enturies after mankind nearly destroyed itself in the Time of Troubles, survivors from the moon colony and elsewhere have built a ruthless hegemony spanning many worlds, whose capital is in the East Asian World City of Ulanor. The government is headed by the aging, self-indulgent Empress Xian Xi and its strict laws enforced by ruthless and cruel security forces who torture and execute people at the Palace of Justice, with the help of apelike alien Darksiders. The security of the autocracy is suddenly threatened, however, when members of a secret organization called Crux steal a time-travel machine just invented at the university with the intent of going back to assassinate the man responsible for initiating the war that caused the Time of Troubles.
To handle the dangerous assignment of thwarting Crux's scheme, security agent Yamashita retains private investigator Steffens Alexandr, a kif-smoking ne'er-do-well former security agent who would rather spend his time with the courtesans at the Radiant Love House. Through ruthless bureaucratic politics, Yamashita becomes chief of security and establishes the Office for the Exploration of the Past, Pastplor, to guard against future attempts to change history. Hastings Maks is one of the security time surfers trained to safeguard history. Over time, however, Pastplor is used for much more than safeguarding the past, as selected humans are secretly rescued from before the Time of Troubles and brought to the future.
After years of political intrigue, brutal bureaucratic maneuverings and temporal near-disasters, Maks realizes that he wants to escape his fascist world and live in the simple past, but he can't determine how to do so without eventually being hunted down by Pastplor. The opportunity appears to present itself, however, when an attempted palace coup pits the Earth's security forces against the interstellar military forces and throws all of the Worldcity of Ulanor into chaos.
A fix-up worth finding
Albert E. Cowdrey, a retired historian and author of several volumes on military medical history, has been writing some notable stories in recent years for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, including three novellas, "Crux," "Mosh" and "Ransom," that form the first three quarters of this novel. The fascinating dystopian world that Cowdrey has created will therefore be familiar to many readers.
Crux is what used to be called a "fix-up" novel, containing several pieces written to function as self-contained stories. Cowdrey's book suffers from many of the problems common to fix-up novels, since many of the techniques of plotting and characterization that work well for shorter works do not work as well at novel length. The result is a disjointed narrative, with occasional disorienting time gaps, and such things as viewpoint characters being summarily killed without warning, a technique that can work in the denouement of shorter works but is disconcerting in the middle of a long novel.
Many aspects of Cowdrey's fiction are far from original. The concept of time-traveling security forces safeguarding the past has become a hoary cliche since the time of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. Cowdrey's characters also are from stock casting, although from a variety of different sources. Fascist far-future dystopias also have been commonplace in science fiction. Yet this book feels highly original, mainly due to the fascinating juxtapositioning of its many disparate elements to create a milieu that feels totally new. Cowdrey's future world and characters of Crux are alternately repelling and likable, and the plot in the final section of the book even manages to become compelling reading.
Although Crux has many defects as a novel, it can be recommended to SF readers looking for something familiar yet startlingly different.
