Update: I read this again three years ago, and tried Orczy's original, but it sat only 25% read. And I stopped re-reading Hawke's series at this point. I've decided that I don't need to read Dumas, and I seriously doubt I'll read Orczy, but I do believe that this time through, I'll make it past #3. I'd forgotten the intrigue Hawke began in this book.

Fun, light lit. Re-reading the series has actually inspired me to read the literature it is based on. Plowing my way through Ivanhoe now, and tag-teaming The Scarlet Pimpernel, that tome The Three Musketeers will have to wait! ( )

This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot.wordpress.leafmarks.com & Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road Facebook Group by Bookstooge's Exalted Permission. Title: The Pimpernel Plot Series: Time Wars Author: Simon Hawke Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars Genre: SFF Pages: 236 Synopsis: The group [I say group, but they are more of a loosely associated bunch of people who happen to have had adventures together before] goes back to deal with an Adjustment, only to find those rat bags from Intelligence are STILL playing games and absolutely nothing is as it seems. The novel this takes place in is the Scarlett Pimpernel. My Thoughts: Thoroughly enjoyed this one. Even while being rather confused. However, said confusion was on my part and not because the book didn't make sense; Hawke does a great job of writing the double game here. The 2 main intelligence guys from before are back and causing headaches for our guys, who just want to do their job and then go home. Most of this story is dealing with rogue agents, double agents, etc instead of weaving through the main story of the Scarlett Pimpernel. If I hadn't read the original novel, I'm not sure I could have figured out what it was actually supposed to be about. This book was about the repercussions of the Time Wars and the nature of a Time Split. It was kind of horrific to be honest, in its implications. Billions upon billions of people coming into existence and then just as easily ceasing to exist. And realizing that the narrative of the those we follow could just as easily be replaced by another group of them. " ( )

This is my . . . well; I’m not actually sure how many books I’ve read by Simon Hawke. Both because he is someone who I’d first read long long ago, and because I’ve never actually included everything I’ve read by him on here. Like, did I read his The Romulan Prize? I don’t have it marked on here as read, and I probably didn’t since it is a Star Trek: The Next Generation book and I’d read few of those. Still, maybe I read it at some point.

I do know that I’ve read at least 19 books by Hawke, including this book here, since I’ve marked . . . well, 17 books as read (one is a collection of three novels). So, this book is, at the very least, the 19th book I’ve read by Hawke. Most of those books, with the exception of The Shade Trilogy and the prior two books in the TimeWars series were read in the 1990s and very early 2000s.

I like the concept of the TimeWars books – at least in terms of having a mixture of science fiction and history seen through the lens of people from the 27th century (for the most part) doing ‘stuff’ back in time. I say that I like the concept, instead of using different language, because I am not always happy with the execution. To a certain extent. Maybe I’m just not happy with the tidbits of 27th century that dribble in and maybe because I don’t particularly like either the time agency that the main characters work for or the main characters. Well, I kind of like Andre, so far, and Lucas Priest is bearable. He’s kind of bland. Don’t particularly like Finn though. He’s like a boy in the body of a man who is around 120 years of age (anti-aging drugs keep him from, you know, dying of old age. Or looking old). Or, more accurately, he’s like the caricature of a boy in the body of a man (or, to put that into different words – a man who refuses to grow up.)

I’ve noticed it before, I noticed it in ‘The Pimpernel Plot’, and I noticed it in the current book I’m reading, the next book in the series after ‘The Pimpernel Plot’ – I’m not sure if it is part of the plan of the author’s, I kind of get a hint that it is part of his plan, but the people and politics fighting ‘on the other side’ of these TimeWars seem to be a much better group of people, with logic and reason on their side. Both, in this specific books case, Mongoose, and the people Mongoose were fighting (Cobra and the rest) Cobra and the rest were fighting to maintain their own history, their own timeline, a logical and reasonable thing to do, no? Mongoose was fighting both fighting for his own timeline and, maybe indirectly, maybe directly, against the corruption inherent in his own timeline. Delaney, Priest, and the rest are attempting to keep their own timeline from splintering by ‘making sure history goes the right way’ while at the same time, more seen in the beginnings of the next book having no real problem with the corruption inherent in the system. Apparently. At least in terms of helping, by breaking the rules, their boss have some prizes for his collection like, say, a specific sword, or gun, or etc..

In this specific book, that ‘making sure history goes the right way’ involves the time and events of the French Revolution. During said revolution many people meet their deaths; many of whom were aristocrats. In the original official timeline, there was an agent from England who helped some aristocrats get to freedom in England. He went by the name of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Well, as luck, or the like, would have it, the people of the 27th century have decided that the best way to engage in disputes, to resolve disputes, is to send people back in time and inject them into certain situations. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but the point is that people from the 27th century get sent back in time to join armies and the like.

