Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Island In The Sea Of Time and The Stand
I just finished Island In The Sea Of Time, by S.M. Stirling. I’d long seen it recommended, bought it a while back, and just got around to it. I concur with the general sentiments about its greatness. The concept is sufficiently cool and intriguing to have sparked chronic threads on the alt history newsgroup where I used to lurk, usually titled [fill in the blank] ISOT, where everyone knows ISOT means in the sea of time. People play with the implications of various places to and from various times. Alternate history is always intriguing enough, but then there are disaster/survival story elements of upheaval as well.
The setup is that a strange, massive electrotemporal event, in the before-tourist-season month of March, drops our little island of Nantucket into 1250 BC, bringing (presumably) the 1250 BC version forward in trade. Along with the island comes a small amount of adjacent sea, and fortuitously a Coast Guard training ship. Given the sudden cutoff of mainland resources and the limits of the island, it really is a survival situation. The author handles that aspect well, and we see, perhaps, things we might not have thought of casually.
Naturally we see the beginnings of the influence of modern Nantucket’s arrival on the rest of the world. I hadn’t realized until after I started reading it that there were sequels, but it only makes sense.
I’d also wondered what the people “up in the twentieth” made of Nantucket’s swap to a pristine state. Turns out that there is a series underway of books on the other end of this electrotemporal disturbance, in which late twentieth century earth is rendered untechnological. Apparently the event was the biggest imaginable EMP, then some. So in that one it’s survival of people with more primitive skills. Should be an interesting read.
One of the more amusing scenes in the book is when one of the moderns starts to break it to the locals that the world is round, and they’re like “duh, we knew that.” Well, actually they were each surprised the other did, as it was closely guarded knowledge, but the moderns were the most surprised.
I also read Stephen King’s The Stand recently, which made for an interesting contrast. I started to write a commentary about that book, but never completed and posted it. That’s one of those books where people would express shock on learning I had never read it. My impression from poking through one King book one time was booooring writing, and horror isn’t ordinarily my genre. The Stand barely qualifies as horror, being more of a disaster novel. You could have a 99+% deadly virus escape and result in a similar scenario without any supernatural elements.
The book was excellent, but I kept thinking in other directions. Like… how long can all the food left behind by the dead people remain good and be enough to feed everyone? What are they going to do when food, gasoline, medical supplies, etc. run out or get harder to scavenge? What direction will a rebuilt civilization take? (An answer we have well in hand by the end of ISOT.)
Both books were engaging and hard to put down. I heartily recommend them. By comparison, Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South, an excellent alt history novel, was a bit slow and hard to get into or stay with in places. Now I’ve started reading the fifth Harry Potter, in preparation for reading the sixth one that had everyone so excited of late. So I’m a little slow.