Days of Cain

Guarding the historical integrity of the twenty-fourth century, monitor Gaspar James must stop his former protege Alma, who has transported back to 1943 Auschwitz and presents Gaspar with a painful moral dilemma

Time-travel yarn from the author of This Side of Judgement (1994). Time is mutable and can be visited--you can even meet yourself--so to rationalize the situation and prevent tampering with history (in order that, in the remote future, God can evolve), the Moiety has been created. Time Monitor Gaspar James, from planet Arpad in the medium-future, is assigned by his mysterious, eccentric boss Coriolan to deal with a problem in 1943, where the charismatic Alma Lewin, once a colleague of Gaspar's, has gone ``renegade.'' But what is Alma attempting to achieve? Gaspar's attention focuses on the notorious death camp Birkenau, where he captures a courier of Alma's trying to smuggle in future antibiotics. But this is only a hint of Alma's well-organized conspiracy: She has obtained helicopter gunships from the future beyond 1943 and intends to assault not just Birkenau but all the Nazi camps and liberate the inmates--with incalculable effects on the future. Genuinely harrowing and impassioned, with wonderful characters and an unforgettable theme--the sole possible drawback being Dunn's unquestioning acceptance of orthodox time-travel mechanics and causality. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the future, Gaspar James of the planet Arpad monitors time travel and guards the historical past from being altered. When his protege, Alma Lewin, and other renegades go back to 1943 to liberate the death camps, Gaspar and a team travel back to stop them. This emotionally powerful story by the author of This Side of Judgement (LJ 5/15/94) belongs in most sf collections.
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