Kelly Robson.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
Tor. 2018
rating : 3.5 : worth reading
review : 25 May 2020
In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells to reclaim humanity’s ancestral habitat. She’s spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately Minh’s kind of long-term restoration projects have been stalled by the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity to take a team to 2024 BCE to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.
Minh, an old woman with six mechanical tentacles in place of her legs, restores river systems on a ecologically devastated Earth. When she is given the opportunity to travel back over 4000 years in time to study the Euphrates river in its pristine glory, she is at first dubious – recently-developed time travel has nearly destroyed her livelihood – then more enthusiastic. She pulls together her equally dysfunctional team, and off they go. But they discover that the Euphrates is quite heavily populated, and the natives are not at all primitive. Minh and her team might be lucky to survive.
Some great world building, some laugh-out-loud proposal bidding practices, the obligatory post-apocalyptic time travel technology, a seemingly missing page, job-obsessed characters, and a peculiarly abrupt ending, make this an uneven, but interesting, reading experience.