Chronospace - Hardcover

Steele, Allen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0441008321 ISBN 13: 9780441008322

Publisher: Ace Hardcover, 2001

Synopsis

A time-traveling crew from the twenty-fourth century journeys back in time to 1937, just in time to interfere with the trans-Atlantic voyage of the Hindenburg and to prevent its destruction, but in stopping the disaster, the team has unwittingly unleashed something much worse.

About this title

About the Author

Allen Steele was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and received his B.A. in Communications from New England College and a Masters Degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri. Before turning to science fiction, he worked as a staff writer for newspapers in Tennessee, Missouri, and Massachusetts, as well as Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife, Linda, in Whately, Massachusetts.

Reviews

The master of science-fiction intrigue.

Clearly written to please his fans and the editors of the science fiction magazines he frequently publishes in, this alternate-world novel by Steele (Oceanspace) panders (by excessive namedropping), without producing stellar results. In the 1998 of our world, David Zachary Murphy, a physicist with NASA who longs to be a professional writer of speculative fiction and see his name featured on SF magazine covers, writes a nonfiction article about the possibility that UFOs are time-travel machines. This story achieves every writer's dream it changes the future of the world. Especially the future for Franc and Lea, time travelers from the year 2314. When Franc and Lea go back to 1937 to observe the crash of the Hindenberg, their participation in the disaster somehow destroys their world and its time line. They are bounced into an alternate time line, in which Murphy and his postulations are a nexus. Franc and Lea's heavy-handed attempts to fix things (including impersonating one of Murphy's idols, real-life SF writer Gregory Benford) only make the situation worse. Meanwhile, mysterious "angels" are observing mankind, using their own extraterrestrial powers to try to stop the paradoxes caused by humanity's use of time travel before humans can infest the galaxy with their follies. Derivative and cloying, this isn't up to the level of Steele's short stories, which do grace the pages of many of the magazines he reverentially mentions throughout this novel.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Steele jumps from 1938 to 1998 to 2314 to a time when the moon is no more and the earth is a lifeless rock. Time, however, is mutable in ChronoSpace. In 2314, a group of historians has learned to create small wormholes and fly into the past, but recently they have sensed that they are being shadowed by "angels." Worried, they proceed with another mission, to document the 1938 explosion of the Hindenburg. Despite meticulous planning, they change the time line, and, worse, crash land in 1998. A daydreaming NASA functionary, David Murphy, deduces that they are time travelers and invents a time machine that, 300 years later, eventuates in the Hindenburg mission. Meanwhile, David journeys far into the future to caution his mentors, and they journey into the past to relay his warning to a younger version of himself. And then the angels make themselves known in this irresistibly suspenseful tale that occupies the territory between Robert Heinlein's sobering Farnham's Freehold (1964) and Philip K. Dick's certifiably insane Martian Timeslip (1964). John Mort
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ace Hardcover
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0441008321
• ISBN 13: 9780441008322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336