Customer Reviews

Time Spike (The Ring of Fire)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I've enjoyed the "Ring of Fire" series from the very first. I've given copies of _1632_ as gifts many, many times. Eric Flint is a creative person, and a great writer. Unfortunately, Marilyn Kosmatka is not in Eric's league. It takes a really seriously anti-talent to screw up an Eric Flint story. To do this amount of damage to an Eric Flint story beggars the imagination.

_Time Spike_ has done something I would have thought was impossible. For the first time in a long and varied reading lifetime, I could not find one single character I actually cared about.

There are so many amaturish mistakes, I can only presume _Time Spike_ was rushed into print to meet a hard deadline. Perhaps its true title should be "The Contractual Obligation Book"?

At the very least, _Time Spike_ could have been improved with even rudimentary proof-reading/editing. *Two* major characters named Geoffrey? Two *other* major and semi-major characters named Leffers and Luff? A baby born and not given the planned on name because "it's too important" and then is *never* named? Black characters whose 'homeboy' speech can't be sustained for three sentences in a row? These are mistakes high school students make in remedial writing classes.

Then there is the painfully bad subplot taking place "uptime" (in the present day). The few bits of "scientific" information presented in them could have been handled in a two-page or less prologue, as was done earlier in the series. As it stands, the uptime scenes detract from the action, and serve no purpose whatsoever other than allowing Kosmatka (presumably) to vent childishly petty remarks about the government. She even invents a ludicrous accusation of the government blaming Grantsville (_1632_)on "terrorists." If that's what floats your boat, go ahead and giggle along. But take it some place other than a book about the Ring of Fire. It serves no purpose and diminishes a really fine body of other people's works.

If I were Eric Flint, I'd ask to have my name removed from this book or sue Kosmatka. Preferably both.

I have the feeling that Flint has run into troubles with the complexity of changes cascading into alternate history in the Ring of Fire - it becomes more and more complex extrapolating the new history that resulted from the arrival of Grantville.
This book is set onto a smaller stage - it is more about the interaction of a small set of cultures being transposed into virgin time. 20th century knowledge does not have the devastating effect is had in middle age Germany.
The cultures - modern prisoners and prison guards, 1800's Cherokees, 1500's Conquistadores, and early (very early) American Indians are dropped way back in time before familiar plants and animals had evolved.
The book was a good page turner, well written. Much faster paced than "Bavarian Crisis". Flint seems to have found a good co-author.
The book though has the feel of the beginning of a series - I can almost taste the sequel that has already been written in draft form. This sense of incompleteness got it the four - rather than the five - stars from me. (Besides - to needs to keep authors humble.)
But go buy it - it is good.

If you want a fast paced, well-written book with an interesting (if familiar) concept about time travel, you won't be disappointed with this book. The authors do a good job of postulating what would happen if people from four divergent time periods in southern Illinois were moved back in time to the age of the dinosaurs. One group is from the present, and are the guards and inmates of a maximum security prison. Another group are Cherokee Indians and their U.S. Army escorts from the Trail of Tears, in the mid-1800s. The third group are Spanish Conquistadors under Hernando deSoto. The last group are early aboriginal Indians, the Mounds Indians. The book is entertaining, and there are discussions by physicists who are trying to get to the bottom of what happened that provide enough basic science and physics to make a plausible explanation.

The book rated only thee stars for a variety of reasons. The editing was surprisingly bad. Misspellings were rampant, as were wrong words, omitted words, etc. Love at first sight was also rampant. This got rather tedious, and is more than a bit of a stretch. The cold-blooded murderer/arsonist/armed robber with the heart of gold was also overdone.

These were annoyances more than anything. There were two things that really intruded on the story, and hurt it significantly. The first was the ease and speed with which everyone accepted what happened to them and took it in stride. I found it literally incredible that a group of soldiers and Indians from the 1800s would not be bothered by being thrust back in time 150 million years. Their main concern seemed to be finding a replacement for beef fat in their pemmican. I might have had a few bigger concerns than that.

Finally, the authors should really stop preaching about the evils of "the current administration." Flint is a labor organizer and clearly a staunch Democrat. The authors hate Bush. We get it. Say it once and move on; don't rub our faces in it. What the evils of "the current administration" (the single most used phrase in the book) have to do with people sent back in time 150 million years is a bigger mystery than how they got there. The authors couldn't decide if they wanted to write a science fiction story or a political diatribe. They opted to do mostly the former, with a hefty dose of the latter. It didn't work. I sincerely hope they knock that off in the inevitable sequels. I'll read them, but they will be much better without the political preaching.

