This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.
The book is Time Traitors by Eli Donovan. The book is available from Amazon.
Blurb
Jurassic Park meets Romancing the Stone
Dr. Grace Carson is one of the lucky few scientists cleared for time travel. Years ago, her husband nearly destroyed her career by poaching dinosaurs. Grace turned him in, divorced the deadbeat, and two years later she’s ready to return to the work she loves: studying dinosaurs in their natural habitat. She has no interest in the new time agent, Ben Nakamura, assigned to her research station. No matter how charming or clever he is.
Unfortunately, her team isn’t alone. Poachers are trapping dinosaurs for the black market again. Another scandal like this could kill her research if it comes out, and Grace’s boss wants her to look the other way until the thieves are gone. But Grace can’t bring herself to let the criminals get away.
When the poachers discover Grace’s plans to blow the whistle, they attack her research station. Nakamura and Grace flee into the forest with her time machine, but it’s broken in the process. Nakamura knows a secret cache where they can hopefully fix the time machine, but it means a perilous trek through the wilderness.
Braving prehistoric dangers together shows Grace she can trust Nakamura with her life, but she’s still not sure she can ever trust him with her heart.
My Review
This is a fun romp, full of romance, time travel, action, betrayal, secrets, quickening heartbeats, and even some kissing. You don’t have to work very hard to get me interested in a humans-in-the-Campanian story, and this delivered on the premise and played really well with the concept and the space it provides.
Plot and Characters
There are two POV characters who mostly alternate between chapters but sometimes alternate within chapters. One is Grace, a paleontologist (and technically field biologist, which paleontologists usually don’t get the chance to be), who’s working herself back from a previous betrayal and disgrace to get to run a second research mission into the Late Cretaceous. Her disgrace was at the hands of her (now ex) husband, who went with her on the time travel research trip and ended up poaching materials and dinosaurs to sell to shadowy present-day figures, something expressly forbidden by the Time Guard, a law enforcement agency who controls time travel with a less tight fist than it first appears.
The second POV character is Julia, another paleontologist, but she’s turned poacher, helping a team of baddies operating in the same timeframe as the research group. It’s Mesozoic madness! There was a detail with Julia I should have picked up on much, much sooner than I did, i.e. before it was revealed, and I may have to turn in my plot perception card now in shame.
The research team comes with a gaggle of scientists and Time Guards, and the baddies come with a gaggle of thugs and criminals, so there’s a big cast of time travelers to keep track of. The plot centers around these two groups operating independently and at cross purposes, eventually moving more and more into each others’ spaces. I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it’s a satisfying story with the two perspectives and the different motivations and conflicts pulled off well.
My Thoughts
So, this book is about a lot of things, and it does almost all of them well. For example, this is a book about paleontology and field research, and it nails the species names, the concerns that scientists might have in this weird situation, the wonder they would feel at having this unique opportunity, and the nuts and bolts of research. It’s really remarkable for a book like this to be this good with that stuff, and I applaud Donovan for what must have been a lot of research and a commitment to portraying made-up impossible research in as realistic a way as possible, complete with imagining how technological shortcomings in the distant past might impact research methods.
This is also a book about time travel, and it handles that really well too, and with increasing complexity as the book goes on. With any such book, you need to have a method to violate the laws of the universe, and here we have “time tubes,” which have limitations but are wisely not explained much – they’re the magic you need to make the book work, and that’s fine. The political structure that’s grown up around managing time travel is interesting and seems realistic, and the attitudes toward paradox and changing the past seem reasonable. The story discusses paradox early on and plays with it more as it goes on, as any time travel story absolutely should, and it’s done in a satisfying way, making a fun set of choices as to how the rules might apply. I particularly like the idea that time and destiny have momentum, and that it’s hard to alter the history we’ve come to know. The concern about leaving behind artifacts and bodies seemed maybe a little over-the-top at times, since such things have almost no chance of surviving in identifiable form to the present day, and since such concerns seemed to be ignored by the Time Guard itself at times, leaving shuttered research stations around to decay, but that was a minor quibble.
This is also an action story, including some elements of horror (the big-animal-wants-to-eat-us kind) and some of sci-fi shoot-em-up. Once we shift more into action mode, it’s very exciting, and the challenges keep coming for both groups we’re following in unpredictable and harrowing ways. The one thing I’ll say here is that there are some head-scratcher decisions that I had a hard time accepting, such as the semi-complacency of one group upon learning there was a traitor in their group, which was explored but then kind of stalled out, leading to an entirely predictable outcome. The attempts to throw suspicion around to different parties seemed a little too much to me, too, and I found myself thinking, well, it can’t be that person because they’re pointing too hard at them. There was also one groaner moment for me when one party incapacitated a guy who’d been hell-bent on murdering them, including stating his homicidal intentions and acting on them convincingly, and then the aforementioned party DIDN’T SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD or even tie him up. I hate that, as does Scott from Austin Powers.
The stupid impetuousness of some parties also seemed a little forced, and it often caused predictable bad results. I can’t speak to poacher rings, but I have to think that, just like with high-stakes space missions, Antarctic research, and other small-group scientific work, that there’d be a good deal of psychological profiling to avoid having conflict-laden hotheads join the scientific team. You also don’t meet your grad students for the first time in the Campanian – you recruit them and you work with them for a while before you take them on a huge undertaking like this. But those are nitpicks.
This is also a romance, although that’s only one of the book’s many flavors. I don’t read a ton of romance, although I’ve now written one with a friend (see Best,), so I may not be the audience for or the most knowledgeable reviewer about such things. The longing and the lust-slash-romance elements here work and seem to hit the beats and tropes that such stories demand, and you feel for the people going through it and cheer for them as they go. The primary romance on the science side is particularly satisfying and interesting because of its connection to time travel. One thing I tend to find a little frustrating in romance novels is that characters tend to go around in a high emotional state all the time, triggered by all kinds of stimuli, which leads to lots of conflict, bickering, impetuousness, yelling, and swooning, which sometimes seems unrealistic to me, who lives life with the emotion dial set much lower. Nothing wrong with that, though, and who am I to question a $1.4 billion romance novel industry?
Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution
Sorry to have to issue a IPW for the second straight review, but my tendency toward pedantry cannot be denied, and this is the second book in a row that’s at least partly about paleontology, which I’ve taught many times in my geology professor career. Although the paleontology portrayed was pretty darn good, I did take issue with one aspect of of it. That was that the paleontologists had a family-level and often genus-level name ready for every dinosaur they found, almost all of them matching dinosaurs that are currently known from the fossil record. However, the fossil record is super-duper incomplete, because fossilization after death and survival of the fossils for 70 million years is unlikely as hell. Some estimates suggest we only know of maybe 5% of dinosaur genera from the fossil record, while other estimates are higher, but none I’ve seen more than maybe 25% or 30%. That means that even the absolute best paleontologist who knew everything there was to know would be completely surprised by anywhere by 70% to 95% of the species they see around the Campanian, and that would even higher for fragile or rare organisms that don’t make it into the fossil record, like forest dwellers. Therefore, there should have been many more “wow, I have no idea what that thing is, but it’s very neat” moments than there were, and in fact a good deal more of those moments than there were proper identifications. You could explain some of this away by them having visited the past before and identified some of the newbies (although then the taxonomic names would generally then be new rather than ones we currently know in the real world). But the various dinosaur spottings also allow our favorites to have cameos in the story, and that’s definitely a noble cause.
OK, rant over. Sorry.☺
Summation
This is a fun book, one that feels lighter weight at first but which still has a lot of complexity, both human and sci-fi, and explores that with gusto and with thoughtfulness. Definitely worthy of a semifinal spot, and we’ll see how it does making it into the finals – I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the final ten. I enjoyed my time with it, and if you’re up for some mildly spicy dinosaur scientist action/romance (and who isn’t?) this is a great choice.
