The Ocean of Years (The Chronicles of Solace, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)

by Roger Macbride Allen (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
As the second, but surely not the last, Chronicle of Solace opens, the planet Solace's terraforming is beginning to break down. Oskar De Silvo, who began it, is supposed to be dead but actually is in a combination of stasis and cryogenic suspension to prolong his existence so that he can be at hand to prevent disaster. Meanwhile, Anton Koffield, formerly of the Chronologic Patrol, is using all his knowledge of timeshaft travel and a hijacked and disguised starship to deal with a personal enemy. So dealing, he discovers that De Silvo's knowledge may hold the key to saving Earth from a disaster that occurred many centuries ago. He travels through a timeshaft wormhole back to Earth of the early third millennium. At the end of more than 400 pages, Koffield has just gotten into position to save Earth. The action, characters, and technology are sufficiently absorbing to make this book thoroughly readable. Again Allen has mixed hard science, social science, and pure adventure effectively. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Praise for The Depths of Time

"[A] well-rendered hero and a maddeningly provocative ending."
--Publishers Weekly

"Allen meets his usual high standard in the far-future combination of speculative hard science, social SF, and pure adventure."
--Booklist

"Mind-boggling ideas spice up an absorbing puzzle."
--Kirkus Reviews
-- Review

Praise for The Depths of Time

"[A] well-rendered hero and a maddeningly provocative ending."
--Publishers Weekly

"Allen meets his usual high standard in the far-future combination of speculative hard science, social SF, and pure adventure."
--Booklist

"Mind-boggling ideas spice up an absorbing puzzle."
--Kirkus Reviews
--Review

Praise for The Depths of Time

"[A] well-rendered hero and a maddeningly provocative ending."
--Publishers Weekly

"Allen meets his usual high standard in the far-future combination of speculative hard science, social SF, and pure adventure."
--Booklist

"Mind-boggling ideas spice up an absorbing puzzle."
--Kirkus Reviews


See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (June 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553583646
• ISBN-13: 978-0553583649
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 3.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #407,633 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Pursuit of a Mad, Plagiarizing Terraformer..., June 25, 2002

By	Carl Malmstrom (Monument, CO USA) - See all my reviews

Picking up where "The Depths of Time" left off, "The Ocean of Years" forms the second part of Allen's "Chronicles of Solace" and sends Admiral Koffield and the crew of the Dom Pedro IV hurrying back to the Solar System to find word of Oskar deSilvo's whereabouts.

Allen's universe here revolves around an Earth and its colonies linked together by a series of timeshaft wormholes: that is, a series of fixed-distance wormholes through time that allow ships (none of which are capable of faster-than-light travel) to objectively experience a hundred-plus year trip through time in a subjective period of days or weeks. The concept is a bit complex (requiring a chart and full-page explanation at the start of each book), but comes off as oddly plausible once you think through the myriad implications of the system - which Allen seems to do well.

In this trilogy, outer terraformed colonies are beginning to die and the only answers as to why are linked with their terraformer - Oskar deSilvo. A man thought dead halfway through the first book, he is hiding in an undisclosed location having provided, essentially, a maze for the crew of the Dom Pedro IV to run to find him. Taking them the libraries orbiting Neptune to Earth to the long-ruined, fungally-overgrown Mars, the book is essentially a series of mysteries laid out and solved by the crew in their attempt to not only find out where deSilvo is, but what implications his pre-hibernation discoveries have for the worlds colonized by Earth.

While this book makes an excellent middle chapter in the trilogy - building on the first one and naturally extrapolating much higher stakes for the third, it does suffer from a few small problems. One is that it's virtually impossible to understand if you haven't read "The Depths of Time". While he tries to being new readers up to speed, he does so over the first hundred or so pages of the book, creating a bit of a jumble in terms of the action occurring. I found even having read the first book six or nine months ago, I was getting lost having forgotten many of the main details. Likewise, his pacing occasionally suffers from unpredictable stutters. Stylistically, it lags or surges forward at odd times. There were parts in the middle - and near the end that dragged by as you waited for characters to move on to the next key. In the same way, occasional pieces of the puzzle were laid out only to be immediately solved by the characters - not giving the reader a chance to try to stay one jump ahead of the mystery.

Nonetheless, though, this is still an outstanding book. His universe is based on a novel idea and is well extrapolated from that point. The shadowy, background villains stay suitably shadowy and a good sense of paranoia slowly infuses the book. If you read - and enjoyed - "The Depths of Time", definitely give this one ago (after having, perhaps, flipped through the first again). If not, go back and pick up "The Depths of Time"; it's worth the read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Best in the 3 Book Series, October 2, 2006

By	James C. Dascoli (Millburn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you can get past the fact that Allen has a habit of being repetitive, especially considering no one is reading the second book if they have not read the first, then you can enjoy this as the best and most interesting of the three in the series.

Of all three books, here we get to really see Allen's vision of the future, how humanity has stagnated and the populace has ignored the clues to the impending crisis. The most enjoyable section of the book was the image and description of The Permanent Physical Collection, the housing of all the books in a giant space habitat orbiting Neptune. As has been discussed in tech circles and other sci-fi books, the weakest link in our push towards a total digital age is being able to store the original source material in accessible form, ie paper.

The failed terraforming experiment of Mars was also an enjoyable read, as Koffield and Norla go searching through the suppressed technology hidden by the time patrol. Finally, after playing Wile E Coyote to DeSilvo's roadrunner, Koffield finally catches up with DeSilvo, but of course, we are left to a resolution in the third book.

The book/series certainly have some weak points. Many of the themes are common in other sci-fi stories, Allen really could have told the story in two books, and whatever issues you want to throw into a book with some form of time travel. However, despite those weaknesses, the story is compelling, and I found myself extremely interested in two of the three main characters, Koffield and Norla.

As an aside, Greg Bridges did the artwork on the cover of the book, which I enjoyed so much I found his website and ordered a print. He does many sci-fi covers and in my opinion is one of the best along with Jim Burns.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars high tech science fiction at its very best, July 6, 2002

By	Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In the far distant future, mankind has been able to terraform whole planets so that humans could colonize them. Oskar DeSilvo is credited as the genius who brought this process about but Anton Koffield declares that the terraforming project is breaking down and if they don't evacuate the planet millions will die.

Although the authorities have proof that DeSilvo is still alive and has technologies that will save mankind, the authorities want proof that the terraforming project is imperfect. Koffield and his associates travel through a time wormhole one hundred years in the past to locate DeSilvo, get the technology, including the FTL drive and save the future. Koffield also wants vengeance on the man who destroyed his career.

THE OCEAN OF YEARS is high tech science fiction at its very best. The time travel operation, intricate to the story line, is both easy to understand and makes sense even if one is not a quantum physicist. The hero is a driven man, whom seems to place honor above all else, making him the implacable enemy of the antagonist. Yet it is his thirst for vengeance that ultimately leaves readers to wonder whether humanity will survive (at least this novel). Fans of Arthur C. Clarke will love this book.

Harriet Klausner