Lost in time William R. Forstchen Never Sound Retreat (Lost Regiment #6) 1998 US$6.99 ROC/Penguin Books 376 pages 0-451-45466 S.M. Stirling Island in the Sea of Time 1998 ROC/Penguin books US$6.99 608 pages IBSN: 0-451-45675-0 You're a red-blooded Yankee out sailing off the coast of Maine when a monstrous storm comes up complete with cheesy, Spielberg-esque lightning effects. Then, after a strange discontinuity, the skies clear and you see the stars. It's then you see the horrble truth---you've never seen the stars looking quite like *that* before; they're preternaturally clear and in strange new alignments. You've been transported into a new world, and some quick exploration shows that you're surrounded by hostile natives who speak a familiar but mostly unknown language. A military crisis brews on the horizon as you struggle to recreate your familiar New England society on the shores of this distant lands. It's a good thing you've brought along a small squad of American troops and a few brilliant technicians to help you build guns and ingenious inventions that might be just enough to turn the tide of the war. This is the plot of both Sterling's new _Island in the Sea of Time_ and Fortchen's now six-book "Lost Regiment" series, most recently extended by _Never Sound Retreat_. Lost-in-time-and-space books, films, and TV shows are nothing new in the science fiction world. It's always a toy-soldiers/Robinson-Crusoe fantasy to take the smallest coherent set of Americans, strand them with hostile natives, and see if they can make a go of it on their own. For some reason, it's almost always New Englanders with upright morals who try to apply a modern sensibility of what is right at wrong with these natives, Their own unquestioning morality drags them into interesting, if harrowing, situations. WHALE INFESTATIONS Sterling's book concerns 1998 Nantucket Islanders who are spontaneously moved 3000 years backwards in time, yet still (somehow) in the same place relative to North America. The mechanism of their travel ("big storm") is largely ignored, and the 5,000 residents (and the sail-powered Coast Guard training ship full of cadets) adjust suspiciously rapidly to the idea that they're never coming home, despite no evidence the contrary that what moved them once won't happen again. Instead, they quickly form a socialist hierachy to ration food, plant crops, quarantine the local Indians (trying to avoid plaguing them to death as Columbus and Cortez would a millenium and a half later), and set sail for England to trade for wheat and barley. The emotional action centers around four characters: the gruff, soft-spoken sheriff and his sharp, matronly librarian fiancee; the gruff, soft-spoken coast guard captain and her blonde English girlfriend; the gruff, hard-spoken traitor with Kipling-esque dreams to be a pre-Christian wizard-king; and the not-quite-so-gruff, soft-spoken Jewish anthropologist and his astronomer girlfriend. The story unfolds over zillions of pages, going from the standard ark plot ("How will these people thrown together survive?") to an action-adventure plot driven by the regal ambitions of William Walker (footnote: the same name of a real-life adventurer who went to Nicaragua to try to set himself up as a third-world dictator during the 1870s). The characters respond more or less realistically to threats and triumphs---my favorite are the little twists, such as the tree-hugging New Age flake complaining about slaughtering whales for food ("They're an endangered species!"), and the captain replying, "No, they're not. They're a navigation hazard. You can't sail five miles out there without bumping into the damn things." Stirling, at no loss for words, weaves to well-researched treatises on anthropology, archaeology, and economics into his narrative. He has a knack for making his savvy history lessons relevant to the plot; I never felt he was making me suffer for his hours in the library. Except near the inevitable clash of prehistoric armies near the end, the plot was mostly unpredicatable, failing to follow a conventional story trajectory, which made me not want to put it down so I could find out what was going to happen next. At the same time, the story is hardly rich in theme or metaphor; you read this because you want to dream of starting society over in America with a fresh continent and the lessons of the past. I really liked this book (I never played my treasured computer games on a long and boring business trip), and I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel---I've gotten to know his characters and like them, and he's left them in an unstable equilibrium. NEVER SOUNDING