Country: USA
Genre: Adventure/Pulp Fiction
Pages: 468 kb (eOriginal)
Order A RIP THROUGH TIME here
See, up until Berlin caught a case of batshit crazy and barricaded himself in his lab, he'd been considered humankind's greatest living treasure - the kind of mind that comes along maybe once a century. You know the type. Aristotle. Galileo. Einstein. Hawking. Only you know what Berlin has that those guys didn't? The Company, that's what.
The quarrel between readers and non-readers rages overs the following questions: is reading supposed to be fun? If reading is that fun, nourishing, transcendent activity, why reading the classic writers is such a chore and why do they make me feel stupid? These questions are all valid and aren't easy to defend. David Cranmer's outfit Beat to a Pulp is a great argument for reading, though. It's less about the writer and the feeling of exclusivity of knowing and understanding one's work and more about putting some cool stories and fun literature in the world. His collection A RIP THROUGH TIME is another cool, thinking-outside-the-box project. Five short stories, four writers, one storyline (along with an essay by Ron Scheer at the end), the adventures of time cop Simon Rip. It's not the first "franchise" character he outsources to other writers and hopefully not the last. A RIP THROUGH TIME is wacky, over-the-top and incredibly fun to read. If this was mandatory reading in American classrooms, 90% of the people would read in public transportation.
So who's this Simon Rip exactly? He's head of security for time infraction at The Company, who have hired and funded Dr. Robert Berlin to invent the Baryon Core a device that can predict the future and also retrodict the past by tracking position and vector of every particle of the universe. When Berlin steals his own creation and disappears somewhere in time *, Rip goes after him, along with beautiful Dr. Serena Ludwig to retrieve what is company property. But it's nothing is what it seems to be and digging for Dr. berlin through history, he will come to a better understanding of what The Company is and why do they want to Baryon Core so desperately. He'll have to chase Berlin down from the ice age to the end of times and reevaluate his professional choices in the midst of all that.
David Cranmer is a smart man. The contributing writers to this anthology were carefully chosen for one particular trait, their ability to complement each other. They all have a similar style, with slight differences. Chris F. Holm's opener has great tension, but the story that stood out is Chad Eagleton's conclusion DARKLING IN THE ETERNAL SPACE. It's by far the boldest story and it goes so far into time travel physics and logic, while keeping good pacing and humor, that it stood above the other. It was so much fun to read, it would've made J.J Abrams and Damon Lindelof want to chop their balls off for being unworthy (and this is coming from a LOST fan). There's nothing I appreciated more to this collection than Rip being cannonballed at the end of times (that passage contained a nice wink to Arthur C. Clark, by the way) and having to deal with a difficult personality. Chad Eagleton wrote another story called THE FINAL PAINTING OF HAWLEY EXTON, which is very different, but it's more of an exclamation point. An epilogue if you will.
Chronal energies dissipated, leaving Rip ankle-deep in the muddy waters of Havana's bay. Seagulls wheeled and cried. A warm salt-breeze pressed against his back. Only moments before he'd been fighting for his life in the relative cold of southern England, trading blows with Saxons and sorcerers. He shook his head. The far-off time of King Arthur collapsed like a daydream.
Charles Gramlich's and Garnett Elliot's stories are no weak spots either. In fact, they are so seamlessly constructed, they could've been one and the same story. I think I barely noticed the switch and that's a good thing. Means they prioritized the narrative over anything else and succeeded at keeping me sucked in. Ron Scheer's essay at the end was also enjoyable. It tapped into my academic weakness (physics), but he kept me in the loop by using a historical perspective on the physics of H.G Wells' time travel. Overall I loved the freshness and the crazy pacing, kept up by the use of many writers. Score it as another success for Beat to a Pulp publishing and a triumphant return for time travel literature. A RIP THROUGH TIME is both a blast to read and pushes you intellectually with questions of physics and the ethics of time travel. It's cheap, fun, involving, has a bombastic conclusion and there will be a new Simon Rip novella coming from Chad Eagleton soon. What's there not to like?
FOUR STARS
* Notice the Iron Maiden reference here.