I have read a few things in which S.M. Stirling has collaborated over time, like the Raj Whitehall series with David Drake, Jimmy The Hand (part of Raymond E. Feist’s Legends of the Riftwar series) and some others, but I had never read any of his non-collaboration works, until now.
The Island in the Sea of Time series got my attention from the very premise. The island of Nantucket gets moved 3,000 years back in time, to the Bronze Age. As you probably have figured out by now, if you’ve been reading my book reviews for a while, I’m a sucker for historical what-if SF, specially when it’s mixed up with good military SF, like in Flint’s Assiti Shards/1632 series…and the Nantucket saga fits right in that realm.
The series was written and published from 1998 to 2000, and it’s composed of three books.
Island in the Sea of Time
Against the Tide of Years
On the Oceans of Eternity
There’s also a short story set about 15 years after On the Oceans, called Blood Wolf, part of The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, which unfortunately I haven’t read yet.
The story is simple: one dark night, something unexplained happens and the island of Nantucket as well as a Coast Guard training ship get transported all the way back to the Bronze Age. What happens after that takes three books to tell, and the story is good enough to keep you hooked to the books from start to finish.
The characters are interesting and well rounded, from the scholar Ian Arnstein (who also happens to be the first person we meet), to Jared Cofflin, Chief of Police, through the tough and sharp (and my favourite character in the series) Captain Marian Alston of the Coast Guard training ship Eagle, as well as the people they meet in their new surroundings; you get to see the whole gamut of people, from the good-almost-saintly to the evil-beyond-belief, and everything in between.
The writing is interesting, and I can even see, now that I’ve read his solo work, that he had an important hand into the Raj Whitehall series, and now I can’t really see who wrote what parts of each book, unlike when I read them…the battle scenes in these 3 books are of as good quality as those in the Whitehall series, which I thought must have been Drake’s alone…I’m not so convinced anymore, and that’s a big compliment for Stirling’s writing, since I consider Drake one of the best battle scene writers there is today.
The social/political aspects of the introduction of modern thought into the Bronze Age also make for interesting storylines, with conflicts and eureka moments, making this not only good military SF, but also good socio-political SF…and merging the two together is never easy.
One interesting point I’d like to make is that, unlike Flint and the rest of the writers in the 1632 universe, Stirling does decide to make some of the bad guys people from Nantucket. I think he did this because he realized that if it were Nantucket v. Bronze Age, it’d be a match so uneven that the time-travelers would have to end up as conquerors of the world and would lose some of the good guys luster. I’m not saying the Bronze Age people were any less smart than the enemies of the West Virginians in 1632, but the technological and knowledge edge would have been waaaay too much on Nantucket’s side for it to make for a really interesting story.
The one small defect I see in the series is….it’s too damn short! I can see where there’s space for at least another couple of books, telling the story of how things develop after On the Oceans of Eternity, the first steps of the birth of democracy and its battle with autocracy, among other things…but Stirling decided to finish his series on 11 A.E. :(
Anyway, this is a great trilogy of books, well worth the time and money investment…I seriously recommend it to any fan of historical what-if science fiction.
Tags: Books, historical what if, island in the sea of time, military science fiction, Reviews, s.m. stirling, science fiction
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Books, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Glad you enjoyed them.