The Zenda Vendetta

Still like the series, but Hawke's better at keeping relationships glib. I know the side plot was carried through, but it wasn't a part I liked much. Giving depth to shallow characters doesn't work often and his shallow characters are fine as they are.

The 20th book I know I've read by Hawke.

The gang's back, this time with the direct involvement of their boss, Moses Forrester. It appears that Forrester did some 'naughty' stuff on his first mission, which resulted in a kid (don't worry; this comes up immediately in the book). The kid, who now looks about 30 but is actually 79, and an old flame of Forrester's decide on some payback. Oh, and they are the last members of TimeKeepers still around, so there's that as well.

As I mentioned in my last review, the TimeWars, at least up to then, and this book, does not relate to warring times or the like. But to one time that decides to settle their disputes by inserting members of 27th century military personal back in time. During conflicts. show more And 'judge' the results. I mention this issue because it's mentioned several times in this book. It's the purpose behind TimeKeepers. They are like Green Peace - in that Green Peace has been known to ram whaling boats to stop the people on the boats from whaling. Well, TimeKeepers fuck with time to try to show that fighting wars back in time is super stupid. As any sane person would know without having to have them involved (hell, the guy who invented the devices that allow time travel knew it, got insane over it, and killed himself over it).

So, in this specific instance, a specific person is about to be crowned king in some made up country in Central Europe in 1891. That country being a ‘vest pocket’ kingdom named ‘Ruritania’. Which is both a fictional country, and something that popped up in real, fiction, books way back when. The TimeKeepers, in the form of this really super hot chick, and Forrester’s son, are attempting to both disrupt this crowning moment, while also kill Andre Cross, Lucas Priest, and Finn Delaney. They’d like to get Forrester to, though he is desk bound now-a-days so that’s unlikely (ha, send him a letter, he’ll travel in time).

I’d mentioned before, in another review, that I liked how Hawke combined real world history with a science fiction/time travel story. Though I didn’t specifically like the ‘good guys’. Well, that mostly continues in this book. Mostly because the ‘bad guys’ side seems more reasonable than whatever weird thing the ‘good guys’ are fighting for. It’s vaguely annoying that I kind of entered this series a while back (as in the 1980s, 1990s) with this idea that the TimeWars people were working to protect time. To keep it from destabilizing. Annoying because, while that is true, for the most part they are making ‘adjustment’s that they wouldn’t have to be making if they weren’t fucking back in time to begin with. But, whatever.

I entered this book somewhat reluctantly because I knew, unlike past books, this one would be fiction set in . . . fiction. As in, instead of the story set against ‘stuff’ that really happened back in time, the story is set against. . well, the idea of something that could have happened back in time. Sure, Ruritania popped up in a set of books released in the late 1890s, but it’s still a fictional country. And sure, the last book by Hawke, the Pimpernel Plot one, involved a fictional character as the back story (from a play from something like 1905), but it still had as it’s backing the real French Revolution (hmm, and heh, I just learned that one of the main villains in that book, Chauvelin, actually is based on a real person who actually lived through the time and was an officer under Napoleon. Unlike how the book just tossed out something like ‘it doesn’t matter that he died, he was going to die in a year anyway’).

As happens, I distracted myself.

I was reluctant to begin this book because it seemed to be veering away from one of the things I liked about the series (time travels working and acting in a real world historical setting). But I did begin the book, and I found it actually quite entertaining. It was ‘good enough’. I’d give it around a 3.7 or 3.8 rating.

April 7 2016 show less

This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot.wordpress.leafmarks.com & Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road Facebook Group by Bookstooge's Exalted Permission. Title: The Zenda Vendetta Series: Time Wars Author: Simon Hawke Rating: 3 of 5 Stars Genre: SFF Pages: 210 Synopsis: The Time Commando's head out to mop up the last of the time terrorists, who are hellbent on causing a time split and potentially ending the universe. However, the Commando's don't have all the info, as their commander has held back some very personal show more revelations. My Thoughts: First book where I hadn't read the original book this was based on. To be honest, I don't feel like I missed a thing and I also have no desire to search and read The Prisoner of Zenda. That rat Mongoose [how ironic] is finally killed for real. This was mainly about the head of the Time Commando's, Forrester and how his past actions are coming back to bite him, and everyone else in his timestream, in the butt. Passable action but not quite enough to take your attention away from the lack of characterization and overall b-list writing. Mediocre is the best word I can use to describe this. Good enough to keep reading for awhile but it does mean that if things don't change, that this series' death knell has tolled. " show less

