Patton's Spaceship by John BarnesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book isn’t exactly what I had expected – and what I had expected is one of the reasons that it took me *counts* 20 years to read this book. Yes, really, 20 years. I knew of the series near to when it was first published in 1997, and I probably had a used copy of the first book shortly thereafter. And . . . . did no t read it until this year. 20 years later.
Why? I expected that this book would be just like every other book that involved time lines and multiple universes. There’s Simon Hawke’s TimeWars, several short stories (and possibly books) by Poul Anderson, a series by David Weber, etc. – lots and lots of books that involved either two or more forces battling wars within time (TimeWars; Anderson’s short stories), or across universes (Weber’s series, and, later in the series, TimeWars). And while I liked that kind of thing, there is such a thing as getting overwhelmed with the same topic getting repeated over and over again.
So, what is it exactly I got this time? The first 25.23% of the book was an interesting look at an action/suspense/private investigator-bodyguard mystery. Quite detailed, quite interesting, and quite emotional. And then, finally, we got to the science fiction part.
And we, the readers, find – two competing forces battling each other through multiple universes. But, before you can say ‘training montage’ (no training actually occurs), the guy being recruited, Mark Strang, gets himself separated from the time traveling people and – impulsively, stuck on another world – a timeline wherein Hitler won (one of the 800 such timelines (vast majority, for those following along, have Hitler lose)). He is there on this world, trying to figure out how to interact, taking out some of the ‘Closers’ (the name of the ‘evil’ faction involved in the ‘Timeline Wars’ (as the back over the book calls it), but mostly this isn’t fight between two different time periods/sets of timelines/etc. It is the journey of a man who found himself on the wrong world. A Nazi controlled world. A world wherein Nazi’s took over the USA – but there are still forces trying to fight back. And Mark attempts to find them.
This book surprised me at just how good it was – just how interesting and exciting everything was. And, for that matter, just how violent it was. (heck, there’s even mention of gorgeous naked (or where they topless?) female slaves . . . seen in passing, glimpsed, not important to the story – but unexpected in and of itself to see).
If I had to come up with a complaint, a flaw it would be one specific issue – because of reasons fully explained in the book, Mark Strang became a trained operative – skilled with martial arts (though that training started when he was a kid before the ‘reasons’ occurred), gun use, body-guarding, private investigating, and art history (he had been heading for a doctorate in art history when his world imploded). But it was stressed a large number of times that he had no military training. He didn’t exactly become a military genius, or anything like that, no, it’s just that he was shown with skills that it had been kind of stressed hard he hadn’t gotten. Counter-argument to that is that much of what he did could have been picked up when he went all ‘commando’ like back in his own time period. It’s just that he was shown to be a good skilled body-guard, not Rambo, prior to going to another world and . . . doing what he did (where, fair enough, he didn’t go Rambo, he just became a very good instructor of military security people – also, he did kind of go all Rambo like in a few occasions).
Right, so, quite fun, interesting, great book.
Rating: 4.36
June 7 2017
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