Twelve. In Times Like These (box set sample) by Nathan Van Coops
2018, self published, appr. 122 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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One of the nice features of kindle books is that you can download a sample for free. After reading a few chapters, you can usually make up your mind if the book is worth whatever they’re charging for it, and they cleverly put a button at the end of the sample that makes it problematically easy to purchase the remainder of the book and pick up right where you left off.
On the other hand, kindle devices also have advertisement as their screen savers, primarily for books distributed by Amazon itself. For the most part, I don’t pay attention to the advertisement. Whatever algorithm is involved in making the decision of which type of books to offer me was probably very weakly constructed (otherwise I can only describe its tenacity in offering me romance novels as brute force), and, at least according to the blurbs that are used to persuade you to buy the book, Amazon’s threshold for publication is very low, and therefore I don’t bother with trying these books.
One frequent advertisement did catch my eye, because I love time travel stories. It offered a whole box set of books in a series named “In Times Like These”. At some point I took the bait. A free sample of a genre that I will probably like is something I can invest some time in. The sample turned out to be very generous. Of the five books included in the box set, you get the traditional sample from the first book in the series, also titled “In Times Like These”, but you also get the complete novella titled “Clockwise & Gone”, which I understand is not part of the series but takes place in the world of the four novels. As this was an investment of time equivalent to a short book in itself, I’ve included it in the list of Sixty Books.
The series has an interesting premise — it relies heavily on the theory of multiverses and the ability to jump between timelines, and replaces the same entity paradox (i.e. meeting yourself in the past or future), with the fact that it is a version of yourself that does not have an effect on your own timeline. The usual tropes are there — they are expected and they help to easily navigate the books without the author having to provide a lot of scientific background. There is the professor who has invented the ability to travel through time and can mentor and guide the protagonists, who were accidentally sent back in time. There is (apparently) a governing body making sure that time travelers follow specific rules, and some rogue travelers who do not. There are amusing encounters in the past, some adventures and danger, and the chapters are short enough to be very easily readable.
The series, at least according to the enclosed full novella and the first few chapters of the first book, has drawn me in very quickly, and I was very interested to learn what happens to the characters and how they end up resolving the troubles they find themselves in. I will definitely add the four books in the series to my list and will eventually get to read them, in time. Pun intended.