Timespike is a great read. It is another example of Eric Flint's ability to co-author another compelling story with an unknown author and make it work. The story is really a novel of survival and a short novel of discovery. The short novel tells of the reaction of our time line(OTL) to the event in southern Illinois and (from the 1632 novels and stories) Grantville West Virginia. The new time line(NTL)follows the coping of those dragged back to the past to their massive problems. As always, characterizations and interactions are what make the story work.

John

I am a big fan of time travel stories and this one showed promise - despite the fact that the publisher was asleep at the switch and got the name of the main character wrong.

Still...

The first few dozen pages were great, and the concept is good. The problem is that the author never seems to DO ANYTHING with it. The character's are mostly cardboard, except for "Our Hero" who is ALWAYS the stoic leading man type, The others are caricatures.

The plotline is choppy, switching from NOW to Then with two completely different groups, only the NOW portion (A groups of scientists, I think) goes nowhere except into a romance that goes nowhere. Though events are talked about they are never brought into focus and the ending just - well, ends.

If this is book one in a Series, well I will withold judgement, but if it is a stand alone... It is like 7-up without the LemonLime aftertaste.

Time Spike, by Eric Flint and Marilyn Kosmatka had all the elements in place for an exciting science fiction tale: a Southern Illinois maximun security prison transported millions of years to the past, prison guards surrounded by 2,000 convicts on the inside, hemmed in by carnivorous dinosuars on the outside, and to make things even more harrowing, the authors threw in a band of equally stranded, truly sadistic, homicidal Spanish Conquistadors.

To my chagrin, these elements failed to gel properly, causing the story to run low on steam at key points. Too much of Time Spike focused on a team of present day scientists and their investigation of the prison's disappearance. Monumental events in the story were glossed over at the expense of key characterization. The reader is deprived of certain characters' perspectives when they are most needed to add depth to the story. Adrian Luff, the cerebral prisoner, who develops into a megalomaniacal monster, is poorly served by the authors. Luff's POV is drastically reduced later in the story when it could have been used to sustain and enhance his character.

The Spanish Conquistador element of the book was the most disappointing. It would have been very interesting to read about Hernando de Soto's and his men's reaction to being in an environment far stranger than the one they were wrest out of. The Spaniards are bereft of a single thread of POV. While they are portrayed as the ruthless brigands that they were in history, their ruthlessness serves as nothing more than a device to build up revulsion in the reader. When the Spaniards are finally dealt with, their comeuppance in encounters with the heroes is written in prosaic fashion. I still don't know what to make of De Soto's rather anticlimatic fate given my own expectation. Ultimately like the handling of de Soto's fate, I was expecting more from this book.

I always try to find something good in a book, especially when it's by an author I usually love to read. However, the combination of Eric Flint and Marilyn Kosmatka left me wondering why I bought it in hardcover, which is also not the first time I've read Flint's collaboration with another unknown author and was left asking questions about the publisher's sanity at times.

Time Spike seems to pick up roughly a few years after the Ring of Fire event in Grantville. In Marion, Illinois is where the setting originally takes place. The maximum security prison features a very interesting and eclectic collection of prisoners, including one man (who is a central character) who was wrongfully convicted. Very stereotypical mislabeling of the justice system.

Right around here was when I started scratching my head. One of the main characters was a skilled boxer, and I recalled in the 163x series that the leader of Grantville was also a boxer. A coincidence that so many boxers are thrown back willy-nilly into alternate time lines, or simple laziness on the author's part?

Another problem I had was with the speed that the people acclimated themselves. Grantville (163x series), without the plethora of prisoners running around wild, was still trying to get set up and be stable a year after the event. The prison, though filled with rapists, murderers and the like (you don't get into a maximum security prison for writing bad checks, by the way), seem to have an easier time coping with the change and turns not one but two towns into boom towns.

Indeed, the prisoners "with the heart of gold" bit grew stale after a time. I'm thinking that this is a problem for people who have watched "Pretty Woman" too many times and then tried to write a novel. The "hooker with a heart of gold" act grew tiresome in that movie as well, and towards the end of the book I started hoping that a dinosaur was going to come along and pull a Godzilla act on the prison proper. That perhaps would have been more entertaining than another love at first sight story, or the black guard falling in love with a prisoner roughly ten minutes after meeting him. I'm sorry, but how many guards look at a prisoner and think "I can look past his faults and fall for him"?

Time Spike is a huge let down, and I was immensely disappointed in it. It was not very believable, and I can usually suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy almost any book. I could not with Time Spike, however. I do hope that this was a stand alone, and the authors do not attempt to turn this book into a series.

