This was an enjoyable read with a plot twist that I didn't see coming. Well done to BE for that. ( )

A story based on the premise of what would happen if Franz Ferdinand was not killed. An enjoyable read that was a bit too predictable at times. ( )

Hugh Stanton is sent back in time to stop the Great War. The scientists from 2025 think that if the Great War is stopped the world would be a better place. So interesting and well written, the characters are well developed and you follow along for the ride. ( )

I remember Ben Elton for his talented writing of the Blackadder series. The 'blurb' attracted me to purchase this. Its the e-book that I read.

Novels are something new to me, by him.

I enjoyed this it was an interesting idea and quite well executed.

I enjoy science fiction, especially when mixed with some version of reality. This book has a couple of interesting twists in it that would be considered spoilers if discussed in a review.

The story flicks between 2024/5 and 1914. The main protagonist is an ex special forces, and TV survivalist (too close for comfort I would have thought with a certain real life individual). He is bounced back in time to complete a mission to save the 20th century.

While reading it I couldn't help drawing parallels between other science fiction (books and film) of this genre - The Butterfly Effect, Terminator series - springs to mind. It also seemed to me that there was a bit of confusion about what the main style should be. There was the science fiction element of time travel and alternate reality, several 'set pieces' such as the Orient Express, romance and action sequences. The secondary characters aren't particularly well developed, making them more of scenery than people. Unfortunately the scenery (worlds of 2024/5 and 1914) also lack development. The world of 2024 relies on our perceptions of 2014 to flesh it out. The historical 1941, likewise, relies on the readers' to fill in the banks. One could be cynical and suggest that this work was written with the primary aim of making it attractive to a film producer...we shall wait and see.

As I said. Enjoyable. Also easy reading and interesting ideas. Three stars because there were a few plot lines that really didn't go anywhere - Bernadette being one of them - and some confusion over the novel's identity - sic-fi, historical, romance, action? ( )

Ok, first thing: Overall, I think I liked it. It was an easy read and a very captivating at that. I spent half of the night reading cause I just couldn't stop, i wanted so much to know what happens next.
But. BUT.
Second thing: it was interesting and disappointing at the same time.

The main character was as unsympathetic as they come.
He is a James Bond slash Bear Grylls slash soap opera whiner type. He's all like "I'm tall and handsome and super trained in arms and combat and can survive in wilderness and omg i'm so famous it's so unfortunate and i'm so sad cause my family died and i will never be happy again or fall in love again because did i mention my wife died?.."
He spends about 30% of the book whining about that which doesn't stop him at all to sleep with another woman (why not, eh?) and assessing the other (who is actually a visitor from future so she's an important ally) in terms of "she can be even beautiful". Yeah, cause that's what's important about her.

Anyway. The main character's idiocy aside, there's some author's idiocy. No, sorry, don't wanna be rude. It's not idiocy actually or even being stupid, it's just a very superficial approach to the research.
The sandwich theory, really? Let's popularize that idiotic idea some more.
Using "gulag" as a synonym for a "camp", really? Does Ben Elton even knows, what "gulag" means? (Spoiler alert: it doesn't mean "camp"). "...died in Russian gulags", "... was sent to the Stornoway gulag", my god.
Saying something like "German Soviet Communism", really? German Soviet? Because "soviet" is such a german word? Gosh.

But, going back to the positive side, it is interesting.
And it does have a nice twist closer to the end (it was really a WOW moment for me). So I suppose if you're looking for a weekend read that is not so bad and has a time travel plot, this one can be it. ( )

I really like this time travel book - it actually makes sense, which is not an easy feat for time traveling. Plus, it covers a very interesting time period and has some surprises up the sleeve that I actually did not see coming. ( )

It's been a while since my last Ben Elton and I was totally entranced from the very first page. I loved the characters, the prose, the premise and the execution.

