Review::Time's Child by Rebecca Ore

Time's Child by Rebecca Ore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Time's Child by Rebecca Ore

Time's Child is from yet another stack of books I picked up a while ago. Rebecca Ore is an author whose books I've read before. She has a refreshing new voice in the stream of voices that run through my library. So This small time travel novel caught my interest. This is a time travel story that has the travelers all moving forward in time. Though the machine allows the future to observe the past they are limited to only drawing specific people from the past and it is usually someone who has no recorded history in the past.

The primary protagonist is Bernedette whose life intersects with Leonardo Da Vinci.

Bernedette is brought from the past at the moment she is meant to die and the future people save her life and then interview her for information about the past. But the future people first play a game of being gods and their institutes being heaven, hell, or purgatory; all somewhat dependent on the individual they are dealing with. Bernedette sees through this quickly and just as quickly begins to have a number of questions about the sincerity of what these people are doing. She is told that they can't let her out into the world because of all the mutated viruses and the fact that others they have brought forward have died from culture shock even after being fully inoculated.

The story slowly reveals that the time machine might not be these people's creation and in fact they are still struggling with understanding it. It seems that some future has sent it to them, but it's unclear what that future wants them to do with it.

Bernedetta and several others escape or are released finally and they help to expose this project to the public while at the same time they plot to steal the time machine. At some point it appears the people in the future of this society (who might have sent back the plans for the time travel machine) are interested in the people brought from the past gaining control of the device.

This is one of those save the future through the past but not so much changing the past as it is bringing the past forward to repopulate a world that has become a self defeating dystopia. It's quite interesting to see the people of the past coming to terms with the future and future society; and possibly being able to recognize the problem and the threat to civilization that the future people don't know exists.

This is a good book for SFF fans though its not particularly outstanding as a time travel novel it does have some new twists on the time travel tale. Picture a time traveler from the past jumping into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

J.L. Dobias



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