he year 2021 finds our world still embroiled in the clash of civilizations, as the Western powers and their allies fight against the insidious global forces of jihad and terrorism. In the South Pacific, a large Allied fleet of powerful superships, packed with every technological military innovation known and under the command of Adm. Phillip Kolhammer, stands ready to invade Indonesia to put down a radical Muslim coup. Attached to the fleet by chance is a DARPA research ship that happened to be in the neighborhood. This ship, the Nagoya, is experimenting with teleportation in the hopes of perfecting a weapon that will deliver destructive ordnance directly to a target. But the latest test run of its teleporter goes disastrously awry, and spacetime is stretched in a temporary bubble that destroys the Nagoya while simultaneously casting the entire fleet back to 1942.
Kolhammer and his command arrive smack-dab in the middle of the U.S. fleet that is about to engage in the famed Battle of Midway. Utter confusion results, and both sides begin to attack each other. Although the 2021 vessels are vastly superior, they do not escape unscathed. Thousands die on both sides, and much damage is wrought before an understanding is reached and hostilities cease. In just minutes, however, the invaders from the future have already begun to change history. The Battle of Midway will now never happen.
At the same time, a lone future ship, separated from the fleet, is found and boarded by the nearby Japanese. Over the next few weeks, as the soldiers from the future, anchored at Pearl Harbor, begin painfully to integrate with the natives of 1942, the Nazis and Japanese will mine their own captured ship for technologies that will help them turn the tide of battle in their favor.
But as important as the superweapons are, what are more crucial are the attitudes and ideas that the future Americans bring with them. Feminism, anti-racism, political correctness, anti-smoking rules—these alien concepts might do more damage to the past than a dozen aircraft carriers.
A believable near future
At least since Fritz Leiber's Change War cycle and the 1950s glory days of Star Spangled War Stories, when comic-book genius Robert Kanigher sent modern soldiers back in time to fight dinosaurs, the trope of time-shifted warriors interfering with past battles has been around. Add in—suitably twisted—the example of the 1984 film The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a 1940s battleship comes to the present, and Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South (1992), wherein white-power fascists interfere in the Civil War, and you have the core inspirations of Birmingham's debut novel. (The author has several prior non-fiction books to his credit.) But all these predecessors taken together fail to account for or predict the glorious excitement and meticulous density of Brimingham's speculations.
Here's what Birmingham does marvelously well. He first creates a believable scenario and technology for 2021. (The U.S.S. Hilary Clinton, anyone? You'll believe it when Birmingham explains.) He then populates that environment with neatly depicted and empathy-inducing characters, numbering in the dozens. (Although his two embedded reporters, Julia Duffy and Rosanna Natoli, do come off sometimes like the cast of Absolutely Fabulous.) Then he engineers a plausible means of time travel for them all. He next blithely and swiftly introduces scores of additional personages from 1942, including all the famous players, such as Roosevelt, MacArthur, Hitler, et al. He concisely and vividly lays out the historical parameters of the burgeoning World War, and then just as expertly begins to demolish the givens, as the presence of the future-dwellers starts to unhinge the timeline we know. All this while writing stirring and shocking battle scenes.
But perhaps Birmingham's biggest accomplishment is the clash of civilizations he brilliantly limns. I'm not talking about Muslim fanatics of 2021 versus the rest of the world, but rather the culture of 2021 versus that of 1942. Birmingham lays out in fully dramatized scenes just what we've lost and what we've gained in the 80 years between the rigid certainties of World War II and the flexible grayscales of the never-ending war on terror. Even the technologies of the two eras mirror this schism, with the future-folk employing "flexipad" computers versus the hard copy of the past.
With one of his most perceptive minor characters embodying the viewpoint of a '40s SF fan, Birmingham seems to be telling us that it pays to think about the future before you find it camped out on your doorstep—with big guns.