The Prisoner of Zenda gets the Time Wars treatment for the fourth installment of the series. In this outing our now regular team of commandos need to travel to the Balkan nation of Ruritania in 1891 to thwart the last vestiges of the temporal terrorist group known as the Timekeepers. (This is the same group that was causing trouble in The Timekeeper Conspiracy.) What follows is a tale filled with action and intrigue. One where the temporal agents have to use their wits as well as their technology to save the day. It's a book I'm glad to have on my shelf.
--J.

Anthony Hope’s original book, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), is a dashing tale of adventure in a middle European kingdom. Rudolf, about to be crowned king of Ruritania, is kidnapped by Black Michael, his half-brother; but just then an Englishman, also called Rudolf and bearing a remarkable resemblance to his namesake (of whom he’s a distant blood relation), happens to visit the country and is persuaded by a pair of loyalists to impersonate the kidnapped king until he can be rescued. There are castles to be stormed, swordsmen to be outfought, and a beautiful princess who falls in love with the fake king.

It’s a robust plot with some potentially lively characters. But the English hero, though brave and reasonably honourable, is an show more overgrown schoolboy and almost as much of a bullet-headed oaf as the members of the gang he’s up against. The conduct of his romance with the rather insipid princess Flavia is quite implausible.

A good yarn, then, but not especially well told.

Much later, along comes Simon Hawke, in search of somewhere new to send his time commandos (already veterans of three previous novels); and he cheekily clocks them back from 27th century Los Angeles to 19th century Ruritania, charged with the unlikely mission of preserving the course of history as documented in Hope’s novel. As usual, the course of ‘history’ is endangered by the Timekeepers, a by now seriously depleted guerilla organisation bent on sabotaging the time stream. This time, they’ve killed Rudolf Rassendyll before he reaches Ruritania, forcing the Temporal Corps to substitute one of its own men—who, by happy coincidence, happens to resemble both Rudolfs as closely as they resemble each other.

The plot of Hawke’s book follows the original quite closely for some time, and then diverges only in detail, but it does of course add a number of new characters and a whole new level of intrigue, and, although not a long novel, it’s about 50% longer than the original.

It seems to me that the result is something more than mere plagiarism. In the same way as an author will sometimes show the same fictional events from the viewpoint of different characters, so Simon Hawke gives us a rerun of the same fictional events—at least from the same starting point—from the viewpoint of a different author. It could be a new art form. I wonder whether Hawke happened to read David Langford’s 1977 short story, “Accretion”, which suggested something rather similar.

Although essentially a writer of action adventures, Hawke is a man of some intelligence and has his thoughtful side—more than can be said of Hope. Thus, in his book, Hawke not only deals with the extra plot complications he introduces, he also enlarges and improves on the original characterizations, making most of the participants more likeable and interesting than Hope managed to do; and yet without fundamentally changing their natures. Being, evidently, a believer in female equality (which Hope certainly wasn’t), he brings on one of his own strong female characters as the chief Timekeeper; and he goes to some trouble to improve the credibility of the impostor’s relationship with the princess.

I have no biographical details on Simon Hawke, but he must have spent some time in the US army, possibly as one of the Vietnam draftees, and his military personnel have an authentic-seeming weary cynicism. He’s clearly more interested in intrigue and strategy than in violence, but he seems to have the soldier’s acceptance of violence as part of the job, and he manages to put it over with a rather clinical detachment and a redeeming lack of enthusiasm. Although his regular characters are part of a military organisation, they function more like secret agents.

I have to admire the fluency with which he turns out these novels. It seems almost effortless. Of course, he’s helped by getting much of the framework of each story from someone else; but I think he contributes enough of his own to make the exercise worthwhile. show less