Adam Roberts

A pregnant woman calls her future daughter at age sixteen (at a cost of nearly 18,000 euros) to find out whether the daughter was glad she was born—and she’s not the only one calling into different times.

Professor Hermann Bradley has managed to have his time travel device last seventeen seconds in various past times before spectacularly exploding. Now he’s on the verge of cracking that seventeen second barrier (and, according to the narrator, possibly the wiping out of the dinosaurs as well as hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tunguska), but the damnable Professor Notkin is blocking him, claiming that Bradley has committed crimes against humanity (and perhaps against dinosaurity).