RETREAT UNLESS YOU REALLY HAVE TO Fortchen takes the same plot in a different way. For those unfamiliar with the Lost Regiment series, this means following the drama of a (real-life) Union regiment, the Maine 35th who were lost at sea in a large storm. In Fortschen's books, however, rather than being miserably lost at sea, they are instead transported to an entirely different planet (but still, it means a big storm and lots of lightning). The planet is ruled by big ugly aliens called Bantags, who ride endlessly around the world, apparently set upon experiencing as much jet lag as possible. The Bantags still use crossbows, which means they're ripe for an upset by our men with muskets. They're totally unforgiveable enemies, too. They call human beings "cattle" and eat people at the Moon Feast, which means scooping out the brain while the human being is still alive. They've been feeding off various tribes of humanity who have been brought in by this mysterious time-tunnel from different Earth epochs, meaning Romans, Russian peasants, Zulus, Vikings, you name it. (This seems to be an excuse to mix and match various times and places and put, say, a Caesar next to an Eric the Red, much like Sid Meier's popular computer game "Civilization.") In the first few books of the series, Keane, the regimental lieutenant, fends off the first wave of these horse-riding aliens and allies himself with the local Russian peasant village. Now, since book #5, the Bantag have a new alien leader named Ha'ark who is also from another world, this one more technologically advanced than even the Union soldiers. Ha'ark knows about heavier-than-air travel, tanks, and even machine guns. He also inexplicably has a psychic connection to Lt. Keane. Ha'ark wages war on the Keane settlement from the captured human city of the Chin (Chinese peasants from some ancient time). Ha'ark is cleverer than the spear-wielding thugs from previous books, and the war starts looking less and less like the Civil War and more and more like World War I. This means Keane is fighting a war of attrition and technological change rather than one that hinges on brave artillery battles and cavalry charges. So we're left with the inevitable question---will Yankee know-how save the day? Although Forstchen foreshadows his story arc more than Stirling, I've frequently been surprised to find out the answer to the above question is "no." Keane and his men often get slaughtered in badly-planned attacks, surprised by ambushes, or out-thought by their opponents. One never knows whether each book will end with a win or a loss for the home team, and every battle is drenched in the blood of main characters who get whacked. The battles are gruesomely detailed and very compelling. I can't help but hum as I read the Civil War songs my father (an American historian) played for me as a kid---"Aura Lee," "Battle Hymn," "Johnny Comes Marching," and so forth. Forstchen's characters are all pretty stock---the troubled but brilliant commander, the grizzled veteran sergeant who teaches his commander to command, the genius American inventor who comes up with new military technology at the last minute, the self-serving and despicable traitor who wants to be king in this new world (gee, that's familiar), and a small cast of nurses and wives who can worry about their men. Stock or not, though, I love this series. It's cheesy, it's derivative (derived from good adventure stories), it's occasionally jingoistic, but I've been eating it with a spoon since _Rally Cry_ (book #1) came out in 1990. It's like watching "Star Wars," only with some new twists---clear good guys, unredeemable evil bad guys, and a cast of thousands of spear-carriers. I've felt like I've read it all before in some other context. Book #6 is more of the same, and I have this feeling we'll be seeing another few Lost Regiment books, much as the new Lucas films will be out next year. CONCLUSIONS OF A SPACE/TIME-TRAVELING READER As I read all of these books, I keep wondering if we haven't explored the important parts of this whole genre. Then, I kept doubting that conclusion. It's like sports nuts pitting the 1985 Chicago Bears against the 1995 Dallas Cowboys---they can't help but make the "what-if" comparison. Military/anthropology fans want to refight their own battles, and the result are hundreds of war games and a few books like these. Stirling and Forstchen have written two good ones. I hope they keep serving up action-packed action spiced with history---I'll keep reading them. ---- Celebrity note: Stirling mentions my uncle, Gerald Hawkings, as a source about Stonehenge in the middle of _Island_. Be on the lookout!