The Great Adventure

Time Tunnel: The Twin Towers by Richard Todd. New Orange Media. 308 pages.

This was a book that I received free from Goodreads in a giveaway. I got it the same time that I received several other books, was writing my own book, and was busy teaching classes. So it promptly got put on the back burner and forgotten. It didn’t help that the title reminded me of a B-grade science fiction TV show I used to watch as a kid.

But then recently I got a reminder from Goodreads that I was supposed to do a review and I felt guilty, especially since as an author I have been put in the same situation many times myself. You give away books and then you get no response. I decided to read Time Tunnel, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Here’s the Amazon summary:

The date: September 10, 2001. Kyle Mason, an Army Special Forces Major, is honeymooning in SoHo with his newly wed bride. When his wife ducks out of their hotel room for coffee and a cigarette, Kyle is shocked when a strange visitor appears, enlisting Kyle’s help to prevent an unimaginable disaster that will take his bride’s life in the twin towers the following morning.

Described as “An action-packed time-travel tale…” by Kirkus Reviews, “Time Tunnel: The Towers” weaves in history and science to translate fantastic concepts like time travel into startling reality.

First the good. Richard Todd is either a genius with an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia, or is a very thorough researcher. This book, which I would consider a hybrid between science fiction and techno-thriller, is filled with incredible details about physics, modern history, Arabic, and other areas that I know probably took the author a lot of time to compile. Because the story involves the Roswell crash in 1947 and little grey men, as well as time travel, there’s a lot of suspension of disbelief. And the author deals with this by giving copious arguments to prove that you should believe what he’s telling you.

Now the bad. Technobabble. The author falls into the trap that many science-based authors fall into. They get caught up in the subject and forget the story. That’s not to say that the story isn’t exciting: it is very much so. But the author starts to develop characters and then they disappear into the background. We jump from time to time and person to person, and it’s hard to figure out who the story is really about until the last third of the book. As my colleague Kyle Portbury used to tell me: “Remember, it’s all about the story.” Don’t get so caught up with explaining how things work that you forget to tell the story.

That being said, the story is fun, and I want to read the sequels. But I wish the author would have focused more on the main character, rather than jumping around, trying to set up everything. Technobabble is often just skimmed over.

I give Time Tunnel four out of five stars.