Review of “Time Warped” by Micky O'Brady

Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)

Previous OCA-winner Micky O'Brady is back with yet another compelling story following a strong and spunky teenage heroine!

Imagine going back in time armed with knowledge and experience that even your supervisors, bosses, and experts don't have! What would you do? What would you say? Would you try to change things for the better or would you try to conserve and keep them the same?

Time Warped is a character-driven, thought-provoking sci-fi novel. It is also very dense—arguably needlessly so at times.

The book follows Nonie Thorburn, a 17-year-old cadet in the United Space Exploration Fleet (USEF), promoted early to lieutenant. Determined, resourceful, and morally driven, Nonie navigates complex missions and ethical dilemmas. Her backstory includes growing up as the daughter of Admiral Thorburn and overcoming physical and emotional challenges, such as adapting to her biosynthetic leg and enduring prejudice.

You know... there is so much to unpack with this book. It's actually kinda overwhelming Where do we even start?

Well, the core conflict involves the huge space war going on between the pro-human USEF and a mysterious and powerful alien race known as the Quaneez. This is a decades-long space war that has cost billions of lives and has resulted in a stalemate. That's right. In forty years of fighting, neither side has seemingly gained a distinct advantage. What a costly nightmare!

However, is that really where we should start our explanation of the plot of this book? Because the narrative seems to want to push the plot device of a suspicious viral pandemic that may have nefarious origins. This pandemic is used by the sketchy-as-heck USEF leadership as an excuse for Nonie's first couple of missions in the book. Nonie is essentially sent on a fool's errand to find a magical plant cure, actually not too dissimilar from the mission from The Adamantine Jewel by Jeffrey Pears. As you might expect, there's a lot more to it than that. After all, why would you send one of your least experienced officers? Well, the sketchy-as-heck USEF leadership seems to want plausible deniability should anything go wrong. They argue that they can just consider her a radical rogue agent. Gee, thanks!

But wait, there's more!

This book also heavily pushes this father-daughter/paternal relationship between the idealistic, gung ho Nonie and her grizzly, jaded, old, somewhat-discontented father, Admiral Thorburn. See, Nonie's father is controversially pro-alien (or at least an alien sympathizer) at a time of tremendous pro-human bigotry akin to Palpatine's Galactic Empire in Star Wars. Nonie's father also seems very apprehensive to support her desire to advance in the USEF, particularly her dream of joining the enigmatic Division 2, a secretive division of the USEF that presumably undertakes the most dangerous missions associated with human advancement and survival.

Nonie's relationship with her dad, though loving, also seems a bit strained due to him not supporting her goals. You really get the sense that Nonie starts her journey very bought-in on the USEF and its supposed purpose—almost like a blind loyalty to the USEF. However, her faith in the organization gradually degrades as lies, deception, and reasons for distrust reveal themselves to her.

Nonie's relationship with her dad is very similar to the relationship between Zach Aurelian and his dad in Academy Bound by J.C. Mastro. In fact, the two books share a lot of similarities including leaders of the space academy concealing information and hiding potentially-incriminating or inflammatory secrets from the cadets.

Anyway, Nonie is granted the Pioneer, a legendary and advanced USEF space ship capable of stealth and high-speed deep-space travel.

Relatively early on in the book, Nonie is attacked/ambushed by the Quaneez, the enemy alien race distinguished by their large size and yellow/golden beams. She is then swiftly implicated in a catastrophe that leads to the destruction of planet H-155, presumably leading to the deaths of millions (or even billions) of Quaneez.

Nonie and the reader eventually realize that the USEF was aware of planet H-155's Quaneez inhabitants as well as its unstable core (leading to the planetary extinction event).

But wait, there's more!

This isn't just a space-faring/space-fighting/space-colonization novel, but it's also a time-travel novel!

Nonie is sent forty years into the past like she's Samurai Jack because of a convergence of Quaneez advanced time-manipulation technology and snowballing circumstances on H-155 causing temporal displacement (or...something like that...).

Anyway, this takes Nonie to the time before the very first battle between the Quaneez and the USEF: the Battle of Balthar on May 15, 2255—a date which lives in infamy and in the collective conscience of many of the book's characters.

