Synopsis
If you could re-create civilization, what would you do differently?
Oakland, California, 1946. Ex-soldier John Rolfe, newly back from the Pacific, is about to make a fabulous discovery. It happens with a flip of his shortwave radio switch, a thunder crack of sound, and a blinding light. He blinks his eyes to discover a portal to an alternate world where Europeans have never set foot on the land he knows as America. Able to return at will to the modern world, Rolfe summons the only people with whom he is willing to share his discovery: his war buddies. And tells them to bring their families.
What mistakes would you repeat?
Los Angeles, twenty-first century. Fish and Game warden Tom Christiansen is involved in the bust of a smuggling operation. What he turns up is something he never anticipated: a photo of authentic Aztec priests decked out in Grateful Dead T-shirts, and a live condor from a gene pool that doesn't correspond to any known in captivity or the wild. These finds soon lead to a woman named Adrienne Rolfe - and a secret that's been hidden for sixty years.
As danger brews on both sides, two realities are threatened, and so too are the lives of everyone who crosses the boundary between them.
Reviews
One adjustment to his radio sends John Rolfe VI, a descendant of the Virginia colonist, from 1946 into a California New World never touched by white men in Stirling's (The Peshawar Lancers) mesmerizing new novel. Having discovered the Oakland Gate that allows one to switch secretly between worlds, Rolfe and a passel of army buddies found New Virginia, a Southern Agrarian "pirate kingdom," and proceed to build wealth and power on both sides. Stirling cleverly switches between vignettes of New Virginian history since 1946 and the "present" of 2009, when a neo-Mafioso is plotting to take over Rolfe's "theme park of perverted romanticism run amok." In this luscious alternative universe, sidekicks quote the Lone Ranger and Right inevitably triumphs with panache. What more could adventure-loving readers ask for?
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Stirling's endlessly and sometimes perversely fertile imagination now realizes a world in which Alexander the Great lived to old age. Moreover, the East doesn't discover the West until 1946, when John Rolfe finds a gate from his time line to another and sets about discreetly, profitably colonizing the alternate Earth he discovers on the gate's other side. In 2009, Rolfe's granddaughter, investigating a threat to her family's benign feudal despotism, encounters a California fish and game officer tracking down the source of certain mysterious birds and beasts. He becomes her lover, ally, confidant, and spouse, and with odd, assorted allies from both time lines, they defeat a plot to overthrow the Rolfes and viciously conquer the new New World. This is even more of a romp than Stirling's Peshawar Lancers (2002), but while its action scenes are state-of-the-art and its femmes wonderfully formidables, it is the sort of romp that has four appendixes of historical backgrounding, not to mention a blatant opening for a sequel. Roland Green
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