This was a book that I read in under 24 hours and I could easily have handled another 300 pages. Such a great story: the relevant historical period was well researched and the future visions were believable.

Time travel is a particular favourite topic of mine and Mr Elton did it justice. ( )

Time And Time AgainI bought "Time And Time Again" because Ben Elton wrote it and because the cover art (unlike the title) is original and intriguing.

What I got was initially a lot of fun but finally became something brutal, depressing, and horribly plausible.

I was so surprised that, as I finished the book, I found myself feeling angry at Ben Elton for having broken the implicit contract between writer and reader about the type of experience I'd signed up for. If I'd reviewed the book right then, it would have pitched between a confused "WTF was that?" and a disappointed "How could he do that to me?"

Fortunately, I didn't have time to write anything right away because, as the days passed, I couldn't get the book out of my head and I started to understand what Ben Elton had really done.

To be honest, I wish he hadn't done it but you can't unread a book and I can't undo the fact that Ben Elton has abraded my smug view of history as a narrative and left me with something raw and bleeding and much less romantic.

Normally, I enjoy the time travel trope. Who doesn't want to speculate on how things would have turned out "if only"? Normally, I expect a spectacle of altered cause and changed effect that move quickly enough to keep me dizzy and off balance while feeling slightly smug about knowing (at least some of) the history and getting a vicarious tingle from the new possibilities.

"Time And Time Again" starts off like that. in 2025, our hero, an ex-SAS Captain with a degree in history from Trinity College Cambridge, a flair for languages, and a tragedy in his recent past that has destroyed his will to live, is recruited by his old History Professor to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime chance to travel back to 1914 and stop the Great War.

The details are original and fun, so I won't share them here but in a relatively short time our twenty-first century Captain is in Istanbul in 1914, bumping up against the obnoxious behaviour of privileged Brits and trying to move west without being noticed. He has to sit on his anger at the Brits of the day because not to do so would put his mission, to save the world from a war that would destroy a generation, at risk.

The fun continues when, travelling west on the Orient Express, he meets a young Irish Suffragette and falls instantly in lust. The exchanges between them made me laugh out loud. He can't keep twenty-first century idioms out of his speech and she is swept away by his New Man views on sexual equality. When he quotes the yet-to-exist Mao and say that "Women hold up half the sky" she practically wants to take him where he sits.

At this point, I settled down into the book, thinking I'd found a romance/thriller that would turn out to be a John Buchanan style ripping good read.

I should have remembered that I was reading Ben Elton. His books are never that simple.

As the story progressed. I started to feel less and less comfortable with Our Her0's certainty that he was right and that the mission to save the world justified any action he needed to take and any casualties that might be suffered along the way, but I was still wrapped up in the thriller aspects of the plot. I wanted to know what happened next. I wanted to know how he pulled it off.

As more and more things started to go wrong, I could see less and less ways for Our Hero to win. I got all the way to the point where Ben Elton stepped outside Our Hero's narrative to reframe the story before it occurred to me that, maybe, winning hadn't been the real objective of the story.

The last section of the book, after the reframing, is shocking, brutal, and hard to look away from. It seems to challenge all the assumptions that the rest of the book was built on, but what it really challenged was all the assumptions made by Our Hero, destroying his belief in his mission, his values and his whole view of history. He was raised to view history either as Romantic (shaped by the actions of individuals) or Deterministic (progressing along an inevitable path, shaped by socio-economic forces). This is pretty much how I was raised as well. By the end of the book, Ben Elton has made me see that either view of history is self-serving, creating a comfortable narrative that gives me a context I can live with. So going back in time to change the narrative is fundamentally pointless. The real point of history is that is was somebody's present and they had to deal with whatever that present threw at them.

I recommend this book as a fascinating but uncomfortable read. Which, thinking about it, I could use as a description of almost all of Ben Elton's books.




