Books: Paradox Bound By Peter Clines (2017)

"Eli Teague lives in Sanders, Maine, the town that time forgot. A chance encounter with a Model A Ford and its driver when he was a kid sets Eli on a collision course with all of America's history. That is, if the faceless men don't get him first. Eli’s willing to admit it: he’s a little obsessed with the mysterious woman he met years ago. Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War era clothes, wielding an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires? So when the traveler finally reappears in his life, Eli is determined that this time he’s not going to let her go without getting some answers. But his determination soon leads him into a strange, dangerous world and a chase not just across the country but through a hundred years of history—with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at stake."

I did enjoy Peter Clines Paradox Bound (and I’ve always loved time travel stories) but it does comes off like a pitch for a multi-season SyFy TV show that will be cancelled before it can complete its arc. Much like The Fold, Clines borrows lots themes from other popular culture books, TV, and movie...and, of course, previous time travel stories –or history travel here. Beyond the obvious references to Back to the Future franchise (especially the third film, and mainly due to John Henry's train, the Steel Bucephalus, there are other references along the way) the book also seems also to allude classic Doctor Who with the books MacGuffin, the American Dream. Eli is told the American Dream is a physical thing, forged by the Egyptian god Ptah at the behest of the Founding Fathers, and stolen at some point in history (early 1963 apparently). It is much like the Key To Time arc that the Doctor went on during TOS 16^th season anyone who can get their hands on the American Dream has unlimited power to mold the future. So if thousands of people believe in the same thing, the Dream will do what it can to make it happen. This is also why it went missing. Since thousands of people were looking for it, it had to go missing in order for it to become true, thus creating a predestinational time loop, since no one would be looking for something that wasn't missing.

Through this history travel, Harry and Eli are perused by The Faceless Men, who are chasing the Searchers (who are everyday people from different timelines who are also search for this object. Here the book adds shades of River Song from modern Doctor Who, as these Searchers don’t tend to meet each other linearly). With utterly featureless faces, they wear masks and use hypnotic badges (or as I called them, perception filters) to make sure no one notices that the person they're talking to has no face. Originally tasked with protecting the Dream, after failing to keep it safe, they has doubled-down on their secondary job - keeping history intact from accidental  incursions created by the Searchers. There is a Biff like bully that has been terrorizing Eli since childhood and who is recruited (not by choice, though) into the Faceless Men.

As with all time travel tales, you need to have the hero (or heroine) make some leaps in logic and a lot of those leaps comes that toward the end. Some of the conclusions Eli reaches are a bit farfetched, especially considering he’s only been doing the time hopping business for a very short time and people like Harry (and others) have been doing it for years.

It’s a fun book and would probably make a good weekly TV series for those who only mildly enjoy science fiction. It’s no Quantum Leap, but it will hold your attention.

Books: The Fold By Peter Clines (2015)

"The folks in Mike Erikson's small New England town would say he's just your average, everyday guy. And that's exactly how Mike likes it. Sure, the life he's chosen isn’t much of a challenge to someone with his unique gifts, but he’s content with his quiet and peaceful existence. That is, until an old friend presents him with an irresistible mystery, one that Mike is uniquely qualified to solve: far out in the California desert, a team of DARPA scientists has invented a device they affectionately call the Albuquerque Door. Using a cryptic computer equation and magnetic fields to “fold” dimensions, it shrinks distances so that a traveler can travel hundreds of feet with a single step. The invention promises to make mankind’s dreams of teleportation a reality. And, the scientists insist, traveling through the Door is completely safe. Yet evidence is mounting that this miraculous machine isn’t quite what it seems—and that its creators are harboring a dangerous secret.  As his investigations draw him deeper into the puzzle, Mike begins to fear there’s only one answer that makes sense. And if he’s right, it may only be a matter of time before the project destroys…everything".

As I was reading The Fold, I could not get over the feeling that I was reading A). A fan fic story that blends Star Trek and Doctor Who and B) A teleplay for a pilot of a TV series. Then at the end, in Peter Clines Afterword, the author notes this novel began as a short story when he was in a college literary class (and notes how the teacher seemed to be upset that he was writing this story versus something with more heft). And that it took years of rewrites, being stored away and then more rewrites for its publication this year. Leland "Mike" Erikson, described as Mycroft more than Sherlock Holmes by Clines, is really those two literary characters melded with Gene Roddenberry's Spock. While there are people who are like Erickson - he has an eidetic memory, which means he remembers everything he's exposed to with great detail- I kind of felt that Clines created a human supercomputer that may not truly exist (I don't know, never met a person with that type of capabilities). 

For Star Trek fans -and which gave me the feeling Clines was writing fan-fic- the plot is full of nods to the The Original Series. Of course the whole idea of the multiverse comes from comic books, but even Doctor Who and Star Trek have used this device for selling their drama. And Clines does out of his way to explain the idea of the possible real science behind the Albuquerque Door (which is a reference to Bugs Bunny and which I find ironic  because this week the animated character is celebrating it's 75th anniversary), but resorts to "magic" as it were to avoid really explaining the whole way it could work. Meanwhile, I kind of hated all the scientists working on the project. While we get a reasonable explanation of their attitudes about what they're doing and why they hate the "government" (who is of course paying for it)  for interfering in their project (much like David Marcus whined about Starfleet taking Genesis in Wrath of Khan), they're all kind of unlikable. Clines sort of paints the scientists as anti-social, secretive, and distrustful of everyone, including their fellow scientists. 

Another problem I had with the book was the last hundred or so pages, when the plot devolves from theoretical science to "Attack of the Creatures From Galileo Seven Episode of Star Trek". I felt this was so out of place with the rest of the plot, which for the most part was stuck in this "reality". Again, the idea that this novel started out as a short story some decade and half ago explains why Clines resorted to this pulpy style after pages and pages of character building; he got painted into a corner, really. And then the book ends with the arrival of a secrect governmental agents (Scully and Mulder?) who offer the surviving folks jobs dealing with the "weird." 

Finally, the prose is sparse (it reads, at times, like a teleplay), the F word gets thrown about like grenades, and the book reads like Clines is trying to get a certain cable network interested in a series based on the book -or is thinking he can take his super smart, super eidetic memory man and create an new book series. 

Funny, I did like The Fold (the concept is cool), but I found the execution a bit pedantic. Still, if this book went through the many iterations as Clines describes in his Afterword, perhaps while the idea was interesting, perhaps a short story or novella would have served the approach better?