Time Rep by Peter Ward

Nila goes on a time-travel vacation with Peter Ward’s debut novel, Time Rep.

Time Rep by Peter Ward

ARC (provided by publisher)

Published June 30th, 2013 by Diversion Books

Review by N. E. White.

Time Rep is funny, in an annoyingly British way.

Whoa! Before you get out the pitchforks, give me a chance to explain…

Quite a few times while reading this book I chortled enough to choke on my tea. But though I thought it entertaining, the story ultimately left me wishing the past hadn’t been changed. Let’s get to the book.

Geoffrey Stamp is a freeloading loser. The novel starts with a description of Geoffrey’s messy apartment. He’s asleep on the sofa and we’re more or less told he has no job, lives off the kindness of his best friend, loves video games, and has a snarky attitude. He’s pretty much everyone’s millennial teenage nightmare. While some may think the jokes he regularly delivers are hilarious, I simply found them a little funny and a little annoying, like one of those Monty Python characters that insist on slapping you with fish or explaining the finer points of peasant politics.

Regardless, you can’t help but want to follow Geoffrey, the most insignificant person on the planet in the 21st Century, and go along for the ride when he goes for an interview and is suddenly transported to the end of the Cretaceous period, right before a huge meteorite pummels earth.

You see, Time Travel™ has been well established in the future and visiting significant times in the past is all the rage. But there’s a strict mandate that no one can travel back in time that might alter the past, because if one did, history would be changed forever and time travel might not be discovered at all. Or some such catastrophe, but the author explains that all away with a massive supercomputer that essentially acts like a god. The supercomputer vets prospect time travelers before they are allowed to go back into the past. And it also vets the Time Reps, to be insignificant time period locals who act as travel guides.

As I said earlier, Geoffrey Stamp appears ideal to be one of those insignificant Time Reps. But he turns out to be not so insignificant after all.

Time Rep goes through Geoffrey’s first day on the job and it is a doozie. He witnesses the end of all dinosaurs, watches London burn in 1666, is stabbed by a mysterious assassin, gets obliterated by aliens, and stands by while the end of the world barrels towards him. With snide commentary and remarks throughout, Geoffrey takes it all in stride until he realizes he may not be the insignificant twat the supercomputer predicted.

But he is a twat.

While I found his jokes funny at first, by the time I got about halfway through the book, his snide remarks really started to wear on me. Because the story is written in the style of traditional humorous Science Fiction, one expects the characters to just accept some of the most outlandish things. And while I thought Peter did an excellent job of steeping the reader in that Douglas Adam-esque surreal world where anything can, and should be expected to, happen, the main character’s remarks and jokes just seemed completely out of place.

Really, if you just found out an alien assassin was after you, I just don’t think you’d make some random joke about the Admiral who’s about to save your butt. I would think the character would be more concerned about his own hide and would make jokes about that.

Nevertheless, regardless of whether I found the jokes relevant or not, Peter Ward’s Time Rep is a quick, entertaining read and proves, once and for all, there just might be a reason to play video games for hours on end. So if you want to burn another few hours, check out Time Rep. The second in this series, Continuum, is out this summer.

N.E. White, June, 2016.