The Depths of Time

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable.
Review: "The Depths of Time" displays Allen's usual guts in going for the big picture and has its share of breathtaking moments. I didn't find the pacing and technological ideas as compelling as in his spectacular "The Ring of Charon", but his character descriptions improve with each novel and I enjoyed this one very much. To describe this novel as a pulpit for ecoconservatism is completely specious; yes, some of the plot does hang on environmental modeling, and yes, environmental catastrophe does feature, but these are in a specific context that is decidedly different from our Earth. The science is in fact fairly solid, and there is no moralizing, just the creative exploration of consequences that is after all why we read hard sci-fi. I look forward to the sequel.

Rating:
Summary: See Kyle Jones Review but more info.
Review: Agree with Kyles Jones's review "starts fast, runs out of gas, coasts, then... no resolution". From my attendence at the World Science Fiction in September 2000 I know that Kyle did correctly conclude that The Depths of Time is a series. There are 3 books planned. Next the author plans to complete the next volume of the Hunted Earth series but that might not be published until 2003!

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece of Ecological Fiction
Review: Allen has begun, with this book, one of the finest and most insightful series of science fiction I have ever read, and I have been reading in this genre for close to half a century. His direct, clear and imaginative style is superb. His characters appear, one by one, as full and as realized as people who walk through the front door of your house. You feel that you know them, understand and care about their fears, their hopes and their struggles in this future tale of planetary crisis, and ecological colapse.

The story is set in a believable but distant future, a time in which technology and desire have peopled many planets, all of which have had to be "terraformed" into habitability. However, the technology which ties this interstellar network together is based on an intriguing method of using black hole wormholes in space to sling space ships and their passengers and crews backwards and forward in time, to achieve interstellar distances in a believable time frame. Within this complex tapestry of stretched time, planetary societies exist, flourish, and sometimes end disasterously. The worlds and planets in Allen's universe face realistic challenges of complex ecological dynamics that we in our own time are only just recently becoming aware of. So his worlds are "real" and face real problems, not just fantastic and simplistic militaristic dramas or "alien" menaces. Allen's people and their worlds and societies are those of real people and real geology, ecology and ecosystems.

Allen has developed a very readable and incisive style of writing and story spinning, and now with this series, and this book he begins a discussion and exploration of vast issues and very very timely ecological challenges.

The worlds in this story face challenges brought about by faults in human design and engineering. Yet, as is true of human societies throughout time, realty and truth are not easy to accept when the mass of humanity in Allen's universe simply want to go on living and have not realized the brink of disaster that awaits many of their worlds.

The main characters, including a remarkable main figure Admiral Koffield, move and breath and exude real human foibles, fears, hopes and motivations. I find Allen's characters some of the best in all the fiction I have ever read, and I have read a lot, being a publisher, and a life long student of history, and literature of all kinds. Koffield is a kindly yet vibrantly strong figure, a great relief in this time of weak and inspid male mock figures and artificial "super heros". Almost an anti hero, Koffield moves through this story in a powerful way, yet he shares the story with other fully realized characters, both men and women, who are believable, understandable and interesting throughout the story.

The shifts in time and location which are inevitable in the vast canvas which Allen has created are well done indeed, and the point of focus and momentum of the book moves smoothly through a variety of environments, and yet each one remains habitable in our minds and understanding, we are included and invited to continue along with the story, tantalized with enough good tale telling and believable science and acurate and cutting edge ecological science to stay closely committed to the progression of this very very fine work.

I cannot reccomend this work highly enough, for years I have enjoyed parts and portions of many different authors and works in this genre. But, I feel stronly that Allen has achieved one of the finest integrations of his own vision, the power and magic of the written word and the challenges and insights of science and future times that can be found in the science fiction.

I have re read this work a number of times since the first reading, and each time find new aspects to enjoy and that stimulate my own thoughts and work.

I look forward to the development of this series and thank Mr. Allen for a true masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Incomplete
Review: At little over one hundred pages into this book, I stopped reading it. There was nothing wrong with the story's concept. Time travel is a time honored (no pun intended) theme in science fiction. In the hands of a different author, this tale of a space based time patrol and its mission to preserve the integrity of the timeline may have been a better read. In the hands of Roger MacGride Allen, the story, unfortunately, is hampered by strings of redundant sentences and mired by his inability to resolve, within a reasonable frame of time the opening battle scene. The writing is good, even eloquent, the descriptions grand, and there are lot of internal points of view to add depth to the characters. Yet, somehow, inexplicably, paradoxically, I can't explain it, these elements of good storytelling fails, in this instance, to coalesce into a story capable of maintaining my interest to the very end. I hate to put aside a book without completing it, especially after having purchased it with my hard earned money. But time is a commodity that's precious to me. It's a pity that Depth of Time was a waste of my time.

Rating:
Summary: A EXCELLENT book!
Review: General:
The beginning started out excting, but got bogged down with too many tech. details, thus it was boring too and I almost didn't get past a single chapter, but . . .
I stuck with it and a few chapters later, it become excellent. His characters are very likeable and believeable. The books hard to review, as there's too much about it that should be in a review, but can't because it'll spoil the book. It touchs on various subjects and is a very interesting and thought induceing book.

