Times Without Number is a time travel story set in an alternate-history Earth.  (Yes, the implications are pretty obvious.  I won’t comment on them until after the spoiler barrier.)  The book was originally three separate short stories.  For this publishing, Brunner reworked the stories to create one narrative from them.  Nevertheless, the book breaks easily into three different sections, each following a particular event in the life of “Don Miguel Navarro, Licencate in Ordinary of the Society of Time”.  (The alternate-history is that the Spanish Armada successfully invaded England and Spain, instead of England, became the colonial empire of the West.)

The setting seems reasonably well-thought-out, if a bit chauvinistic.  Women are second-class citizens, though that’s generally presented as a bad thing.  There are slaves, which exist and are never commented on.  Native Americans are all referred to as Mohawks, though some do express indignation at this.  Time travel is the sole dominion of the Catholic Church; the creator of the original device didn’t think anyone else would behave properly with it.  This book is probably not for anyone who would get offended at any of this.  (It was written 1969; the original stories are from 1962.  All well before political correctness came into vogue.)

Within the story are some reasoned explorations of various aspects of time travel.  The Society has strict rules governing the use of the technology; naturally, the stories tend to hinge on the breaking of various of those rules.  For me, this is the main reason to read the book.  There isn’t too much here that hasn’t been explored in other time travel stories, but this one probably predates most others.  Beyond that, the writing is decent, but not excellent, and it feels a bit dated.

Spoilers

Okay, so the obvious happened.  Someone went back in time to change the outcome of the Spanish Armada’s assault on England.  I did find myself hoping that such would not be the case, but I suppose the setting preordained it.  As I read the last bit, the final events did surprise me.  I had expected Don Miguel to go back in time and become the Earl of Barton (who was, after all, a “man about whom almost nothing was known”).  Oh, well.  The part about entering the “real world” wasn’t too bad. 

I was doing a bit of browsing today and ran across several websites that I figured I’d record for later reference.

• BookCrossing – pass books around to people, record your thoughts about received books on the website.
• The Online Books Page – listing of over twenty thousand books freely available on the web.
• Internet Book List – looks like an attempt to create an IMDB for books.  Good idea, only ten thousand books so far.  And no ISBN search.  Compare to All Consuming and…
• Internet Speculative Fiction Database – more or less the same thing, but aimed specifically at SF.  Includes information on what awards books have participated in.  Didn’t see any good way to search by ISBN.
• The Library of Babel: Links – one blogger’s collection of other blogs that deal with books (though the collection is, of course, incomplete).
• BookSpot.com – didn’t really look around this site all that much, and the appearance seems a little too corporate for my tastes.  Still, might be useful.

Public transportation is a good idea, it really is.  Maryland just happens to have implemented it in a rather sucky manner.  And I get to deal with it.

I was actually up earlier today, so I figured I’d stop at Baltimore Coffee and Tea for chai and a bagel to server as my breakfast/lunch.  I missed the bus I was aiming at, which was my fault because I was a little late and it was on time.  I caught the next one, which was three minutes late.

Got on the Light Rail in Baltimore and off next to Baltimore Coffee and Tea, ten minutes later than scheduled.  Well, I still had ten minutes before the next train, and it was probably going to be late, so I went and got my food.  Came back ten minutes later to see the back of the train receeding along the tracks.

Now I made my big mistake.  “Oh,” says I, “I can just go catch the 8, rather than waiting twenty minutes for the next train.” I walked for six minutes to the bus stop, then waited for another twenty-five.  In that time, two buses were supposed to have gone by.  None did.  From past experience, I really should have known better than to trust the 8 when I needed to have anything resembling a schedule.

I ended up walking back to the Light Rail stop and taking the next train, which was only seven minutes later than scheduled.

All told, if I’d left right after missing the first train, I could literally have walked to work and gotten there sooner than I ultimately did.

Bah.

A lot of critics seem to like Archform: Beauty, and I can’t really disagree with them.  It tells its story from five points of view, switching among them as it progresses.  Despite the title and the presence of five narrators, I didn’t really see much evidence of Bartók’s arch form in the structure of the book.  Beauty is, however, on the minds of the characters, though each has different ideas about what is beautiful.

Mostly, though, it’s a detective story.  Illegality has transpired, and the characters, variously, have committed it, are chasing it, or are affected by it.  The different threads of the story tie together marvelously as events work their way forward.

Modesitt also gets points for a very well-developed world.  Language usage has changed a bit in three hundred years, and the book is littered with new turns of phrase.  It’s not too hard to figure out meaning, though, and a short ways into the book I found the terms nonintrusive.

Spoilers

I’ll admit that I was disappointed a bit by Kemal’s death, mostly because he didn’t get what was coming to him.  Nevertheless, it was quite reasonable in the context of the book.  I was very happy with the tying together of Parsfal’s and Cornett’s threads at the end—the poet and the singer.

With respect to me discussion of endings in an earlier post, I’ll point to this one as an ending that left things loose or unresolved but still gave me a sense of closure.  (I had tears in my eyes at the last scene, even if Parsfal’s poetry wasn’t spectacular.)

• Beauty versus utility
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