Book #50 of 2023: Shatter War: A Time Shards Novel

Shatter War by Dana Fredsti and David Fitzgerald. Book 2 of the Time Shards series, previous book reviewed in my last post.

I loved the first book of this series so much, but I felt the opposite about the second.

The first book was such a fun romp: The timeline shattered, and chunks ("shards") of time got all mixed up, so you'd have a mile of Ancient Egypt next to a block of 1950s America next to a football field-sized patch of prehistoric jungle next to a three square foot chunk of city from the year 3,000. A group of characters from vastly different times got together and were trying to survive.

The second book was set in the same world, but felt so much different. The plot's bad guy had a "chemical compound" that would turn humans into perfect slaves. If he ordered them to stop breathing or stop their heart beating, they'd do it and die. The compound lasted forever. (In the book, an advanced AI checked the compound and confirmed it was a mix of chemicals, so it wasn't nanotech or something.) You'd think with the rest of the storyline being about the timeline shattering that I could just accept that that chemical compound existed, but it made zero sense to me. What chemicals could do that? And never wear off?

The book's bigger issue was the Nazis. The authors had the entire human and pre-human history of the world to play with. They needed a bad guy group, and they picked the Nazis? That's about the easiest, least creative choice you could go with. In the whole history of this world (and fictional thousands of years in the future), there wasn't one single more interesting choice than Nazis?

And lastly, a complaint held over from book one: I fully understand that all through history women have been raped, and if you go not too far back, men sometimes talked about women like nothing more than objects, but wow. I got tired of reading it in these two books. The history in the books seemed to be accurate, so I understand where all the rape and the "don't be selfish, share your white woman with our army" stuff came from, but I didn't enjoy reading it at all.

I don't know why I've been pushing myself to not DNF books lately. I was ready to DNF this one at the 30% point, but I pushed myself to finish it (with lots of skimming). I should have DNFed it.