![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Cheap Copy
Sep. 3rd, 2018 11:14 pmAug 2017
Just One Damn Thing After Another - Jodi Taylor – Accent Press, 2015
* *
This is a (mostly) lighthearted book about Madeleine Maxwell (Max), a historian who is recruited by a university institute based in a stately home that uses time travel technology to send adventurous academics to study historical events at first hand. If this concept sounds very familiar to you, it is probably because you have read something by that fine writer Connie Willis. Many of her books use exactly this setup, except that they start in 2060s Oxford.
Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this. Most artists start by emulating the ideas and styles of the people that they admire before putting their own spin on it - Beethoven's early symphonies closely follow those of Haydn, for example, and Picasso's early work is a follow-up to El Greco and the Symbolists. Indeed, one could say that the essence of creative development is thoughtful plagiarism, which is why the strict enforcement of copyright laws is one of the great evils of modern western culture because it is killing art. But if you are going to copy someone else, it needs to be a good copy, and alas, this is not. The "comedy" R&D department with its bumbling professors left me seething (I am so tired of scientists being portrayed as lacking common sense when the opposite is the truth), personalities change arbitrarily to accommodate the plot, and at one stage there is a three year gap that I did not notice because none of the characters altered in the slightest during it. Worst of all, Taylor's descriptions of the past periods to which Max and her fellow historians are sent are bland in the extreme, unlike Willis' sensitive and thoughtful evocations. Taylor can string a sentence together and her action scenes are pretty good, but I find it depressing that her books appear to be best sellers on Amazon and Willis' are not.
