1991 SF, twelfth and last of its series. After three Observers go
missing, the Time Corps protagonists travel to Tombstone, Arizona in
1881.
And so does everyone else. It's clear Hawke knew this would be
the last book in the series, so all the factions are in play. But of
course this is Hawke still writing in the pre-Internet age, so there's
lots of infodumping about the period, the place, and the people who
are going to be involved in what will later be called the Gunfight at
the OK Corral.
More interestingly, we have the return of Scott Neilson, one of the
few Time Corps survivors of The Dracula Caper. As seems quite
plausible for someone frequently travelling into the past under
theoretical military discipline but lax supervision, he's a firearms
enthusiast, particularly of the guns of this period. When he gets
involved in an argument in a bar, he uses his skills, and soon enough
he's being called the Montana Kid. But once he's reported signs of
historical disruption and the first team comes in, he doesn't seem to
know them…
Indeed, it feels as though Hawke is finally letting himself consider
the potential consequences of having two universes running in parallel
and overlapping into each other. It's never confusing to the reader,
but with five factions and overlapping plots it's clearly and
legitimately confusing to the people experiencing it from the inside—a
neat trick and a hard one to pull off.
Still. I read these more or less as they came out in the 1980s and
1990s, the earlier ones several times each, and greatly enjoyed them.
These days they seem a bit, well, straightforward; the potential of
nearly unlimited time travel is rarely exploited, plot resolutions go
pretty much the way anyone who's read a story before would predict,
and my own conception of this genre has moved on, admittedly in a
direction that isn't really compatible with conventional narrative
forms at all.
Also we have Wikipedia now.
I don't suppose I shall go back to these books again, but it's been
pleasant—if sometimes a little wearing—to catch up with them in order.
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