Peter J. Wacks

If you like hard sci fi, time travel, time paradoxes, and a healthy dose of parallel intrigues, then there's a lot here to like. The plotlines are clever, intricate and interwoven, moving in both directions along the time line as various parties intersect. It gets a little tough to keep up with the switchbacks, but it does come around to a fairly convincing wrap-up. The ending, however, involves something entirely unscientific that I just couldn't buy, almost literally a deus ex machina. It wasn't built into the rest of the story with sufficient depth to convince me that it fit, and it left me wondering what the overall point of the whole exercise might be. I also found every single one of the characters so paper-thin and unsympathetic that I couldn't find anybody to root for. They all behaved like sociopaths at one point or another.… (mer)