Timebomb - Scott K. Andrews

Mind-bomb

The first of a trilogy, Scott Andrews' Timebomb has some good ideas, some strong characters and - operating as it does with time travel - it has lots of interesting places to go to in the subsequent books. The first book takes place mostly in the 17th century in the middle of the English Civil War, but the far future, the present and even some hints of events in the even more distant past, make this a highly potent mix.

The strength of the concept is bound up in its central team of three characters who come from the past, the present and the future. 17 year-old Jana is from New York in the year 2141, 18 year-old Polish-born Kaz is from the present-day and 14 year-old Dora is a maid in Sweetclover Hall in Cornwall in the year 1640.  Having been brought together by some sudden and not yet entirely explained phenomenon, they are able to draw on their individual talents, local knowledge and futuristic body-implant enhancements to deal with... well, that remains to be seen...

For most of the first book, the three youths act more on intuition than with any sense of purpose and run around not really knowing how or why they've been propelled through time or what they're supposed to do. It seems fairly certain however that Lord Sweetclover and a woman named Quil, who has powers that would mark her out as a witch in the 17th century, know more about what is happening, and you can probably be sure that the intentions of guys who are attempting to do mind probes on you in a laboratory aren't benevolent. We've yet to find out who is the mysterious person called Steve is, who helps them escape with his transformation skills, but it's all highly exciting and imaginative stuff.

One interesting feature about the time travel element is that it doesn't appear (at the moment anyway) that multiple time-lines are a feature. The characters are able to go back and stop things happening but only because they already have gone back and altered them, if you see what I mean. But don't worry, Scott Andrews, to his credit, handles all the interweaving periods with sometimes multiple versions of their character operating in the same timelines in a way that is remarkably clear and easy to follow. It's going to get complicated though, and you don't need to be able to look into the future to see that. Thanks to the author's fine handling of the opening book and the unresolved situations that can go just about anywhere, I can however predict without the benefit of time-travel that if you read this book you'll be reading the next two as well...

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