sixteen-year-old ship’s steward, Liam O’Connor, is about to die on board a sinking Titanic in 1912.
Eighteen-year-old computer geek Maddy Carter is about to die on a plane that is about to be blown out of the sky by terrorists in 2010.
Thirteen-year-old adolescent Sal Vikram is about to die in a fire in Mumbai in 2026.
None of them do. All three are rescued by an old man who appears just in the nick of time and offers them a choice: Stay and die or join him and live.
Their rescuer is a man called Foster and he has recruited Liam, Maddy and Sal as “time riders” — time-travelling cops who ensure history is not altered in any way.
In Time Riders, Alex Scarrow tries to deal with perhaps the trickiest of all science fiction topics: time travel. At times he does it quite well but at others he seems to lose the plot.
Foster brings the time riders to a ramshackle garage in New York which is their base. For some inexplicable reason, the base is encased in a 48-hour time bubble in 2001. September 10 and 11, 2001, to be precise. The team thus has to go through the terror strikes that bring down the twin towers of the World Trade Centre over and over again. Foster’s explanation is that people will be too busy during 9/11 to notice anything weird about their base.
Foster explains time travel to the new team and how it will be their job to look out for fluxes in the space-time continuum and go back in time to fix them. To help the team is a lab-grown human robot — Bob — who is built like the Hulk with a super computer for a brain. At times, it seems that Bob is the real hero of the book. Grown from a foetus — in a gigantic tube — with computer chips implanted in his brain, Bob has superhuman strength, can heal incredibly fast and, to top it all, is endowed with analytical powers far beyond that of a normal human brain.
Maddy is made team leader and has to work the computer. Sal, the teenage girl from Mumbai, has the job to look out for time fluxes — to do this she has to take a walk down the roads of New York everyday, and since they are in a time bubble, she has to look out for out of ordinary stuff. Liam is the designated field operative and with Bob he has to go back and forth in time to put things right.
Matters get a bit complex when in the year 2056 a deranged scientist, Dr Kramer, with a gang of ex-marines, breaks into an American museum and steals the only working prototype of a time machine. His ambition is to go back in time and change events so a perfect society can be born — without pollution, crime, power-hungry politicians etc. Noble intentions no doubt, but to give form to this future, Kramer travels back to 1941 Germany, just as Hitler is planning his Russian campaign. He manages to convince Hitler that the Russian campaign will lead to his downfall and thus engineers a Third Reich supremacy the world over. In 2001 New York, the world suddenly changes. It’s more restrained, clean and full of Nazi flags. To observe the changes, Liam and Bob are sent to 1956 Washington D.C., bang in the middle of a pitched battle where German forces are taking over the White House. To make matters worse, Liam is captured and Bob stays back to rescue him.
In 2001, things go downhill when another time flux changes New York into a post-apocalyptic world. In the changed past, Kramer has ousted Hitler and is the new Fuhrer. In his deranged state of mind, he is convinced that agents of Satan are out to get him for changing history. So he detonates a nuclear bomb that wipes out most of the earth’s population.
The new 2001 is straight out of a zombie movie with cannibalistic human-like creatures out to get Sal, Maddy and Foster, who are trying their best to set up the time machine — no electricity in this changed world — to get Liam and Bob back.
Do they manage? Is history set back on the right course? Read the book to find out.
At times the plot of Time Riders seems to meander and the reader has to really work hard to overlook the loopholes which Scarrow has failed to plug. Young adult fiction — as the genre is called these days — is hard work, mainly because Hardy Boys no longer fit the bracket as books like Artemis Fowl and Twilight have upped the bar considerably.
Given the fact that science fiction is one of the toughest topics to write on, Time Riders does a decent job though at times it feels that Scarrow wrote the book keeping movie rights in mind as it often reads like a film script. As usual, it is a part of a series and the next one, set for an August 2011 release, is about dinosaurs.