I did not regret it.
I'm a fan of time travel, and have written a few (bad, amateur, silly) time travel stories during my six months of daily flash fiction. I can appreciate the standard stuff, but I enjoy when something a little different comes along. In TimeSplash, the past is distinct from the future and can't be changed... much. You can tamper with it, but you won't change the present because everything reverts back to normal - it does, however, play with local physics which causes some really trippy effects. The recommended method is to send someone back about fifty years to kill their own mother and then sit back, pop a few pills, and enjoy watching reality itself go on a bad trip.
The actual plot deals with the realization that going back past a certain distance makes these ripples do real damage. Whoops, now we have a terrorist weapon on out hands. Go back more than a hundred years and kill someone important and you might smash an entire city up, killing hundreds of thousands of people. The plot could, in theory, be done with anything that acts as a hard-to-trace weapon, but Storrs makes good use of the time travel aspect. I liked his choice of targets for the big attack, and really got a kick out of the descriptions during the trips with everything going haywire even before much had changed.
He ran across the pile of sand, kicking it around as he went. Patty thought he was just showing off, like young men often did around her, but then she noticed what was happening to the sand in his wake. It seemed to be jumping, vibrating, squirming. She screwed shut her eyes and looked again, as if they were the source of the strange blurriness she saw. Hal stopped at the far side of the pile and looked back at it proudly. With strange shifts of colour and position, the deep prints of his feet were slowly being erased. The weird, shifting of shape and colour spread briefly to the road surface around the heap, causing Patty to jump back in alarm as the effect rippled out toward her feet. In thirty dizzying seconds, the pile restored itself.
And that's just a pile of sand... So you can imagine the kind of things that happen once people are involved. The pacing was good - I read the whole thing in one sitting - and the plot was pretty tight. For terrorist purposes I wonder if nukes might not be simpler - or maybe just sending a bomb back in time rather than a person - but that's the kind of thing I tend to think about after finishing a book or movie. It didn't bother me while reading and there's at least some answer implied by the book for the latter. I also found myself wondering about whether or not governments were using this technology for spying purposes, something that wasn't really brought up, but in the end that doesn't matter because they would be doing smaller jumps that wouldn't cause damage and on top of that they certainly wouldn't mention it to the main characters.
The point is, it's good enough to make you wonder about stuff like that. It pulls you in and makes you think, "What would I do with this technology?" Especially kept to "safe" levels there are a lot of options and it could lend itself to another novel set in the same universe but exploring a more... controlled... application of time travel. Hint, hint. I also liked the way the story ended, including a few loose ends that were tied up in an unexpected way. I guess if I had one complaint it would be the romantic aspect, because the male lead is obsessed with the female lead due almost entirely to her looks, which serves to reinforce her self-stated issues. Had that bothered her or had he shown more interest in her personality it wouldn't have bugged me.
But that's a minor nitpick about a well-written and intriguing novel. Go buy it - you can pick up a digital copy HERE or get it specifically for your Kindle at Amazon.