( )

A really good book, time travel, history, what ifs and so much more.
Very different, I highly recommend it ( )

Loved this. This book would make a great movie, or a tv series. At the end it could be extended out for another season or two. But as I was reading every chapter felt like it could be a scene in a film. I’d love to write the screenplay for it, or just watch it on the screen. An enjoyable, suspenseful, great time travel story well paced and constantly interesting. Really enjoyable. ( )

Loved this. This book would make a great movie, or a tv series. At the end it could be extended out for another season or two. But as I was reading every chapter felt like it could be a scene in a film. I’d love to write the screenplay for it, or just watch it on the screen. An enjoyable, suspenseful, great time travel story well paced and constantly interesting. Really enjoyable. ( )

Frankly, I was less than impressed with the first two thirds of this book. While the premise and writing are quite good, the story was bogged down with the personal angst of the main character. However, the last third left that behind (for the most part) and really focused on the main plot. There are many twists and turns, and I was engrossed until the final page. It was well worth the wait. ( )

[spoiler in final paragraph]

I haven’t read a Ben Elton book in years - since he stopped being funny, pretty much. As usual, I found myself wondering why. He does write exceptionally well - here managing to break down a particularly complicated chunk of history into bite sized chunks for the historically challenged.

Any book that hinges on time travel as this does must surely be an incredibly complicated undertaking. You have to take account of so many different ifs/buts/effects/paradoxes, the sort of thing that would make me give up after ten minutes. So bravo to Mr Elton for pulling it off.

SPOILER ALERT!!! I did find myself wondering about the purpose of the professor accompanying Stanton into the past - was it simply to allow for the physical confrontation once he put two and two together about his wife’s accident? I was convinced that the laws of fiction insisted she didn’t die when falling from the train and would pop up later, probably in some heroic capacity. That didn’t seem to happen. So...I’m puzzled, that’s all ( )

I don't often do this, but I just didn't enjoy this book enough to finish it. I never connected with the characters and it just didn't grab my attention and hold it. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this rather far fetched story.
Hugh Stanton an ex soldier down on his luck living in England 2025 volunteers even though he's convinced it wont work to travel back in time to 1914 to prevent World War I. (Issac Newton had explained a special time continuation concept that was past down the ages)
He travels back then makes his way to Sarajevo to save the Archduke Ferdinand getting assassinated.
He also has to travel to Germany and kill the Kaiser. Along the way he has to dispose of his old tutor who tricked him, he also falls in love with a nice Irish girl called Bernadette.
This is a well written original story.
Hugh has to go on the run a few times, he also meets a girl who came from the future after him this is the bit that confused me, it seems there had been a few people changing and rewriting history.
Great read. ( )

Time and Time again... indeed an interesting book and a good read.

Time is endless and it is all a loop, or do we call it an "illusion"...

Why am I here and what is my mission to accomplish?
Can I go back in time and change few things, for a better today?
Many many similar questions are running in my mind...
( )

Like so many boys before and after me, I was transformed into a lifetime reader on the day that I discovered the science fiction genre. I was particularly intrigued by time travel stories involving the various paradoxes that writers so much enjoy exploring. You know the kind of thing I’m referring to, questions that at their most basic boil down to something like “what will happen if I accidentally kill my own grandfather fifty years before I was born?” It’s a good day when I discover a time-travel novel that takes itself seriously and doesn’t turn into just an excuse to set some run-of-the-mill thriller in a different century in order to make it appear to be better than it really is.

I’m happy to report that Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again takes itself very seriously, and that it explores an aspect of time-travel that is most often overlooked or ignored. The novel does, however, begin with a time travel cliché that had me wondering for a while whether I had made a mistake by beginning it. At first, Time and Time Again appears to be just another of those time travel novels where a time-traveler from the future returns to the past to kill or otherwise incapacitate one of history’s bad guys. These are most often referred to as “let’s send someone back to the past to kill Hitler” novels.

