Ian's Book Review

"The Timeline Wars"

(John Barnes, 1997)

Having read the first two Timeline Wars novels - Patton's Spaceship and Washington's Dirigible - I think I can speak relatively safely about the series in general. In short, these are basically crosstime action/adventure stories, not alternate histories. The reason for this is that all of the worlds which are showed in any detail at all, are worlds which are the product of massive manipulation by time travel (not just crosstime travel, extensive time travel too) by the two main crosstime powers. The books involve an epic struggle between the ATN (Allied Timelines for Nondeterminism) and the Closers (A slaveowning, seriously nasty race of crosstime conquerors who seem to make the Draka look like amateurs), but what we actually get to see is "our hero" in a lot of personal battles against the agents of the Closers (almost never Closers themselves), far from ATN support.

Thus the action-adventure element - the hero basically roams through the timelines solving various problems with a rapidly changing group of associates, and his method of solving those problems consists of beating people up, shooting people, blowing things up, and several vehicle chases. Not only are the alternate timelines not of much interest as alternate histories (despite the ATN supposedly encompassing a lot of very different histories - mostly longlasting world empires, it seems - all places visited are not all too much changed from our history), being as they are the product of _lots_ of deliberate alteration, but beyond that the events which happen in them are often rather unrealistic. In particular the first novel, where a Nazi-victory timeline that is visited might as well be called "Kludge world" due to the large number of frankly ridiculous jurry-rigged and rapidly-developed technologies shown in it.

Basically if you're looking for action/adventure stories of decent quality which just happen to involve a lot of messing around with alternate universes, these books are for you. If you're looking for seriously plausible work, epic conflict, or any kind of true alternate history world, you're out of luck. I enjoyed the series enough that I read the first two books with no great struggle, but they're definitely not what I had expected and I will think very carefully before spending any money on further novels in the series.