Chris Pierson begins "Pruning the Tree"
with a very familiar scenario that quickly changes to be a timeline very
different from our own. Pierson provides a neat look at convergent history,
since although his story is set fifty years after the branch point, there is
still a similarity of events, although to Pierson's credit, they involve
different people and specifics rather than just finding some way for our
world to reassert its primacy, as seems to happen too often.
Harry Turtledove's "Occupation Duty"
initially looks like a story in which he has simply replaced Israelis with
Philistinians and Palestinians with Moabites, but the story is more than
that. Set in the modern day of a world that diverged from our own when
the Philistines under Goliath defeated the Jews led by David, Turtledove
portrays a society which is torn about, not by our own politics, but by the
long-standing ethnic and religious strife which underlie those
politics. His point is that given the ethnic mixture of the region,
the strife that exists in the area may be unavoidable.
While Pierson eschewed letting our own world come to
the forefront, Kevin J. Anderson revels in the idea of establishing our own
world (as the best of all possible worlds?) in "Mundane Lane."
In a world in which science fiction failed following the destruction of
Sputnik, Anderson uses an alien invasion to re-envision the past in an
attempt to set right things that we would see as having gone wrong.
His Jimmy Andrews, a governmental Sam Beckett, is sent to three significant
points in the evolution of science fiction fandom to make sure they happen
correctly. Anderson's interesting take on the matter is that all of
the events he selects, no matter how far fetched, actually occurred.
Nicola Tesla is living the life of a day laborer in Robert E. Vardeman's "The Power and the Glory."
Tesla's experiments with electricity and radio waves have been sidelined by
the sudden death of his patron, George Westinghouse, and Tesla sees himself
as a victim of the successful Thomas Edison. When powers representing
Tesla's native Austro-Hungarian Empire approach him with the funding which
has been denied him by Edison's mechanizations, Tesla turns an apparent
blind eye towards the potential military use of his experiments, all the
while stating that he doesn't want to create weapons of war. Vardeman
does a good job examining the scientist/inventor's culpability into the use
of their inventions.
Jackie Cassada provides the first straight-forward time
travel story with "Voices." In this tale, Joan of Arc finds
herself in the afterlife, of a sort, and is confronted by the voices of
Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret. Cassada's story transplants
Joan to a different era to allow the saints, who are actually scientists
from a future world, to use Joan's charisma to change policies. Joan
takes a little too readily to their truth and the world of the future, and
the scientists' (and Joan's) striving to bring about a utopian world seems a
little too simple and contrived.
While Cassada brought Joan of Arc forward in time
several centuries, James M. Ward sends the Gambino crime family backwards in
time several centuries in "Downtown Knight." Told in two time
frames, first in 2010 when the FBI is preparing a raid on the Gambino
household, and then in 1405 when the time-shifted mafioso are preparing to
enter the lists in an English tournament, Ward's gangsters seem akin in many
ways to the citizens of a Damon Runyon story. However, aside from getting
away from the FBI, Ward doesn't really examine the Gambino's motivations or
plans in going back to the fifteenth century, leaving the story with an
unfinished feel.
Jon L. Breen presents a reflexive science fiction story
in "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and
Time."
In this case, Breen looks at a writing group debate over whether or not
using the word "shrink" for a psychiatrist is anachronistic for a
story set in World War II. Breen's story demonstrates one of the
problems with an anthology of this nature. Knowing the anthology's
theme means the reader can easily see where the story is going in a way
which might not be as obvious if the story were published in a general
anthology or magazine.
On the other hand, Linda P. Baker's
contribution, "A Better Place,"
does not appear to fit any of the declared themes of the anthology. Apart from a single,
non-essential line referring to a volcanic eruption in 2005, the story is a
straight post-apocalyptic tale. Rosemary is an outsider living
among a tribe in a feral war, accepted as the woman of one of the tribe's
strong men, Gnash. Partly in response to her own memories and partly
due to the ramblings of Old Jerry, another outsider, Rosemary is convinced
that there is a better place, although she has neither the ambition nor the
means to ferret out where it might be.