Hugh Stanton, ex-Army, is a man who cannot think of a single good reason to go on living. Not only has he been kicked out of the army, but a hit-and-run driver has recently struck and killed Stanton’s wife and two young children. So he plays along when his old Trinity College professor says to him, “If you could change one thing in history, if you had the opportunity to go back into the past, to one place and one time and change one thing, where would you go? What would you do?” After much debate, Stanton and Professor McCluskey agree that the best way to save the twentieth century from itself would be to prevent World War I from ever starting. But although he agrees to give it a shot (pun intended), Stanton remains a time-travel skeptic right up until the moment he steps out of a 1914 hospital basement.

Thus begins a great adventure in which Stanton is charged with preventing the assassination credited with starting the war. In addition, he is tasked with the assassination of a different head of state, effectively (or so it is hoped) ensuring that the century will begin in world peace rather than in world war. Along the way, Stanton falls in love and is almost killed but still manages to complete the job he was assigned during the 2024 Christmas Season.

But what if Stanton’s tinkering with history does more harm than good? Does humanity even deserve a second chance to get things right? How about a third or fourth chance?

Bottom Line: Ben Elton has filled Time and Time Again with so many unexpected twists and turns that even the most experienced time-travel fan is kept guessing right up to the book’s final page. This is one I recommend to all the genre fans out there that may have grown frustrated about how difficult it is to find a good time-travel novel these days. Time and Time Again is one of the good ones. ( )

I got a little snitty reading this book, complaining to my self, and to husband, that if someone's going to write a time-travel book, at least they should know history. I even went to tweet about it, and then had the sudden thought that the things that were bothering me, might actually be a plot element, and I shouldn't go all history major on the author, but be patient and read the book. Glad I listened to myself. It allowed me to figure out one plot twist, but be surprised still by another. But, let me ask you this: if you could go back in history and change one thing to fix the wrongs of the world, what would it be?

tags: 2016-read, made-me-look-something-up, made-me-think, read, science-fiction, thank-you-charleston-county-library, time-travel-reincarnation-etc ( )

A rip-roaring good yarn. Hugh Stanton is a former soldier who is recruited to travel back in time (via instructions left by Isaac Newton, no less) to 1914, to stop Gavilo Princeps from assassinating Franz Ferdinand and thus avert the blood bath of The Great War. Or course, problems ensue as they are bound to do when you dabble in time. A fun read. ( )

The first chapter of this starts in 1914, where Hugh Stanton stops a woman from being killed by some reckless driving British Military types of the period, then the story moves to 2024 where we meet Hugh Stantonn again, only he's younger then, by a few months and we move into a rollercoaster ride of assassination and attempts to change the world. As the story unfolds you realise that each action causes a variety of cascades and the results can't be predicted.

Interesting and made me think, but there were times when I lost the train of thinking, very much a what if this happened and then... well thought through but sometimes it felt a bit too much and then too little. ( )

An engaging novel of do overs and unintended consequences. ( )

It gets you thinking whilst your reading and the ending opens up opportunities for much more thinking writing discussing, dreaming. Really the options are unlimited. ( )

In 2024, former soldier, Hugh 'Guts' Stanton is recruited by his old professor at Cambridge to go back in time, following Sir Isaac Newton's guidance from 300 years earlier, to 1914 and basically prevent WWI from happening, thereby avoiding the biggest loss of life of the 20th century and changing the course of history. Hugh travels back in time, but is it really the best thing to do to mess around with history or could doing so actually make things worse?

I've tried to read Ben Elton's books before and gave up each time, but because I love time travel I thought this book would be worth me trying his work again and I wasn't disappointed. I really enjoyed how the story unfolded and thought it was ultimately a clever look at what might happen if you mess around with things, even if you think you are doing the right thing.

I liked the writing and didn't find it too technical. There were a couple of things that didn't ring true to what I believe would happen in a time travel situation but that didn't really matter. Ultimately this was a very thought-provoking book and I think it was well-researched. A great read. ( )