1986 SF, sixth of its series. A soldier sent back to 1897 to fight in
the Hindu Kush meets his exact twin…
The terrible thing that everyone's been worrying about since the
first book has finally happened: the timestream has split, and there's
a whole separate parallel universe out there. And they had the sense
to give up fighting their wars in the past. But they're legitimately
annoyed with the "original" line, and of course nobody on either side
thinks of making peace.
One problem, though, is that with these huge-scale events going on,
there isn't much for our heroes to do that engages with them – and a
fair bit of time is spent instead with professional deus ex machina
Dr Darkness and his own agent in the area. One of the series
principals has a twin from the other timeline, but in a wasted
opportunity they never meet.
Meanwhile, this is the sort of book that would only have been
published before Wikipedia, because we get huge infodumps about the
Siege of Malakand, including the general situation in the region.
(These days you can get away with that if you make them engaging and
personal, but this is really a history lesson, albeit with more of a
ground-level emphasis than my experience of school history tended to
have.) Also Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney show up, not to mention
Gunga Din. And Winston Churchill (slightly tweaked from his historical
position, but not much). There's a potentially interesting subplot in
that nobody from the future regards him as important, because their
implant education of all of history seems to have ignored him, except
for Lucas Priest (who actually reads history books rather than relying
on the implant)… but rather than absorb this into the doubletalk about
split timelines, which might have been rather enjoyable, it ends up
having a separate and mundane explanation.
That's the problem, really. If you already know some history (as
surely fans of time travel stories might be expected to do) the
gosh-wow of the setting falls a bit flat, and the book relies on that
for much of its narrative momentum. Take out the infodumps and there'd
be a lot less book, and it's not very long to start with.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.