Weaver: Time's Tapestry, Book Four (Hardcover)

by Stephen Baxter (Author)
Key Phrases: Ben Kamen, Josef Trojan, Home Guard (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
“Something new and subtly different in the time travel genre.”
—S.M. Stirling

“Baxter is accomplishing something special here.” —
Locus

“It’s masterful, a mix of widescreen spectacle and telling details. Mighty impressive.”
—SFX

Product Description
The climax of the “fascinating”( Locus) alternate-history series— from the national bestselling author of Navigator, Conqueror, and Emperor.

It is a war that has been fought throughout the centuries—with the fate of Rome to Christendom to modern America at stake. Now, during World War II, Germany launches a successful invasion of England. But in secret they are waging a war on an even larger scale. Trapped in the middle of it is Mary Wooler, an American historian caught in the Blitz and tangled up in strands of history; her son Gary, fighting a ruthless invader at civilization’s frontier; and Ben Kaman, a Jewish refugee whose very dreams place him at the heart of a conspiracy that threatens the very fabric of the tapestry of time.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover (July 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441015921
• ISBN-13: 978-0441015924
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #267,179 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #42 in

  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Baxter, Stephen

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Shockingly Disappointing, July 7, 2008

By	robert johnston (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having read the series as they were released, I was anxious to read this concluding book. Emperor, Conqueror, Navigator were subtle and interesting as Baxter melded history with a sci-fi theme with the prospect of 'something' out there pulling the threads in mysterious ways.

Baxter has written brilliant books. He got my attention years ago. He was one of the best sci-fi creators I'd come across. This series is something of a departure for Baxter as he played with alternate history. Perhaps, my expectation that Baxter would reveal his usual over the top sci-fi skill in concluding the series was too high.

The story picks up in early WW2 England. The alternate history he unfolds in this installment is droningly mundane with too many irrelevant, inane characters incessantly talking in one sentence sound bites ("Umm ...", What? ..., etc). The conversations are small talk, over wrought, archetypal good guy/bad guy/clueless guy. The dialogue is simplistic and generally irrelevant to the theme. At 1/3 of the book I considered tossing it, at 2/3 of the book fragments of the theme appeared, then it just runs out of energy and finally you get this "You got to be kidding me!" frustration with the whole charade.

Thankfully, the 2-3 page chapter scheme takes up the volumetric bulk of the pabulum by creating plenty of header space and reducing the verbiage. I started to imagine that Baxter may have been feuding with agents, deadlines or his publisher and was merely going through the motions in completing this book and closing out the series.

The book is boring to the point that one might consider it intentional. Weaver is a dupe on the reader of the 4 books in the story. I'd like my reading hours and money back on the series, please.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "Weaver's" Tapestry More of a Crazy-Quilt (Spoiler Alert), December 27, 2008

By	D. S. Bornus (St. Paul, MN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The final installment in this series takes place in 1940-1943, with an altnernate unfolding of WWII in which the British Expeditionary Force fails to escape at Dunkirk, and is nearly wiped out instead. This sets the stage for "Operation Sea Lion," in which Germany invades Britain, only to grind to a halt along the "Winston Line" in the southeast of the country, just short of London, until America enters the war and turns the tide in favor of the Allies.

We learn that the prophecies of the "Weaver" were not due to some supernatural cosmic wizard, but rather a fumbling Nazi scheme to alter the course of history in favor of the Aryan nation, by SS researchers using a combination of Godel's physics theories and early computing power, coupled with a psychologically-manipulated Jewish psychic/dreamer. Each of the prophecies that people lived and died for in past centuries are revealed as crude experiments to alter time by the Nazi researchers, unsuccessfully attempting to alter the overall stream of time (like throwing hand grenades into a hurricane), as they first send out a "practice" message, then an attempt to change the battle of Hastings, then an attempt to alter the course of medieval history by sending back plans for advanced weaponry, and finally an attempt to divert Columbus from his journey to North America, hoping to prevent the USA from coming into being by sending Columbus east instead of west.

In the end, the "Weaver" is stymied and the Jewish psychic is saved by the Allies, as he sends one final psychic message back across time, so that none of this will have ever happened - he sends a dream to a key Nazi advisor, who will counsel Hitler to hesitate at Dunkirk, allowing history as we know it to transpire after all.

I enjoyed the detailed "what if" scenario of seeing how a Nazi invasion and occupation of Britain might have occurred. It was quite jarring to watch the "S-Day" invasion landing on British soil by the Wehrmacht troops, sort of an opposite-direction D-Day landing as we have all seen in newsreels. Baxter does a good job of making historical periods come to life once again, as we become involved in the unfolding of various characters' lives. The book does diverge from the format of the previous books, however, in that all the characters and their story lines continue throughout the segments of the book.

Although the "Weaver" denouement is revealed to be of much more prosaic nature than the preceding books hinted at, I felt that Baxter did a good job of tying together all the story lines of the previous books. It might be interesting to go back now and read them all again, to see how the ripples in the pond smooth out.

It is understandable that some readers might find the series conclusion a bit disappointing, like finding out that a mysterious "locked room" murder mystery was really a case of accidental death. For myself, however, I enjoyed the puzzle.

5.0 out of 5 stars Satisfying End to the Series, March 21, 2009

By	Randy Stafford (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Baxter brings his series to a very satisfying conclusion. Not only do we see the parties who have been trying to manipulate history since 4 BC but, unlike earlier books, we actually get an overt alternate history.

Some of those parties turn out to by Rory O'Malley and Ben Kamen, two physics students in this world's Boston of 1940. Using Kurt Godel's mathematical explications of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and J. W. Dunne's theory of time, O'Malley is trying to alter history. But others want to manipulate the past too. Some are only known by their fingerprints on history, but others are onstage, specifically one Josef Trojan, officer in the Nazi research organization the SS Ahnenerbe, and Julia Fiveash, an English Nazi.

Fiveash is an example of the strong women, for good and ill, that are throughout this series Another is Mary Wooler, an American journalist and historian trapped in England when the Nazis invade in 1940. She and her son Gary meet Kamen there on the eve of the invasion. Kamen is captured by the Germans, and Wooler and a British Intelligence officer began to suspect the extant of the Nazi plans to alter the world's past.

That invasion is possible because, unlike in our time, the Germans wiped out most of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, but the timeline of this story seems to have diverged from ours at least as far back as the end of World War One though Baxter never explains why Armistice Day is Nov 9th and not Nov. 11th in this world. The invasion doesn't occupy all England - and Baxter presents a clever reason why - but the effects on those under the Nazi boot are well depicted through the life of Ernst Trjoan, the "good" German soldier who is Josef's brother, and Gary Wooler. Ernst's relations with his French mistress and the Millers, the English family he billets with, show the compromises, resentments, violence, and surprising affection that can crop up between conquered and conqueror.

And Baxter ends his story with a surprise entirely consistent with the series.