Was I disappointed with the direction the story went? There's all of HISTORY that could have been plumbed. This was supposed to be a time-travel novel.

Clarity of prose can easily lend itself to a much more complex and compelling plot.ĭid I really want to wind up reading about a small band of shit-dwelling future bostonians living a stone-age existence while a handful of super-bright and/or super-powerful tech-wielding outcasts befriend and later try to save the earth from the muck of industrial byproducts? No, not really.

Instead, we have an Evil Corp trope, which can be done smart or not, depending on the author's talent, but the fact that our future is such a shithole because of stupidity and greed is simply a too obvious worldbuilding technique. After all, they have time and times that are much better at healing failing bodies, but such a fix was never explored.) (Sure, that's bad enough, but there's always a way around such things. Even the rules against doing it too much turned out to be so much hokum, and the worst that can be expected is just the time-traveller's body giving out. This is a time travel book, isn't it? There was too little time travel. There's a lot of great things that can be said about clarity of style, fairly well-developed and interesting characters, and a promising concept, and this novel had it all, including an interesting hard-sf opening with a doomed space battle with highly advanced humanoids, but unfortunately, all the promise kinda fizzled.

Time salvager by wesley chu