Neil Fein's Blog

The Depths of Time

The Ocean of Years

The Shores of Tomorrow

by Roger Macbride Allen

The latest saga from the author of The Ring of Charon and The Shattered Sphere, two genuinely inventive books of hard-SF/space opera, includes many the hallmarks of the genre such as interstellar travel, time travel, paramillitary groups, terraforming, and immortality. The society featured is also well-worked out, with a history of its own consistent with current customs and taboos. Worth a mention of its own, the Timeshaft Wormhole system of interstellar travel is particularly clever. Slower-than-light starships use wormholes through time to cut the elapsed time of their journeys, using suspended animation for the crews and a clever system of computer security and an interstellar police force to guard the integrity of time.

Our protagonist is, at first glance, Admiral Anton Koffield. Through military necessity, and in the middle of an enemy attack, the good Admiral had to destroy a vitally placed interstellar wormhole, cutting off the colony world of Glister from all interstellar travel. As the planet died, Koffield became a bogeyman, the devil incarnate, never mind that he (perhaps) saved humanity by his actions. Koffield is a lonely figure, and he and the crew he picks up over the course of these three books do little to mitigate this image.

The exception to this would be Oskar deSilvo, a legendary figure in terraforming science, who in reality turns out to be just another fallible human being. While these books are very good, all the characters -- with one exception -- are missing the human dimension that deSilvo has.

And in fact deSilvo could have been an excellent way to humanize the characters. The backdrop Allen works against is so vast, so dramatic, that the reader often misses this, but the books seemed to be leading toward a change in Koffield and deSilvo that never pans out. The true protagonist of these stories, really an anti-hero, is deSilvo himself. Allen's ideas are excellent, his plots labrynthe and fascinating, but the best characters in these books are the bit players only on stage for a scene or two.

I thoroughly enjoyed these books for the hard SF elements: The hardware, the world-building, the time traveling -- all were competently executed into a vast framework. But the third installment fell subtly short.