Several interesting layers are added in this core section of the book.
For one, Nonie meets people and figures she heard about or knew—all while they're alive and young. Perhaps the character who stood out to us the most in this regard was Captain Kieran Wildason, a legendary and iconic USEF military leader and hero who is held in high esteem by Nonie and other characters four-decades later.

Kieran is a nominee for both “Coolest Character” and “Hottest Character” as Nonie develops a huge crush on him in the book.

Nonie also meets her father, Arlen, when he was younger, being able to see him in a different light and better understand his point of view.

She meets several of the USEF admirals and eventual-admirals

She meets Dr. Relissa Vontel, the Magellan scientist whose experiments and technology are partly responsible for the phenomena that Nonie has been witnessing and experiencing. This is significant because the Magellans are not humans, they are aliens in an era of great human-centric bigotry. The Magellans are treated with some degree of suspicion and distrust despite their contributions, sorta like Jews in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.

She meets Commander Talen Rez’mor, a Quaneez diplomat who opens her eyes to the possibility of peace in the deadly and seemingly unending Quaneez War. Nonie is gradually able to realize her people's expansionist and imperialistic movements and how they've negatively impacted the Quaneez.

Talen's diplomatic point of view contrasts with the likes of people like Admiral Denrick Hale, who is quick to jump into/push for military action as the primary means of solving the issues with the Quaneez.

You really get the sense that the cadets of the USEF have been indoctrinated to believe that their side is absolutely right and that the Quaneez are absolutely evil and wrong. However, the truth lies somewhere in a gray area. Both sides are to blame, and the USEF definitely has villainous tendencies.

In fact, that is almost definitely the best thing about this book: the way it's able to show both sides of the conflict. Most people who fight for the USEF are ignorant (either willfully or otherwise) of who their enemy actually is. To most of them, the Quaneez are just the non-human other—the enemy. However, the Quaneez are far more than that. They are a people. They have a culture. They have their own society and their own way of doing things.

We loved that the author was able to humanize the Quaneez a bit via scenes like when Nonie notices a Quaneez child dressed in battle armor, leading her to wonder if the child is dressed like that as a way to keep her safe and protected, or because the Quaneez are a militant race like the Spartans.

The USEF, particularly their leaders (but also some of the cadets), are shown in a gray or negative light. Some are warmongers and bigots. Others, like Admiral Glazer, seem to have ulterior motives and might not have Nonie's best interest in mind. Nonie constantly feels like Glazer, despite his initial flattery and promotion of her, is setting her up like a pawn in a large chess game.

Their cadets are also shown to have negative traits, due in part to their indoctrination, such as when a few bully Nonie for her dad being pro-alien (and for her prosthetic leg).

The Quaneez, on the other hand, are a mystery. In forty years, we're told that the USEF learned little to nothing about them, their language, their culture, or their biology, largely because none of been captured alive. So, how do you negotiate peace with someone you can't know or understand? That's actually one of the biggest questions of the book.

Meanwhile, the Quaneez are not these misunderstood angelic characters, at least not entirely. Yes, they're misunderstood, but they're still warriors and they are largely responsible for countless human deaths. Throughout the book, Nonie and the others are forced into situations in which they have to fight them off and even kill them (or risk being killed themselves).

This book has a lot of good things about it, however, it also has some glaring weaknesses that we've already alluded to. It's too involved. We haven't even touched on attention-demanding secondary characters like Zio, Chase, and the half-dozen admirals (like Upinga and Conolly) who serve mainly to create clutter in what should be a fast-flowing story.

It's likely the author intended all of these side characters to serve as foils and add some depth and intrigue, but most of them just draw attention away from the main story, bogging it down.

And that's perhaps this book's biggest weakness of all: it's bogged down. It's incredibly (and needlessly) dense, which really disrupts the pacing and flow of the book.

Let's put it this way: this book doesn't fly; it hops, flutters, lands, then hops, flutters and lands again. It's like it can't get out of its own way. It's constantly stopping and hitting speed bump after speed bump after speed bump. Red light after red light after red light. Can we just...hit the gas pedal go already?

