The first hint Marion Alston, captain of the Coast Guard training windjammer Eagle, had that something’s wrong is when the magnetic card compass started spinning. St Elmo’s fire began darting along the Eagle’s rigging, and then filled the night sky with lightening. When weird bright light, like no electric storm seen before, filled the night sky over Nantucket its residents were shaken but not afraid. Not, that is, until they woke to a world without television, radio or satellites. A world, in fact, where the modern population of humanity has shrunk to just over 7,000. Somehow Nantucket and a circle of water around the island, including the Eagle and her crew, have been transported in time to 1250 BC and there’s no way home.
Written earlier than, but set in the same universe as Dies the Fire, Island in the Sea of Time is the first in a companion trilogy. Though superficially quite different - they have modern technology and knowledge but all around them is underdeveloped – many of the same fundamental issues are the same. These include balancing immediate and long-term survival (the more labour pulled from tilling fields and fishing the less food there is, but neglecting research and development increases workload); managing internal disagreements and schisms; defence against hostile external forces; and building a strong community. The response to adversity includes new pair bonding and a poulation jump (as in Dies the Fire), and brings out the central aspects of character, both good and bad.
I thought some of the overly generous trading, and some of the innocence (like bringing a wily Tartessian trader back from Britain to Nantucket) a little unconvincing, and the consequences foreseeable, though not necessarily predictable. The composition of the population, heavy with convenient historians, was a mite convenient – of all of history to be familiar with, a strong cultural knowledge of the time and place they arrived at, including the folklore of a tribe that left almost no trace in the 20th century – but that’s a relatively minor quibble. I also would have liked a map – the combination of original (versus contemporary) place names with being unfamiliar with Nantucket’s location, let alone its position relative to other countries, meant that I was quite often lost regarding specifically where they were.
In general, though, I enjoyed Island in the Sea of Time. The characterisation was vivid, the scenario both fresh and involving, and the plot moved briskly. I found the reaction of varying groups particularly interesting – the rational leaders, who made plans to maximise outcomes for the groups as a whole; the irrational religious leader, who declared the move to the era before Christ as the work of Satan, and how this was contrasted with more logical religious heads; the dastardly, who plotted in their own long-term best interests; and the hippy dippy eco-romantics, whose attempts as being as one with the native populations were something less than a success.
I think I probably need to take a bit of a break from Stirling, whose novels are dense and thought provoking, but I’ll be continuing with both series once I have a breather. - Alex
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