Review: <i>Operation: Montauk</i>

Review:
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I wasn't really sure what I was getting into when I started Operation: Montauk, but I ended up pleasantly surprised. Fast-moving and exciting, there are dinosaurs, spaceships and gunfire in a battle-heavy novel that centers on castaways in time. There are even brief discussions of metaphysics and fate.

Bryan Young (Lost at the Con, Man Against the Future) created interwoven plots originating in no less than eight timelines that all converge on a grassy knoll in the Cretaceous era as their various time traveling machines drop them unceremoniously at a moment in time where they cannot actually affect the future. Over the course of the novel they fight dinosaurs, Nazis, and each other, while trying to find a singular way back to the future.

The characters are well thought-out and developed with interior lives and histories that indicate Mr. Young's dedication to researching the various timelines they came from, and in the case of the spaceship-traveling pair, making up believable but fantastic details. I wasn't terribly attached to the central romance of the novel, but I think it set up potential for future story telling in the lives of more than one character were there to be sequels or tied in novels in the future.

And that was my genuine reaction upon finishing the novel. I really wanted to know, "What's next?" so I posed the question to the writer. Young said that, "There's no solid plans," but that it wouldn't take much arm-twisting to get him to revisit either the universe of Operation: Montauk as a whole or the individual universes of the characters he created for a future publication.

I, for one, am hoping he does.

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