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Time And Time Again (2014)

by Ben Elton(Favorite Author)

4.2 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0593073576 (ISBN13: 9780593073575)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Bantam Press

review 1: If you could travel back in time to change one historical event, what would it be? Acting on information left by Isaac Newton for the Master of Trinity, Hugh Stanton, an ex-soldier and survival expert is recruited to go back to 1914 to prevent the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, assassinate the war-mongering Kaiser Wilhelm, and thereby prevent the outbreak of the Great War. I always enjoy a good time travel yarn, sometimes even a bad time travel yarn, to be honest. The spirit of 1914 was well created here and the sense of 'What if' well set up by a suitably colourful Cambridge professor even if, of necessity, the mathematics of how the time travel will work was conveniently glossed over. The thing I enjoyed most about the novel was revisiting the actual assassination... more with a step-by-step explanation of how unlikely it actually was. The next best thing was the aftermath of the assassination which truly takes the 'What ifs' to the next level.
review 2: Ben plays around with the idea of the butterfly effect and the history of the 20th century. Would you have shot Hitler if you could? Would it have made things better, or perhaps worse? What if you could return to 1914? It kept me engaged and had an interesting twist in the tail, but it isn't an uplifting read. Having moved to the US from the UK, it did make me think about how different peoples have their own imagined histories that are every bit as 'real' to those who share a culture. And that leads to even more interesting thoughts... less

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