with that concept in a Christmas charity comedy broadcast of Doctor Who (featuring only non-cannon Doctor Who characters played by the likes of Rowen Atkinson, Hugh Grant, and even Joanna Lumley). It was titled The Curse of Fatal Death, and the master was played by the very estimable Jonathan Pryce.

But I digress. The problem I had with the investigator's behavior was that he was starting out several days before the child's murder trying to spot clues to who the perp might be. Why did he not simply go to the dumpster where parts of the body were found and track backwards (or forwards if back-tracking isn't possible) from there to discover who the killer was, and then return and prevent it? It made zero sense to me to do it the blind way he was doing it. Even that might have been fine if some explanation had been offered as to why he had to do it this way, but none ever was.

This same thing happened in the very next murder investigation he's on; then we get the Back to the Future plan of sending them back to the "wild" west, for no good reason other than that many writers seem to think it's cool to send time travelers back there. Other than these sorry plot holes, the novel was technically written well with some nice humor, but for me it was really boring with long periods of time with nothing happening, journeys back and forth, dead ends, none of which seemed to do anything for the plot.

I freely admit that the 1PoV didn't piss me off as it all-too-often does, so that was a nice plus for me, but in the end, the novel was too tedious to continue reading. I found myself skipping larger and larger portions of text and then I skipped the whole rest of the novel because I didn't care about the characters or about where this plot was taking them. Life's too short to waste on novels that don't addict you! I can't recommend this.