The Enormous Hourglass

By: Ron Goulart

Narrated by: Fred Filbrich

Sam Brimmer, temporal detective, and his android time machine solve a case involving kidnapping, murder, and the smuggling of modern weaponry back to pre-WWII Nazis.

©1976 Ron Goulart (P)2020 David N. Wilson

Has not aged well

I was given a free review copy of this audio book, at my request, and am voluntarily leaving this unbiased review.

Wow, this book has not aged well. If you are offended by the F word, in reference to LGBTQ persons, or people being refereed to as "the black woman" or "the Chinese man" instead of names or job/position, etc. Then you will not enjoy this book.

This book is about a time detective from the future, who is searching for a missing woman who was last seen in the past. In terms of a time traveling story, it doesn't make much sense. Lots of little things like **minor spoilers** going to talk to a guy, who dies while trying to tell them something. The obvious remedy would be to go back in time 10 minutes and talk to him while he was alive. There may be an in world reason, but it's never addressed.

The robots in the book are more similar to Bender from Futurama than Data from Star Trek: TNG. All wise cracks and addictions, little logic and processing power. This isn't a bad thing, it brings color to the world. However, is it seldom seen in newer works and it can be distracting at times.

The dialog is fast paced and zippy. This hinders the story, more than helps. It often will have two or more people speaking and will rapid fire between the speakers with no speaker tags. This keeps the pace of the book going, but causes confusion in some readers.

The settings are limited. The world of the future isn't explained well, or explored. The time of 1933 isn't developed beyond it having cleaner air. Nothing really grabbed me of where I was, or why it was special.

The characters, similarly, weren't properly developed. The robot time machine was never really explained, neither where the main character or Sanchez. We never really learned anything about them, or how they tick. They just felt flat.

The biggest problem, aside from the casual racism and homophobia, was the voice narration. Fred Filbrich delivers a poor experience. He does basically no voice differentiation, little emphasis and just kind of speeds his way through the story. The issue I mentioned of the rapid fire conversations is made almost impossible to follow, by a narrator who does the same voice for all the characters and barely takes a breath between sentences. It took a mildly offensive story, that was still interesting, and turned it into a hard to follow mess.

All in all, this book is not worth listening to. Reading maybe, if you're not easily offended. The voice narrator has made this book hard to follow and there is not enough left in the story that makes this worth while to try and follow along. There are better example of time travel and mystery out there, I would go look for one of those.