The ending leaves a lot of issues unresolved and VERY much seems to me at least, it was done on purpose because Mr. Allen sure makes the ending seem like maybe he's thinking up a sequal? The books ending screams sequal.
Why I liked it:
I really like the characters and ideas in the book. Also because while its sci fi, it's hard to pin point the genre of the book. Mostly time travel and mystery, but terraforming and other issues too.
Mostly, it's the believeable characterts that ulimately make me like this. I'd like to see a true ending to this book. If your listening, Please Mr. Allen make a sequal to tie up the loose ends and Antons drama!

Rating:
Summary: Ok story overshadowed by poor implementation of time travel
Review: I had never read anything by Allen, but I thought this looked like an interesting story. The idea of being stranded in the future looked pretty intruiging. Unfortuantely, Allen does such an incredibly bad job of setting up how the timeshafts work and how they are guarded by the chronological patrol that it really spoils the rest of the story which is actually not too bad.

First, the timeshafts are explained both in the diagram at the front of the book, and also, by the story as being holes in time only, not in time and space, so where you enter the timeshaft is the same place you exit it. However, if this is the case, then the concept of uptime and downtime ends of the timeshaft that is relayed in the story doesn't make sense. Because the uptime end of a 100 year timeshaft from the year 4900 to 5000 would also be the dowtime end of the timeshaft from 5000 to 5100. Also, since the timeshafts would have to have that dual purpose, how do you indicate whether you are going uptime or downtime when entering the timeshaft? This is never explained, though it easily could have been by using different codes, or a different nexus. Finally, the CP ships are very clearly thought of as either uptime or downtime ships, when this obviously cannot be the case, the ships would need to serve a dual role, which is never mentioned and is actually contradicted by the way the story presents them.

Second, the story makes it clear that the timeshafts are built far from any developed system, requiring them to travel at least half the duration of the timeshaft in order to reach the timeshaft to ensure that a ship cannot arrive at its destination before it left. But if this is the case, then how do the CP ships return to "their" present? Presumably, they would need to go through the timeshaft before returning home, and the uptime ship would need to go through twice, but if this is the case or how it is accomplished is never mentioned. Also, with this delay because of travel time, how long do these ships stay at their station? No matter how you try to do it, it causes problems, either with the ships leaving their station or the relief ships getting there. But Allen never even tries to explain it, so we just don't know. Also, when the Upholder send word of the attack, how can the Standfast possibly be relieved so quickly, with the travel time being so great? It doesn't make any sense.

Finally, what I think is the biggest problem with how the time travel rules are implemented, is that the author makes it very clear that he doesn't understand them himself. Even if he does a poor job of it, it would be more excusable if he was consistent, but he is not. One example of this is when a ship has been stranded in the future, and the captain is discussing his options expresses that the CP would blow up his ship if he tried to enter the uptime end of a timeshaft to go downtime. Well, why would they do that, since that is exactly what the timeshafts are for? Actually, what really prevents them from returning to their own time is the objective time it would take to travel back to the timeshaft and then back to their destination. Also, the story mentions the Upholder crew being stranded 80 years in the future, but if they are guarding an 80 year time shaft, then they should actually be stranded at least 160 years in the future, since it would take them at least 40 years to travel to the timeshaft and 40 years to return from the time shaft in addition to the 80 years they gained by going through it. The fact that the author doesn't understand his own rules is very disappointing.

Despite the poor time travel setup, I was able to enjoy a lot of this book, the opening battle is pretty good. But these problems really do overshadow what could be a pretty good story. There are also other problems later in the story that are pretty annoying, but they pale in comparison to the time travel issues. One, in particular that bothered me was the fact that early on in the story they show many different ways that identity can be confirmed before accepting important commands, from codes to retina scans to fingerprints to DNA, but later for convenience, the story suggests that an entire ship can be reprogrammed using a simple numeric code.

I will probably look for more books by Allen that do not have the time travel aspect, because I'm sure I will like them much better. But I don't think I will continue with this series because of the terrible job that was done with the time travel.

Rating:
Summary: Not worth the effort
Review: I haven't read any sci-fi for a long time. Stopped reading it years ago because so much of the writing was just plain bad. I picked up this book thinking I might get back into it, but I found that it did nothing to attract me back.

Mr. Allen thanks, in his acknowledgements at the beginning of the book, his publisher who convinced him to turn his one-book idea into a trilogy. Apparently the formula for a trilogy is: 1) take a single book manuscript and 2) flesh it out with redundancies, pointless detail and meanderings.

Some of the time ideas were interesting, but I had a real hard time with two issues: 1.) There is a strict adherence to Einstein's speed-of-light limitation. But at the same time, NO regard for the force of gravity (there are "gravity generators" on all the ships). If you want to "generate gravity" without acceleration you have to bend space. If you can bend space without mass, Einstein goes right out the window. 2.) MOST folks traveling from star to star use cryogenic sleep chambers on space ships. The ship's captain, however, uses some sort of stasis field that slows time to a crawl. They don't use it on everyone because it takes so much power. This is just too lame for me.

