Out of Era

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This story is a nice example of how, if you keep a lot of balls in the air and set off special effects, then readers won't have the time to ask if the metaphysics of the story really works.

Paul is an agent for TIE – Temporal Investigation and Enforcement – which means that he is a time-traveler whose job is to prevent travelers from the future muck around with his assigned beat – roughly the early 21st century – by disrupting the way things should happen, steal objects from the present, and, worse, leave anachronistic future technology in our present. He is a native of the early 21st century since TIE finds it advisable to hire local since no amount of training will permit people from the future to pass as natives.

The book starts off with a weird turn. The disruption he is assigned to correct turns out to be a heavily armed future time traveler on a mission to kill him. Then, there are other assassination plots, and before you can say “Bob's your Uncle” – the setting is in Britain, by the way – there is a conspiracy to disrupt all time with the early 21st century as the point of departure. In addition, we have to mix in the fact, that Paul somehow erased himself from history in an earlier mission, which mysteriously didn't erase him from existence, and his “sister,” born to his parents because he wasn't born, gets mixed up in the affair.

The story was extremely fast-paced with guns blazing, jumps back and forth in time, and a delightfully presented “paradox trap” – the first one of those I've seen in the subgenre. For an action-adventure fan, this book gets full marks.

I enjoyed author Edmond Barrett's sketchily presented future history. Information about the future is never revealed downtime, but some information slips through. We know that the 23rd is a nightmare time and that something bad happened in the 26th century when time-travel was invented. In fact, time-travel was invented in order to change that event, whatever it was.

Barrett also has an interesting but problematic approach to the metaphysics of time travel. Upon the invention of time-travel, an upper limit was established by the invention date. This upper limit moves forward in time on second-for-second basis. There is also a down-time limit attributed to the need to adjust at the atomic level to the new time, which is currently in the late 19th century and moving forward. At some point, such adjustment becomes impossible.

Certainly, it is the author's universe and he can have his physics do what he wants, but why can't time travelers from the future past the invention of the device come visit their own past? Don't they have time-travel devices? I don't if there is an answer that makes real sense, but, admittedly, these restrictions add interesting limitations to the mechanics of the plot.

In sum, this is an interesting and lively story with characters that caught my attention and an intricately designed plot that kept my interest.