This was utterly brilliant! It’s a short story, mostly about the technicalities of a futuristic time-travel business. It reminds me a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s “The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England,” which was pretty similar in concept, though it interspersed the rules for time travel tourism throughout a full-length novel. My favorite part of that book was the handbook itself, which was hysterical… the story itself was so-so. While Scalzi is equally funny in general I think, judging by past works, this book wasn’t really intending to be funny exactly. It didn’t get stone-cold serious until the very end though, when we learn the narrator’s back story, and suddenly narrative tension enters the tale. I’m writing a time travel book now myself, though, and I took copious notes.
My rating: *****
Language: I don’t remember any? His other books are full of language though.
Violence: theoretical only, as it describes what *might* happen
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
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