Willful Child by Steven Erikson | review by Stephen Theaker

“Dad! First contact! Vulcans!” “Wish it was, boy,” Harry replied. “More like… idiots.” Three-eyed aliens visiting Earth in the “Age of Masturbation” leave behind a spaceship and get us started on a programme of galactic expansion. A century or so later Captain Hadrian Alan Sawback finagles his way into command of the starship Willful Child. He’s a terrible sexist, obsessed with trying to have sex with the female crew members and making sure male crew members know their place: not on away missions and well out of the limelight.

Dragon’s Time, by Anne and Todd McCaffrey - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Dragon’s Time is essentially a novel of logistics, rather than adventure or discovery. Pern will soon be menaced by Threadfall, but there aren’t enough dragons and dragonriders available to incinerate the thread, so what can be done? The answer is simple: send all the young and injured dragons back in time a few years so that they’ll be ready to fight. (Which, from mentions of previous events, seems to have been the plot of at least one previous novel too.)

That may seem a rather simplistic approach to time travel, but this isn’t the kind of book where people worry about stepping on butterflies. When Lorana’s dragon needs a bite to eat, she pops back "to a time when the game she wanted would be plentiful" (p. 150). Everyone’s concerned about "breaking time", but events always seem to play out the way they always did so there’s never really any need to worry about the consequences of their actions in the past.