Just One Damned Thing After Another

After first reading, I thought I could cautiously give this book three stars. After second reading, I'm afraid I'm putting it down to two stars, because I just don't enjoy it enough. I can read my way through it, but I have to push myself.

The writing and the characters are OK, and there's a mixture of humour and seriousness, which is fine. I have more of a problem with the scenario and the story.

St Mary's Institute of Historical Research is a chaotic and rather amateurish organization, underfunded and understaffed, which employs historians to go back in time and check facts or resolve mysteries. The job is intimidating. Past times are generally uncomfortable, unpleasant, and dangerous, and the attrition rate is high. Historians commonly need medical attention on returning, and get killed in action now and then. They're not well paid. No-one in his or her right mind would choose to work at St Mary's; and I feel somewhat alienated from the characters because they're all demonstrably insane.

Time-travel is dangerous; that's understandable enough. In addition, something seems to go wrong with every mission, so St Mary's staggers from one disaster to another, the main characters surviving only through a series of lucky escapes. It also has enemies, both external and internal. So the story does what it says on the tin: one damned thing after another, disaster after disaster, and I'm not keen on that kind of story.

A story in which everything goes right isn't realistic or convincing, but a story in which everything keeps going wrong isn't realistic or convincing either—if only because the people to whom all these disasters keep happening would normally take the hint and find themselves something else to do.

Admittedly, there seems to be a shortage of good jobs in their environment. Britain was half-wrecked by civil war before St Mary's was founded, and the world as a whole has suffered from the side-effects of uncontrolled time travel (hence the founding of the Time Police, which is another story). None of this background gloom and doom endears the series to me; I'm not a fan of dystopian fiction.