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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating, philosophically profound, and loads of fun., February 28, 2007
This review is from: Time's Child (Paperback)
This is what time travel would probably REALLY be like. Archivists from a "now-time" of 2300 send back into history and dip up various people, including a 15th-century Italian camp follower, a not quite come-to-manhook Viking warrior, and a 21st-century internet troll. The now-timers have their reasons, but the displaced out-of-history people have motives of their own. Benedetta, the camp follower, escapes from the archives and liberates her out-of-history friends, and they steal the time machine and go fishing in the past for their idea of who THEY want for company.
The out-of-history characters are each complex, unique, very much a product of his or her own historical time and personal history, and utterly convincing. This is a fascinating read. I think TIME'S CHILD sets a new standard for portrayal of alien times, both past and future, and just might become a science-fiction classic. TIME'S CHILD is that rare novel that is both philosophically profound as well as loads of fun.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bizarre, Implausible, December 17, 2007
This review is from: Time's Child (Paperback)
Ok, I know its SF so I'm not declaring the time travel implausible that device is used in an interesting branching timelines theme.
Here is what is implausible:
* A knight Templar declaring "F the Pope" within seconds of being teleported to a strange and advanced future.
* A 17 year old viking raider learns English, becomes a preeminent physicist, and computer expert able to reverse engineer a time machine that only 2 other geiuses on the planet can also do, this development occurs in a matter of months.
* Everyone from Leonardo Davinci, the lombardian heroine from the 16th century, the templars, and the viking use the f-word. Not just in contemporary times which is plausible, but in their own time. It just comes off as weird, it make it seem like these people went back in time instead of forward.
* The heroine having never driven any sort of vehicle in her life and having only seen a motrocycle once hops on one with a passenger behind her and is able to escape attack helicopters.
So, I didn't like it, it also bugs me when people like to "out" historical figures, in this case Leonardo Davinci. For effect, the author includes Leonardo's mother in the ridiculous use of profanity when she makes an obscene reference to her son's lover as "being the waste of a good (crude reference to a rectum)".
I say pass on this one.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
not for the soft-headed, April 14, 2007
This review is from: Time's Child (Paperback)
Some of Rebecca Ore's hard-boiled science fiction of years past, such as her novels SLOW FUNERAL and GAIA'S TOYS, are not for the faint-hearted. TIME'S CHILD is a far gentler read, but not for the soft-headed. The novel is not a heroic or romantic tale at all but more of an anatomy, what Northrop Frye defined as a "satire [that] deals less with people than with mental attitudes [is able to] handle abstract ideas and theories . . . relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature [and] presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern." Rather than the consciousness of a beleaguered individual struggling for survival, what holds it together is Ore's dry satiric voice and astute eye for setting. She makes credible and interesting the micropolitics of smart, verbal people from various past eras struggling to determine whom to trust in a future Eastern Pennsylvania landscape.
Recommended for readers who are equipped to deal with conversation- or idea-heavy science fiction, such as Blish's CASE OF CONSCIENCE, the last four or five Philip K. Dick novels, and the post-NOVA work of Samuel Delany. Not that TIME'S CHILD is as heavy or as demanding a read --more of a soothing vernal chat with a rapier-witted polymath.
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