Book Review: The 'Timeliner' trilogy

Book Review: The 'Timeliner' trilogy by Richard C. Meredith

3 / 5 Stars

Richard C. Meredith (1937 – 1979) wrote a number of sf novels, such as ‘We All Died At Breakaway Station’, ‘The Sky is Filled with Ships’, and ‘The Awakening’.

‘At the Narrow Passage’ was first published in 1973 in hardcover, followed by ‘No Brother, No Friend’ in 1976, and ‘Vestiges of Time’ in 1978.

Meredith made arrangements with Playboy Press to republish a revised edition of the ‘Timeliner' trilogy, starting with ‘Passage’ in September 1979, and continuing with ‘Friend’ in October and ‘Vestiges’ in November. Shortly after the revised trilogy was released, in March, 1979, Meredith died suddenly of a stroke.

The Playboy Press versions thus represent the final editions of the Timeliner novels. All three volumes have cover artwork by Kenn Barr.

The Timeliner novels borrow from H. Beam Piper’s ‘Paratime’ canon, in that they posit an infinite number of parallel universes simultaneously co-existing, without knowledge of one another’s existence.

As ‘At the Narrow Passage’ opens, the protagonist, Eric Mathers, a Captain of the British Infantry, is preparing for a commando mission. It’s Spring, 1971, and on para RTGB-307, the First World War is raging.

Eric Mathers is an agent for a lizard-like alien race called the ‘Krith’. The Krith have the ability to travel at will across paratimes, using a kind of teleportation unique to their physical makeup. Acting in shadow and stealth, the Krith manipulate human affairs on hundreds of paratime worlds. Eric Mathers has signed on an as agent for the Krith because he believes their argument that they are working for the ultimate good of the human race, by preventing paras from destroying themselves in nuclear wars. According to the Kriths, the loss of too many para civilizations to self-destruction can jeopardize the stability of adjoining paras. 

The mission the Kirth have selected for Eric Mathers and his comrades is dangerous: they are to sneak behind the German lines and infiltrate a chateau in Beaugency, where a German officer named Count Albert von Heinen is staying. They are to capture von Heinen and transport him back to British lines. Why is von Heinen important ? Because he is in charge of the German effort to construct an Atomic Bomb – the first one to exist in this particular paratime.

Eric Mathers embarks on his mission, albeit with reservations, and soon finds that all is not what it seems. Have the Krith been less than open with him about their true intentions ? When Mathers decides to investigate the motives of the Krith, a decision that takes him across a wide span of parallel universes, he comes to a growing awareness that a vast and brutal struggle is being waged across the paratimes. And that the fate of the Universe, not just Mankind, may come to rest on his shoulders…..

Overall, the Timeliner trilogy succeeds as adventure sf, with the inclusion of some ‘cosmic’ aspects to lend a note of sophistication to the run-and-gun actions sequences that dominate the first two volumes. 

There  also are plenty of Sexytime passages (Meredith evidently published a volume of erotic poetry ?! at one time in his writing career), involving an array of oversexed females who are ever-ready to unlcothe for the benefit of our square-jawed hero......but, then, this is not unheard- of activity for any 70s adventure novel.

The third volume is the weakest; while I won’t disclose any spoilers, it spends much of its length devoted to the somewhat clichéd sf trope of the Disembodied Consciousness Wandering the Universe. 

As well, Meredith made an effort to address Deep Metaphysical Questions about the meaning of life, time, and existence; this sort of thing is difficult to pull off in what is essentially a space opera, and the third installment suffers because of it.

However, despite the underwhelming nature of the final volume, the Timeliner trilogy is one of the better adventure series to appear in the 70s, particularly when you consider that at the time it first was published in the early- to mid- 70s, that sub-genre of straightforward, entertaining sf was being neglected in favor of novels that were self-consciously 'literary', a consequence of the changes wrought by the advent of the New Wave. 

That makes all three volumes worth searching out; they can be purchased for reasonable prices at your usual online used-book dealers.

Blood on Black Satin Episode Three

'Blood on Black Satin' episode three
by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy
Episode Three (from Eerie #111, June 1980)

Here's the concluding installment of the series, scanned from the original magazine at 300 dpi.....

Heavy Metal January 1984

'Heavy Metal' magazine January 1984

 

January, 1984, and the 80s are kicking into gear. On FM radio and MTV, the latest single by The Fixx – ‘The Sign of Fire’ – is getting airplay. 

The latest issue of Heavy Metal magazine is on the stands, with a wraparound cover by Mitch O’Connell.

By now - that is, the start of 1984 - , MTV was firmly in place as a pop culture cornerstone, and even the most stylishly jaded of hipsters could not avoid referencing it. So, the Dossier section hypes MTV, and provides a photo of Robert Plant posing with the VeeJays – this picture communicates just how physically tiny Martha Quinn actually was.

One of the features in this January issue is a portfolio of pages from The Sentinel, a newly issued trade paperback of Arthur C. Clarke short stories and essays, with black and white illustrations by Lebbeus Woods.  