Well, as might be expected from something like this, someone from the 27th century got sent back in time to the French Revolution. He watched people be beheaded and was sickened. When the crowd moved off to stare at the exit point, at the gate to leave Paris, that 27th century person got carried along. To witness the guards stop suspected and actual aristocrats attempting to flee. Upon learning that a family, with children, had escaped through the gate, the guards get ready to give chase. The person from the 27th century snaps and attacks. Killing or wounding several guards, and some innocent bystanders. One such innocent bystander was the man who was supposed to become the Scarlet Pimpernel. But he’s dead now. (by the way, this is one of the other things one of the ‘other side’ people are fighting – they are fighting against the timewars, no the timewars are not wars between different timelines or the like, it’s wars fought by one specific timeline -> say, for example, McDonalds believes that Burger King stole some food item; instead of fighting over it in the 27th century, they would send people back in time and have them fight there. Thereby almost guaranteeing that they fuck themselves by destroying some tiny little aspect that would cause a ripple effect that would morph things beyond comprehension. I like the idea of mixing time travel and history. The idea of the timewars is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of though; as long as ‘you’ stick strongly to the idea of there being one and only one time line (there are some strong real life theories indicating that no, there are multiple timelines/parallel universes, but whatever).

So, getting back to the book, Delaney, Priest, and Andre Cross have been sent back in time to attempt to make sure that the accidental death of the Scarlet Pimpernel doesn’t alter history. They attempt to ‘adjust the disruption’ by putting in one of their own as the Scarlet Pimpernel, in this instance Delaney fills the void.

This was/is an interesting book. I, mostly, enjoyed it. There was a strong romance side plot that was going on that I’ve no idea why it was included. I say that because it was stressed, a lot of time was spent on it, but it kind of poofed by the end of the book. There was a certain direction things seemed to be going, certain amount of love was expressed but it kind of got shrugged at without too much fight A - ’I can stay! Someone will have to live as the Scarlet Pimpernel once the mission is done. I can be that man. We love each other.’ B – ‘The anti-aging drugs will cause you to age at a different rate of the woman and you are too old now to ‘fix’ that specific issue.’ A – ‘Oh, right, well darn. Guess I’ll go have a beer or something.’

Obviously enough, since I mentioned it in passing, I must have liked the book well enough to dive immediately into the next book in the series. So that’s a plus. Despite some underlying negatives pummeling the book (disliking one of the main characters; ‘the other side’ seemed to be in the right; love plot that went nowhere (I might have actually liked Delaney more if he actually had had the balls to stick around and live with the woman who he said he loved, but no, he has no balls (except he does, that's why he keeps going up and down the ranks; so he was out of character here? yes); science babble (there was a lot of crap injected in passing to ‘explain’ the time travel stuff. It was annoying and boring).

April 6 2016 ( )

Poor old Percy; the Elusive Pimpernel never survives intact in pastiches of Orczy's stories. Feminists like to knock him down a peg or two, and male writers obviously prefer to get him out of the way altogether, and focus on Marguerite. Are they intimidated by the Baroness' hero, or just jealous?

Here, in the third of a series of books about time travel, Sir Percy is dispatched by accident in the first few chapters, and 'rampant specimen of manhood' (I kid you not) Finn Delaney is sent back to patch up the tear in the fabric of history. Finn is a man's hero, swearing, fighting, and drawing his precocious tomboy assistant Andre and Marguerite Blakeney alike to his charms. He assumes the Pimpernel's identity and continues his plans for a league to rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine. This twist works well, because at the start of Orczy's novel, Percy and Marguerite are newly married after a whirlwind romance and already estranged, and he has been living abroad since the death of his parents. Nobody knows him well enough to notice a change. Marguerite falling for 'Finn' is also understandable, if predicatable, because she only realises that she loves Percy when his secret identity is revealed. Instead of killing off Orczy's hero, and replacing him with a stand-in (not even Delaney), a 'Quantum Leap' scenario might have worked better, with (the real) Percy and Marguerite being restored to each other at the end. The Scarlet Pimpernel is far too charismatic a hero to die under a horse's hooves by accident!

The time travel aspect of the adventure is very complex, and Finn's 'nemesis', Mongoose, only complicates matters further. Without the continuing thread of the futuristic agency, however, this would just have been a regurgitation of Orczy's novel, so the blend of historical fiction and William Gibson-esque sci-fi works well. Hawke is fairly faithful to the original source, considering the plot, and doesn't do any of Orczy's characters too much of a disservice (apart from killing off Sir Percy!) There are a couple of anachronisms, possibly intentional signs of an alternate timeline (the Bastille is still standing in 1792), but otherwise this is a unique take on a favourite story. ( )

Book three in the Time Wars series, intertwined with the events of The Scarlet Pimpernel. The story is enjoyable, but this entry in the series sees things fall into more of a formula. There's no real surprise in the team of time commandos and while the tale starts off as a "simple" historical adjustment (fixing a historical change caused by another time traveler), there is once again an adversary with the same high tech as the good guys. A bit of a let down from the previous two volumes, but it's still enjoyable and has a few surprises. Check it out.
--J. ( )