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A few years after their arrival in the Roman Imperial Era, Arthur, now Artorius, and his former students have set the Roman Empire well on the path to rapid economic and military expansion. But just as things seem to going well, they learn than in ancient China, another time traveling team arrived on the same …
Continue reading “The Winds of Fate (Make the Darkness Light II) – S.M. Stirling”
Retired army officer and now ancient history professor Arthur Vandenberg, along with four of his students, is summoned to a lab in Austria in 2032. Around them, the world is descending into imminent nuclear war. The lab has perfected time travel, and the group of five finds itself in the Roman province of Pannonia Superior, …
Continue reading “To Turn the Tide (Make the Darkness Light II) – S.M. Stirling”
The sequel to The City Who Fought, penned by Stirling alone, is just as mediocre as its predecessor.
This collaboration between Stirling and McCaffrey takes place in the Brain & Brawn Ship universe It is vaguely better than McCaffrey’s own efforts. The characters are more solid and there is at least some excitement. Still, I don’t feel that I can really recommend this to anyone.
In the somewhat free-standing sequel to The Sky People, Stirling takes us to a Mars inspired by the work of Burroughs and the “science” of Percival Lowell. The arid and cold planet is nevertheless inhabited by close relatives of humans. Our hero, one of the U.S. team based on Mars, travels to a lost city …
Continue reading “In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (The Lords of Creation II) – S.M. Stirling”
This series is set in an alternate history where Mars and Venus were found teeming with life by spaceprobes in the 1960s. A space race ensued to set up bases on the planets. Interestingly, the superpowers spent so much on space that no major wars were fought on Earth after the Korean War. The action …
Continue reading “The Sky People (The Lords of Creation I) – S.M. Stirling”
Stirling concludes the Emberverse trilogy in grand style, but doesn’t really tie up all the loose threads. As with the earlier two books, Stirling loses himself in long descriptions of nature, down to the names of flowers and whatnot. With most authors, such long winded prattling would have led to me discarding the book well …
Continue reading “A Meeting at Corvallis (Emberverse III) – S.M. Stirling”
The Protector’s war continues the Emberverse series begun with Dies the Fire. Eight years on from the events of the previous book, the world has somewhat settled after the change. The Protector, the Bearkillers and Clan Mackenzie have all consolidated their positions, and past adventures are turning into legend and myth. A showdown with the …
Continue reading “The Protector’s War (Emberverse II) – S.M. Stirling”
S.M. Stirling stole the island of Nantucket from the present time in the Nantucket series. In Dies the Fire, he postulates that when that event happened, all modern appliances (electronics, engines, etc) stopped working in “our” world. Also, all explosives (yes including gunpowder) burn much more slowly. To top it off, steam engines are vastly …
Continue reading “Dies the Fire (Emberverse I) – S.M. Stirling”
John Rolfe, a WWII veteran, inadvertently opens a portal to an alternate timeline in his Oakland, California, basement. He and his old war buddies proceed to conquer this version of the Earth. In the other timeline, Alexander the Great lived to a ripe old age and the white man never arrived in America. The most …
This singleton is set in the year 2025, but not in our future. The premise is that a shower of comets hit Earth in the 1860’s, pushing civilization to the brink of extinction both by the impacts themselves and related general cooling. The British Empire relocated its seat to Delhi, and the story takes place …
This anthology features short stories set in Stirling’s Draka universe. Twelve authors contribute. There are some real gems here, but you probably won’t appreciate them if you haven’t read the Draka series first.
This alternate history series consists of: Island in the Sea of Time Against the Tide of Years On the Oceans of Eternity The island of Nantucket and the Coast Guard barque Eagle are mysteriously sent back in time to around 1000 BC. Being too small a society for self-sufficience, the inhabitants (including many seasonal visitors) …
I am not a big fantasy fan, but this does not read terribly much like fantasy. There is a definite scarcity of bearded wizards and annoying halflings. It’s more like a pirate/explorer story, and quite entertaining.
This omnibus collects all the John Christian Falkenberg novels. It consists of: Falkenberg’s Legion Prince of Mercenaries Go Tell the Spartans Prince of Sparta The story ranges from the fall of the CoDominium to the rise of Sparta and the First Empire of Man that replaces it. However the macro story takes a backseat to …
Continue reading “The Prince – Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling”
This is book one of the Flight Engineer series. “Mr. Scott” from Star Trek makes an attempt. This shameless plug on Doohan’s celebrity is terrible. “Young Adult” or not, I can’t believe that Stirling was willing to put his name on it. Still more unbelievable is that there are more books in the series. Stay …
Continue reading “The Rising – James Doohan & S.M. Stirling”
The series consists of four novels, though the first three are now published in one omnibus entitled The Domination. Marching through Georgia Under the Yoke The Stone Dogs Drakon The series can really shake you up. It is set in an alternate history in which the Crown Colony of the Cape (what later became modern …
The human galactic federation is in ruins, and the worlds have devolved to various levels of barbarism. On the planet Bellevue, which is at about the early nineteenth century in development, a young officer named Raj Whitehall and his friend venture into the catacombs under the capital. There, they find an ancient battle computer named …
Continue reading “The Raj Whitehall Series (I-VIII) – David Drake, S.M. Stirling & Eric Flint”
1632 is the story of how a West Virginia mining town gets transported to Germany in the time of that most horrible of conflicts, The Thirty Years War. While it may be slightly formulaic and cliché at times, and not at all as sophisticated as S.M. Stirling, the characters are quite likeable and the story …
Like 2001 and it’s sequels, “Time’s Eye” is driven by the intervention in human affairs by unknowable and very powerful alien beings. In a flash, the Earth is divided up in chunks from different times. A UN helicopter crew from 2037, a British Colonial detachment in Afghanistan, the armies of Alexander the great and Genghis …
Continue reading “Time’s Eye – Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter”