After a second long sleep, Norman Winters wakes around AD 10,000. The world is dominated by the Brain, an inexorable super computer that knows all, sees all, and feels nothing. Thanks to its cradle-to-grave supervision, human life is easy and comfortable, but what will happen when the Brain realizes people are superfluous?

Unassuming Gerald Cambray, a professor of Latin at Harvard in 1939, has a dizzy spell and wakes in Paris of AD 1263 where his accent in speaking Latin is considered odd and his makeshift plan to earn a living by teaching astronomy brings dangers that even his brazen, swashbuckling young student, Guy of Salisbury, might be unable to forestall.

In the first of a long series of hallowed stories, former military engineer (and noncomformist) Manse Everard is recruited by the Time Patrol to prevent time travelers from making major changes to history. (Don’t worry, history bounces back from the small stuff.)

Oh, dear! Albert Miller has dialed a wrong number on the Mugwump-4 exchange, and the mutants who answered have decided that the only solution is to catapult him into the future where he won’t be able to upset their plans for World Domination.

We may never know just how young Kivrin Engle wrangled her academic advisor and the powers-that-be at the University of Oxford into sending her to previously off-limits, 14th-century England, but her timing was not ideal given that she’dd just been exposed to a recently re-emerged influenza virus. Oh, and the inexperience tech who also got hit with the virus with the virus after the drop may have sent Kivrin to the wrong year.

Henry builds a time machine out of the box that the washing machine arrived in, and he’s his usual horrid self in bringing with his little brother Peter up to speed about the whole thing.

In the cartoon version of the short story, Henry imagines that his time machine is an elaborate time ship, at least until his perfect little brother brings him out of his daydream and back to the real world of cardboard.

This first book of the multi-author series tells of how teens Dak (a history buff and odd duck), Sera (a science nerd), and Riq (a member of the secret Hystorians society) end up as the only ones who can save the world by fixing breaks in time that changed what was meant to be. Their first mission—saving Columbus from a mutiny that was meant to fail—is a disquieting choice that I would not choose as an introduction of history to children. For starters, they are choosing to save the man who brought genocide to the Americas. And to boot, in the broken world where the mutiny succeeded, his three ships still completed their voyage with no noticable change to subsequent centuries (apart from Columbus resting at the bottom of the Atlantic).