It's been a while since I read this novel, so I don't remember the character names--my apologies. But that's one of the points here, this is a poor imitation of the author's prior works and a politcally self indulgent effort. In other Ring of Fire novels, there is a valiant attempt at fairness, showing intractable issues from many sides. You won't see much of that in Time Spike.

The story is set in southern Illinois and centers around the displacement of a state prison back in time much as the village of Grantville was in the original Ring of Fire series. There the similarity ends. For one thing, the displacement was far more chaotic and far deeper into the past, purportedly sending everyone who had ever wandered through this tiny bit of real estate in southern Illinois back to the age of the dinosaurs and snagging several hitchikers along the way. The two most notable groups brought along a famous Spanish conquistidore and his men (I won't say which one) and Native Americans on the Trail of Tears, and a few bits of other groups to round things out. (Odd how selective the eponimious time spike is.)

Ironically, most of the trouble in the book stems from a poor executive decision made by the warden soon after the central characters take time out to vent about poor executive decisions made by the Bush administration. The protagonist decides to abancon his core responsibility and involve himself in the situation outside the prison, marching off and leaving an unreliable subordinate behind.

But in fairness, this is not the first time we've seen this plot device from this author--Mike Stearns commits this same near fatal error in '1632.' (Note that I remember Mike Stearns but not the protagonist in this book)

But, unlike '--32,' no geek on a motorcyle saves the day with his shotgun. Many people die.

Including at least two who are murdered outright in seperate incidents by supposedly sympathetic characters. In both cases victims' crime was that they displayed a politically incorrect attitude and might cause trouble later on. So much for directive counselling.

This novel could have been so much more fun than it was. Dinosaurs and conquistidors--how could you go wrong, right? But the two behemoths that dominate the landscape are Polical Correctness and Moral Relativism. Maybe the sequel will be better, but I won't be buying it.

Napoleon said always reinforce success, never failure. Flint is clearly adhering to this advice with this recent novel. His Ring of File [Grantville] series touched a responsive chord amongst many readers. Here, he takes us back to the United States from which Grantville departed and spawns a parallel thread, by suggesting another time shift, or rather, a translation to another universe.

Fans of S M Stirling will immediately note the analogy to his Nantucket series and then, after the success of those, his writing of the Dies the Fire and Sunrise Lands series. You should also compare closely the scenes in Time Spike when the Americans are trying to adjust to new surroundings to the corresponding early passages of Island in the Sea of Time. Many overlaps, due to the same practical needs of survival. There is also an analog of William Walker, in Terry Collins. A reader reaching the part in the text where Collins first appears can be struck by this. Raising the question of how far, later on, Collins will play out an antagonistic role. (Open rebellion?)

Kosmatka brings to the table a deep acquaintance with much of the subject matter - working as a nurse and in a prison. Giving a rich verisimilitude to the narrative. She has managed to translate her personal and professional experiences into a very readable format. Also an added plus for the SF reader. The parts of the book dealing with these subjects is rarely dealt with in SF. For example, the descriptions of guard routines at a maximum security prison are not often seen in such comprehensive details in much of any fiction, let along SF.

Supervisor Captain Mark Stephens was observing the guard mount shift changing at Illinois' maximum security prison when the ground rumbled. He and others assumed an earthquake occurred. However, looking outside, the geography has changed radically; The Mississippi river vanished and all evidence of human activity outside the prison like roads are gone. Instead they see strange looking flora and shockingly a dinosaur that uses the prison wall to scratch its skin.

Mark quickly concludes somehow they have been transported back in time to a pre-human era when dinosaurs ruled the planet. They are not alone as other people from various millennia have also gone back perhaps a million years. Some of those locked up are cold blooded killers and some from the other groups like conquistadores quickly prove human life is expendable. Mark and his staff know they have their backs against the wall as they deal with human killers and dinosaurs, but enforcing the law of thou shall not kill is critical for their survival.

The Assiti who relocated Grantville, West Virginia into seventeenth century Europe have stirred earth chronology again this time moving several periods into the dinosaur era although the displaced Illinois crowd is the prime focus. The story line will remind the audience of the first Ring of Fire tale as the story line is fast-paced and filled with action, but has not quite become overly complex with time paradoxes as later tales begin to have. Fans will appreciate this strong opening act of a new Assiti time experiment as humans continue to be their guinea pigs, but for Mark and his staff survival of the fittest means containing the violent prisoners and some as vicious other era travelers.

Harriet Klausner