It always seems like this book is trying to do too many things at once—juggling space-faring, space warfare, time-travel, daddy issues, issues at school/the academy, racial issues (with the Quaneez and Magellans), political intrigue, Nonie's disability, Nonie being mislabeled a traitor and a potential turncoat spy; the mystery surrounding Nonie's mom, the mystery surrounding the Quaneez and the war with them, the mystery surrounding Magellan and Quaneez technologies, the mystery of the viral pandemic and the pseudo-magical panacea plant that's supposed to cure it; falling in love with a dude 40 years your senior then having to rescue him; realizing you've bonded with some people named Zio and Chase and now you guys are ride-and-die mates.

It's like the narrative of this book just can't focus on anything. Because of that, it slows and bogs down the reading experience.

You know what it is? It's like a Pile On effect. Things like plot threads and character traits are just stacked on top of things that are stacked on top of things, starting to read like arbitrary lists of things rather than plot threads or character traits in their own right.

That was kinda an issue in Playing with #Fire too. The core story and characters were great, but there was a lot of meandering in the middle that bogged it down.

We usually take about one to two days to read a book. This book took us about half a week. It's not because it's long, it's because our interest kept waning. In other words, we kept closing it and putting it down.

We were being asked to be interested (and stay interested) in way too many things and way too many characters all at one time. Can't we just follow Nonie as she goes back in time, realizes what she needs to realize about the Quaneez and the USEF, then get on with it already? Why does the story have to be so winding and weaving like a chaotic mountainside roadway? The plot, at its core, really isn't that complicated, and it really didn't need to be. That's how we felt, anyway.

Like, 5 Moons of Tiiana by P.T. Harry was a pretty complicated epic sci-fi novel. There were numerous alien races, all with their own conflicts. However, the book never felt like it was overstaying its welcome or that we were waiting on a forgone conclusion.

It is pretty clear early on in Time Warped what's going on—who is right and who is wrong. It is very clear early on the kind of arc and realization that Nonie is eventually going to come to. So, a lot of this book seems like... waiting. Waiting for the thing you expect to happen to finally happen.

At least the final battle scene is epic, although it really demonstrates what we were talking about: because of the time-travel aspect, Nonie already knows what's going to happen in this battle. She keeps telling us that, even though her body reacts with nervousness and anxiety, she already knows the outcome. So, a lot of the tension seems lost. And perhaps that's a symptom of being a time-travel story. See, time-travel stories (like multiverse stories) often suffer from a lack of tension due to a lack of lasting consequences.

Yes, we see a planet destroyed early on, but things like this always seem solvable or reversible in these time-travel and multiverse stories, whether they are or not. Even her reaction to the planet being destroyed—one racked with guilt and remorse—seems somewhat humorous to the reader who knows that this is happening way too early in the story to seem earned or deserved. It's hard to get an emotional rise out of the audience without adequately building to it first. Furthermore, the number of the potential casualties in thrown out there so willy nilly that it almost seems meaningless. What is a million or a billion or a trillion or a gazillion casualties if we really haven't gotten to know who these people are? Like, when Alderaan was destroyed in Star Wars: A New Hope, at least we knew that it was Princess Leia's home planet. We had a character we liked who had a direct connection with the planet that was destroyed. When Majin Buu destroyed the Earth near the end of Dragon Ball Z, it meant something because most of Dragon Ball and most of its characters were tied to Earth in some way. And, by the way, we live on the Earth, so there's that too...

In what way was Nonie tied to planet H-155? In what way was she emotionally invested in it? And why should we (the reader) be emotionally invested in it? Why? Because it essentially meant she failed her mission in the worst imaginable way and might be demoted, shamed, or worse... expelled (as Hermione put it).

You could argue it could escalate hostilities with the Quaneez, but... wait a minute, the war never ended and peace was never negotiated much less agreed upon because the USEF never learned the Quaneez language. So... what are the stakes again? Why are we still waiting for this book to hit another gear and start moving in a surprising direction again?

Anyway, this is ultimately a solid to good book with some noticeable pacing and flow issues.
It's still worth a read if you're into sci-fi that tackles big ethical questions.

Check it out on Amazon!