his novel is the second in a trilogy, following The Depths of Time (2000) and heralding next year's release of The Shores of Tomorrow.
In the first book, we were introduced to the curious interstellar setup of the year 5211. Mankind has spread throughout a small sphere of space, settling a few dozen worlds. But their method of reaching the stars is a kludgy one. A ship will travel for decades at sublight speed until it reaches an artificial wormhole which is part of a system of transit points. The ship will enter the wormhole, which functions as a time tunnel. Emerging in the past, the ship will then proceed to its real destination, arriving at a colony world just weeks or months of objective time after its departure, despite years of interstellar flight (with passengers and crew frozen). This system serves to bind together the human polity in real time. But it also opens up the cosmos to all the typical causality breaches so beloved to SF, such as killing one's own grandfather or getting rich from future stock quotes. Only the Chronologic Patrol ships, stationed at each end of the wormhole, insure that no one succeeds in changing history.
Our protagonist, Anton Koffield, is captain of one such guardian ship. When his wormhole comes under attack by mysterious FTL ships, he must close it down permanently, despite the repercussions. Stranded afterward in his own future, Koffield finds himself cashiered and taken under the wing of master terraformer Oskar DeSilvo. The much-beloved magnate gives him a job. But Koffield eventually discovers that his employer is not all he seems to be, and is in fact responsible for a great tragedy on the planet Solace. Journeying to Solace, Koffield is again displaced from his natural time, cast forward some 120 years. DeSilvo is now thought dead, but an investigation of his tomb reveals that the mastermind is still alive and hatching more enigmatic schemes.
When Ocean opens, Koffield is hot on the trail of DeSilvo, who has left behind a series of taunting clues: "I am hidden, but hidden where you can find me." With some new friends—notably Norla Chandray, a swift-thinking ship's pilot, and Jerand Bolt, a wily and resourceful crewman—and the backing of the Solace government, Koffield heads to the solar system. In an enormous labyrinthine library orbiting Neptune, in the abandoned cities of Earth, and finally, on the deathworld of Mars, Koffield and his comrades begin to fathom the basis for DeSilvo's plots. Surprisingly, the man proves to be a ham-handed savior of humanity, not its enemy. That role falls to the hitherto-pristine Chronologic Patrol, causing Koffield to reassess his whole life and career. When the pursuers finally come face to face with DeSilvo, they receive a final shattering revelation that broadens their quest even further.
Building worlds is not as easy as it looks
Roger MacBride Allen has constructed a future history of admirable complexity and interest. He brings into play several intriguing issues certain to capture your attention. The notion of time travel becoming an integral component of space travel is surely his masterstroke. This physics conceit is something Stephen Baxter would relish and exploit, but surely not any better than Allen does. Allen also adds to the ongoing SF dialogue about the merits and ethics of terraforming, in the manner of Kim Stanley Robinson. The fact that Allen's Mars ends up as a goo-contaminated hellhole—the "Great Failure"—is surely meant as a codicil to Robinson's more sanguine take on colonizing the Red Planet. Stapledonian vistas of humanity's ebb and flow on a galactic scale are examined here very thoughtfully. And the whole matter of "dead media"—the problem resulting when hardware and software platforms are made obsolescent—is given its most detailed fictional examination to date. Few other SF novels have seen fit to deal with this important problem. In the creation of an eerie, automated gigantic library where old-fashioned books serve as the ultimate backup, Allen even ventures into Jorge Luis Borges territory.
Characterwise, Allen does a credible job as well. Koffield and his set of antagonists and supporters come off as engagingly real, if not overly deep. DeSilvo is not onstage that much, but in the closing chapters we get a better sense of what drives him. Additionally, there's a welcome ambiance of van Vogtian surrealism to all of DeSilvo's machinations. All the zipping hither and yon through time and space on mysterious scavenger hunts leaves the reader pleasantly giddy.
But what makes these first two books less than A-quality material is the pacing. It's just a little too slow. The opening battle in the first book set a speedy standard that soon stagnated. Let me give an example from the current volume: The escape of a rocket from Mars takes 40 pages of text. That's just too long, no matter how clever Koffield and crew show themselves in overcoming difficulties, when the reader is anxious for some answers. Still, there's no denying that Allen plants his hooks deeply in the reader, making the arrival of his third volume a much-anticipated treat.
