1984 SF, first of a series. In the 27th century, the economic benefits
of war are realised without danger to the warring countries
themselves, by sending soldiers into the past to join in historical
conflicts: referees count the killed and wounded. But time travel is
never simple…
I mean, all right, even the basic premise has some problems.
But the idea that humans could take a look at temporal physics,
consider the possibility of massive catastrophe if the timestream
should ever be disrupted enough to split and rejoin… and say "eh,
it'll probably be fine"… is alas just as plausible now as it was
nearly 40 years ago when this was written.
What's rather odder is that, when our heroes are told to try to catch
a referee who's gone rogue and is planning to impersonate the
returning King Richard… is that the referees have found, without any
apparent difficulty, the actual Robin Hood and Wilfred of Ivanhoe, and
have knocked them on the head ready for our heroes to impersonate
them. Nobody ever mentions that Ivanhoe is a work of fiction, but
they are at least aware that the Robin Hood legends are a thing, and
they don't seem at all curious about the ease with which this specific
guy was tracked down…
This ends up working a bit like fanfiction: big historical events must
be unchanged (which includes big events from the book), so we have the
arrow-splitting and the kidnapping of Rowena and so on, but they can
have different reasons and personalities behind them. So for example
Bois-Guilbert still drops dead during the trial by combat… but he does
it because of a well-placed laser rifle shot, rather than as "a victim
to the violence of his own contending passions". And the future
soldier playing Ivanhoe, not wanting to cause ructions by choosing the
Saxon Rowena as Queen of Love and Beauty, picks a dark-haired lady
instead… only to find that this is Rebecca of York.
(OK, there's a mention of the 82nd Airborne having "a long and
extremely colorful history, dating back thousands of years", when the
current date is 2613 and they were founded de novo in 1917, but
never mind…)
While most of the time we have the usual conceit of time travel
stories that the narrative-now moves meaningfully forwards (the fake
Richard hasn't revealed himself "yet" and so the potential timestream
split when he doesn't go to die at Chaluz hasn't happened "yet"),
Hawke does at least remember that this is a time travel story rather
than just a visit to the Historyland park: one of the soldiers is
confronted with his own future garrotted corpse, and one conflict
consists of two time-travellers jumping back and forth to the same
battle so that dozens of them are present in the same moment, each
trying to take advantage of potential mistakes made by an instance of
the other reacting to an earlier instance of the first… and that sort
of thing is why I stuck with this whole series in the first place, and
why I thought it might be fun to revisit them now.
These are fluff, don't doubt it. But they're entertaining fluff.
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