If all modern sci-fi is this bad, it's back to the classics for me. I cannot recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Don't leave me hanging.
Review: I just finished this book. The writing style, excellent. The characters, excellent. The plot, well the beginning was VERY exciting.. loved it. The middle, did drag on a bit, lots of filler, etc, but forgivable in the fact that there was always a puzzle for Koffield to solve, a question to be answered, an obstacle. In fact, this extends itself right to the VERY LAST PAGE! Obvisously this is intended as the first book in a series, there's NO climax, no confrontation between the antagonist and protagonist ending in the satisfying ta-DAH! and "curses, foiled again".

We need closure...

Rating:
Summary: A book that makes you wish there was a sequel...
Review: I picked up this book because I saw that it was written by Roger MacBride Allen. I liked his writing in the Star Wars Universe so I figured I couldn't go wrong it picking up the book. Well, I was right but I should have waited for all the books to be out.

Like the previous reviewer said, "starts fast, runs out of gas, coasts, then... no resolution!" Allen reels you in the beginning but then kind of gets lost in the middle, in effect losing you as well. He then reels you back in, only to end the book abruptly with no resolution for the characters or the reader. Although this may seem like a bad thing, I personally think it was intentional. Since the book seems to be the first in a set or series.

That aside, I did enjoy the book. Depths of Time is enjoyable if you can overlook its cliffhanger ending. If you're a soap watcher then DOT's ending will be no surprise. Personally, I'm waiting to see what Allen has in store for us in the next book.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed premise from the start
Review: I will not go into the actual book as others have reviewed that adequately. I shall, however, concur on the fast beginning, slow middle, and abrupt end. What I wish to address is the whole Chronologic Police and the Timeshaft Wormholes.

I'm sorry, but whoever founded the Chronologic Police were idiots. In brief, in the middle of a space voyage, which we will say lasts 100 years, the ship passes through a wormhole and travels back in time 100 years. It then finishes the other half of the voyage for 50 more years so that the vessel arrives almost the same time that it left (+50 years -100 years +50 years = 0 years).

Now if you understand that, you should see the problem with the next bit. The Chronologic Police travel in pairs and they go to the "exit" of the wormhole -- it is not specifically said, but the "up-side" and "down-sides" are at different locations, otherwise there would be at least two ships at each end at all times, but I digress. When they reach the exit of the wormhole they send one of the ships "forward" in time. They do this with the understanding that they CANNOT communicate with anything and no knowledge from the "up-time" may pass to the "down-time". Got that? Well read on....

Lets say, for example, that the "patrol" leaves in the year 5000 and it travels 50 years to the wormhole (year 5050). It sends its partner 100 years into the future (year 5150) to await ships and send them back in time. Now, these ships will have left in the year 5100 and will travel back in time to the Year 5050 so that they will reach their destination in the year 5100. Now let us say that the a ship is in 5150 and tells the "up-time" patrol everything that happened in the year 5100 then the patrol ships goes back in time and heads for home with this marvelous info. Well, the Patrol ship will arrive home in the year 5100 just like the ship that came through, so whatever news was gained 50 years in the future is already known!

Quite frankly, there is never going to be a paradox for the Chronologic Patrol to deal with. It just simply cannot happen. Maybe, it can be argued, that the info could be sent on robot drones that can go far faster than manned ships, in which case there is the possibility for a paradox to occur, granted, but this could happen with any ship, regardless of which "time zone" they started.

So, time paradox wise, it makes no difference if the patrols start at the "down" end or the "up" end; but there are reasons why starting at the "down" end are insane. By making this a necessity that means that while the ships that are passing through the timeshift wormhole arrive at their destinations at the same time (or there abouts) as they left, the Chronologic Patrol ships will arrive home after their tour with the full travel time counted. So, using the example above, the patrol started their tour in the year 5000 and would return home in the year 5100 because (being that they started from the downside) they do not gain the benefits of the time shift. Of course if the two ends of the wormhole are relatively nearby they could use it, but that would cause a few more problems and a lot more paradoxes...

The real paradoxes would occur with ships that started at Planet A, went through the wormhole and returned to Planet A. When they get there they meet themselves traveling to the wormhole and they pack the cargo from the "future" ship to the "past" ship. Theoretically, if this was possible and the original ship did not meet itself on the first leg of the voyage, the cargo would double in size with each repetition. And that is only one of the many cans of worms out there.

Son if, like me, think on these things and cannot get past them, then the book is horrible despite the good writing and characters (I will not go into the story itself, I promise). If you can get past the illogical premise, then if you can stand slow books with inconclusive endings, you'll love it.

As an aside, the author acknowledgements at the front seems to indicate that Rodger MacBride Allen's original storyline was broken up into two or three books and he had to padded it to make it contemporary "novel" length. So, when your original story takes 500-600 pages to tell and it is expanded into 1200+ pages (assuming three novels), then there is going to be a lot of padding. But this is only assumption.