Stephen Leigh's story "Chaos Theory" is
a discussion of historical forces and inevitability. Mostly done
through two talking heads, a Professor and one of his students, the piece
examines the issues concerning not only time travel, but also predeterminism.
Leigh's denouement works because even without any action, he manages to
build sympathetic characters with a hope for the future.
One problem which is often seen in alternate history is
an author completely ignoring an individual's beliefs and deeds in order to
tell a story, using only a person's name to engender a sense of familiarity
and, perhaps, irony. In "The Man in Cell 91,"
Gene DeWeese paints an existential story which clearly could have gone in
this direction, and almost does. However, in the end, he has provided
a reason for his character's alteration, even if the character doesn't show
quite the anguish over the change as his faith in challenged by apparent
fact, as might be desired.
Joe Masdon recreates the Salem Witch Trials in "Oyer and Terminer."
Just as Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" was more about the
contemporary period than the seventeenth century, so, too is Masdon's
tale. In "Oyer and Terminer," his narrators, who spend most
of the story commenting on the trials without getting involved until the
Witch Trials come to them. While the story is an alternate history,
its main focus is on the way in which people, in this case Cotton Mather,
William Stoughton, and Sheriff Walcott, allow the sincerity of their
religious beliefs to undermine the jobs they are intended to do.
One of the recurring themes in time travel is the
paramilitary organization the ensures the time streams remain as they
are. While this is generally seen as a good thing, Donald J. Bingle
looks at the negative side of it in "Standing Still."
Edwin is a member of just such an organization, and in addition to saving
lives and ensuring history occurs as it was meant to, he also has to make
sure the proper people die. After helping to sink the Titanic,
Edwin has cracked and finds himself facing Morris Lefkowitz, a non-time
traveling psychiatrist. Bingle has an interesting premise and handles
it well, although it does raise the question of why the organization to
which Edwin belongs doesn't have its own methods for dealing with this type
of situation.
Skip & Penny Williams also have a Timecorps in
their "One Rainy Day in
Paris,"
in which Kevin Bower accidentally travels to 1906. His activities, minor as
they seem, result in the dispatch of the Timecorps to make things
right. However, the Williamses point out that when dealing with time
travel, there are multiple possible times and ways to correct chronic
errors, and their Timecorps appreciates that fact and uses it to the utmost,
finding the proper times to intercede when various things go wrong for a
variety of reasons.
When time travelers are given their orders to go into
the past to change things, the names and people they will effect have been
dust for years. Pierce Askegren points out that that dustiness
vanishes the moment they actually go back in time in "Try and Try Again."
In this story of two men who are essentially the same, although from
different time streams, one is an old pro and the other gung-ho for his
first assignment to better his own time-line. Askegren examines the
differences in their time-lines, neither of which appear to be our own, but
only gets to his point late in the story, unfortunately, down-playing its
importance.
Nancy Virginia Varian extends Jesus' life by three
decades in "Yeshua's Choice,"
allowing him to be present at the time of the siege of Masada. Told
from Jesus' point of view as a carpenter who was once a Rabbi and the Son of
God, the story includes many anachronisms, introducing Christian ideas about
Jesus to a period before they would have been formulated. The most
interesting question Varian raises, about one man's sacrifice when it is
only one of many, unfortunately, goes unexamined.
Wes Nicholson looks at a very different World War II in
"Three Power Play,"
but his manner of dipping in and out of that worlds history, and the almost
complete lack of characters, gives the work a distancing feel, although not
quite like a textbook. "Three Power Play" is less a story
than it is a listing of ideas with little to hold them together and only
authorial fiat to force the reader to accept the changes Nicholson
proposes.
John Helfers addresses the issue of being able to
repeatedly influence the same event in a very different manner than Skip and
Penny Williams in "One Time Around?" Jack Hollister is part of a
scientific military project to perfect time travel and abuses his position
to travel back to warn his mother of mistakes she would make in her
life. Once he has altered his own personal history, and the history of
the world as a whole, the forces of the universe conspire to ensure that he
can't change that juncture any more. While Helfers doesn't introduce
any new ideas in his story, he applies tried and true ideas in a new, and
interesting manner.