The Sentinel, and succeeding volumes in the Berkeley Books 'SF Masterworks' series, was the brainchild of Byron Preiss, who was still resolutely trying to make graphic novels and illustrated books mainstream entries in sf and fantasy publishing. 

While I can't say that Arthur C. Clarke is one of my favorite authors, the illustrations by Woods are very well done.

There are some good comics in this January issue; posted below is Segrelles's '1992', a sardonic look at the End of the World.

Book Review: Fugue for a Darkening Island

Book Review: 'Fugue for a Darkening Island' by Christopher Priest

2 / 5 Stars

Most Americans are unfamiliar with John Enoch Powell (1912 – 1998), a conservative British politician who in 1968 made a speech in which he predicted that immigration into the UK ultimately would lead to racial violence, as the native population found itself overwhelmed by the social and economic problems attendant to an influx of foreigners to a small territory.

The so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was denounced by the UK political establishment and the national media, and Powell was removed as a member of the Heath government. His name soon was promoted by the media and British intellectuals as synonymous with an element of UK society that embraced racism and bigotry.

Powell’s declaration touched a nerve among the working- and middle- class British population, however, and his attitudes towards immigration and cultural assimilation became subsumed into the larger issue of whether the British Isles had sufficient ecological capacity to support a large population. During the 70s, on into today, the increases in crime, crowding, depletion of the welfare system, and other social strains associated with immigration, maintained the middle class's sympathy for Powell’s stance.

As 2014 begins the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which calls for strict controls on immigration and the deportation of foreign-born criminals, has garnered unprecedented support at the polls, something which has greatly disturbed PM David Cameron and the Conservative party, the British political establishment, and the media.

Those celebrities who have, in unguarded moments, endorsed Powell’s views have been instantly subjected to vehement criticism. Such unlucky individuals have included rockers Eric Clapton (remarks made while drunk in 1976), and Morrissey, who in a 2007 newspaper interview did not explicitly mention Powell, but made remarks critical of immigration.

Christopher Priest’s ‘Fugue for a Darkening Island’ (first published in 1972; this Pan Books paperback, 125 pp, was issued in 1978, with cover art by Mike Ploog) takes the Enoch Powell controversy and places it in a near-future (i.e., late 70s) England.

The first-person narrator is one Alan Whitman; white, British, five feet and eleven inches tall, of middle-class background. He is witness to the arrival in the UK of an exodus of African refugees, fleeing the aftermath of a limited nuclear war in Africa. As a stream of ships crammed with half-starved, injured, penniless refugees descend on Britain, the government is wracked by internal disagreement over whether to observe human rights conventions and provide food, shelter, and residency to the refugees, or to prevent the ships from disembarking and forever altering the demographics of the UK.

As the novel opens, the exodus has led to the arrival of 2 million Africans, or ‘Afrims’. The government is in disarray, the crisis having splintered the ruling class into a number of factions, each fielding a private militia to harden their grasp of power. The country’s economy has collapsed, along with law and order, as large numbers of Africans occupy metropolitan areas and outlying towns and villages, aided in some cases by white liberals and British communists.

The novel follows the travails of Alan Whitman as he and his family flee their comfortable suburban house in a poorly planned journey to possible refuge in the coastal regions of northern England. Their travels will take them through a landscape marked by violence between armed bands of raiders, government factions, and Afrims……a landscape with decreasing hope of sanctuary……

‘Fugue’ would seem to have a premise tailor-made for the sort of engaging, apocalyptic adventure that characterizes The Death of Grass, or The Day of the Triffids. Unfortunately, ‘Fugue’ is a disappointment.

Most of this is due to the fact that, as a novel written in the heyday of the New Wave era, author Priest chose to use an ‘experimental’ prose structure in which the text is not divided by chapters. Instead, he provides paragraphs separated by ellipses. 

To further lend the novel an avant-garde flavor, the overall narrative is discontinuous, with each paragraph representing a narrative thread different in time and space. Accordingly, one paragraph may occupy itself with a moment from Whitman's college years, followed by a paragraph describing a present-tense event, followed by a paragraph detailing an event just prior to the arrival of the Afrims.

Much of the narrative takes place in the time before the Afrim arrival and is concerned with reminiscences of Whitman’s sexual experiences and marital problems, another trope dear to the New Wave movement.

As a consequence of the discontinuous narrative, whenever the author builds up some degree of suspense, it is dissipated as the succeeding paragraphs shifts the reader to some locale distant in time and space.

It also doesn’t help that the story’s protagonist is one of the more inept in apocalypse fiction: Alan Whitman is vacillating and weak. Perhaps not intentionally, Priests’ depiction of Whitman as a white liberal means that Whitman’s actions are marked by constant indecision and self-doubt.

I finished ‘Fugue’ thinking it an improvement over its French counterpart, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973), in which an armada of decrepit ships, packed with diseased, starving Hindus, inexorably sails for the southern coast of France, while the French government dithers over whether or not to accept them. 

But it’s safe to say that neither 'Fugue' nor 'Camp' really succeeds as an entertaining example of near-future social apocalypse.  

Symbiosis

'Symbiosis' 
written by Bhob, illustrated by Jim McDermott and Shawn McManus
from Heavy Metal, December, 1983