Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008) by K. A. Bedford.
Good Reads meta-data is 390 pages, rated 3.58 by 531 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: WA aka Sandgroper.
Verdict: I couldn’t resist the title.
Tagline: ‘Are we there yet?’
‘It’s a job,’ says the technician who needs both the money and the distraction that work brings. The machines themselves are simple but the regulations from the Department of Time and Space are not. Then there are the punters who can be unbelievably stupid. Just as they drive cars like the fools they are, so, too, they drive the time machines!
Quick primer on Time Machines for those who skipped that class in Future History. They travel in Time, that is why they are called time machines. Doh! They do not travel in space. If your time machine is parked next to the car in your garage in Perth, that is where it stays. You can set it for 1660 or 1912, yes, but when it arrives at that time, it is still at that very same spot. Most time travel is backward (1) where people go back to change things for better (and always fail: Kismet) and (2) tourism to witness events. There is little forward time travel since there is no tourist draw, and most do not want to find out about themselves in the future. Yet there are exceptions.
Technician is having a bad day: Very. His McKinsey manager is tsk tsking about his Key Performance Indicators. His estranged wife wants more money. The new apprentice is even more hopeless than the last one. No matter how expensive the beans, the workshop coffee machine produces brown dishwater. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, they do. His latest repair job is…. Well, his latest repair job revealed a corpse in the time machine. Ah, that would explain why it didn’t work. Usually a corpse in a time machine is a bird, rat, or a cat. Not this time. Bad, very.
Worse, the corpse and machine seems to have come – sit down – from the future.
***
Technician is weighted down with the mandatory tiresome backstory.
Isaac Asimov’s End of Eternity came to mind.
Gave up in confusion, needed a flowchart, run-sheet, and a scorecard. About halfway my confusion became terminal.