Customer Reviews

Weaver: Time's Tapestry, Book Four

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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.

The final book in Stephen Baxter's Time's Tapestry series, this book sheds light on the nature of those meddling in time (or at least most of them). It integrates the events of previous books with this book into an interesting framework, opening up fascinating possibilities for story-writing. Unfortunately, this book does not live up to that potential; the interesting framework can not offset the uninteresting characters and setting.

Unlike the predecessor books, this novel exists wholly in an alternate history, one in which the British Expeditionary Force in World War 2 was routed rather than escaping to Britain, and as a result Nazi Germany was able to do a successful invasion of Great Britain (at least initially - by the end of the novel, they have been driven back). It is in this setting that we find out who "The Weaver" (and other meddlers in the past) are, and Baxter does not hold out until the climax of the novel. In fact, he gives away the identity of "The Weaver" right away, along with the means of changing time (a strange machine called "The Loom" built in the early 1940s after the events above that can somehow use a psychic kid with the ability to send messages by dreams to send messages into the past). It then turns into a kind of "chase" story, with our protagonists racing after a group of Nazi sympathizers, with the fate of the world quite literally on the line.

Or at least it would seem that way, were it not for the fact that these characters are not at all interesting. Baxter's characters in the earlier books usually excited either sympathy or disgust, but at least they garnered a reaction; these characters bored me immensely, and I could not find myself with concern over their plight.Whereas Joan's fanaticism and hatred made my blood boil in Navigator, her successor Julia couldn't even rouse my ire.

Just as weak as the characters is the "alternate history" premise listed above (the destruction of the British Expeditionary Force and resulting successful invasion of Great Britain by the Nazis in an amphibious assault), the one that apparently forms the foundation for all of the events and meddling that occurs in the earlier. To be honest, it's just too unlikely to form a plausible alternate history. While as in any story, the characters and plot come first, alternate history at least has to appear -plausible- as an outcome, otherwise the author is writing arbitrary fantasy. Baxter portrays the defeat of the BEF as a near-thing, solely the result of an arbitrary hesitation on the part of the Nazi forces. It was not. Aside from the fact that the BEF was not just sitting there helpless waiting to be destroyed (in fact, they were sitting on good defensive ground, marshy with a choke-point that constrained supply lines going either way across it, with weather so bad it prevented nearly all German flying missions during the period, and extensively positioned field artillery and anti-aircraft guns), the Germans had exceeded both their supply lines (fuel and ammo were running low) as well as their command-and-control system, and needed a few days to recalibrate. If they had attempted it anyways, they would have likely seen massive casualties, and while they would have eventually taken Dunkirk, the BEF would have had plenty of time to escape during the whole process. Moreover, the Germans would have largely been killing Frenchmen instead of Brits, since the French were the ones fighting the rearguard action for the BEF. The end result would be little change to history, aside from significant German losses slowing them down further and making it even more unlikely that they'd be able to launch an amphibious invasion of the UK.

It's a pity that this potential is squandered by a weak story, weak alt-history premise, and weak characterization, because the framework and nature of the Prophecies and Interventions becomes fascinatingly clear in this novel. We find out that Prophecies are limited and sometimes preposterous (such as the "Old vs New World/Feathered Serpent vs Dragon" prophecy in Navigator) because they were actually meant to counter already-sent prophecies, like the sending of weapons designs to middle-ages Spain for use against the muslims. The outcome merely had to be threatening, not absolutely true. Other prophecies (including the very first one from Emperor) are clearly shown to reflect the ignorance and limited capabilities of their creators. At the same time, we find out that the interventions have been categorized and noted as such by authors set in the "past" (meaning the late 15th century).

In the end, this book had the feature that dooms any novel - it was boring. By the end, I had gone from following every word to skim-reading, and an interesting inversion of the usual alternate-history process at the end of the novel did not salvage it. While I doubt this will deter those who have already read the first three books (they are likely to see it through to the very end), I still recommend that you pass on this book.

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.

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.

The book came as advertised. Quick delivery and response.

Joe in Mobile