Island in the Sea of Time - S.M. Stirling Book Review

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Review Summaries

"What a great idea for a story! Nantucket Island is transported back in time to 1250 BC. The 5,000 residents of the island wake up to discover that the infrastructure that connected them to the world is gone. No more food or fuel shipments. No more electrical grid. The focus of the book moves from survival (too many mouths to feed, too little farmland) to exploration and trade, to rapid industrial development, to reigning in a renegade with ambitions of empire building. Stirling answers the question of what one does to build a modern society if one has a fair amount of knowledge but a scarcity of equipment and infrastructure. He has obviously given it a lot of thought and his solutions are convincing. If I have any reservation here, it is that Stirling goes into a lot of detail about how to smelt iron and build a ship and a variety of other technical considerations. He gives more than I want and I found myself skimming some of these passages. The characterizations are generally very good. The good guys are well fleshed out. They have their foibles and blindspots but they learn from believable (within the context of the novel) experiences. Captain Alston strains suspension of disbelief a bit. I have no trouble accepting an accomplished black lesbian Coast Guard captain. However, her physical prowess and skill with the sword evoke comparisons to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The bad guys tend toward the two-dimensional. Walker is an Iago with no redeeming characteristics and Hong is just plain twisted. I would prefer to see a bit more character development here. Perhaps in the two sequels. Overall, a thoughtful and entertaining read.

Crested sapwood supportable noradrenaline runout. "
Greg Careaga, Resident S.M. Stirling Scholar

"A fascinating time-travel story. The entire island of Nantucket is mysteriously catapulted back to the year 1250 BCE. It is a harsh, violent era, where human life is shorter, brutisher (sic), and nastier than ever. If the Nantucketers want to go on living a civilized life, their only choice is to raise the local tech level as much as possible. The result is an intriguing hard-SF tale of exploration, engineering, and ingenuity.

Crested sapwood supportable noradrenaline runout. "
Jeph Gord, Resident S. M. Stirling Scholar

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Overall Review

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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot

Composition of Book
Descript. of chases or violence - 30%
planning/preparing, gather info, debate puzzles/motives - 20%
Feelings, relationships, character bio/development - 30%
Descript. of society, phenomena (tech), places - 20%

Tone of book - very upbeat
FANTASY or SCIENCE FICTION? - science fiction story
Explore/1st contact/ enviro story Yes
Time Travel: - largely backwards/past
Plotlets: - surviving natural elements on planet
Is this an adult or child's book? - Adult or Young Adult Book
Time Travel story? Yes
Story largely takes place in - Really long ago

Main Character
Identity: - Male - Female
Profession/status: - navy soldier - police/lawman
Age: - 40's-50's
Is this an ordinary person caught up in events? Yes
How sensitive is this character? - sensitive to others' feelings - hard edged
Sense of humor - Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence - Very much smarter than other characters
Physique - very athletic

Main Adversary
Identity: - Male
Age: - 20's-30's
Profession/status: - navy soldier
Eccentric: Yes - obsessed
How much of work is main antagonist actually present in: - a moderate amount - a substantial amount
How sensitive is this character? - mean, arrogant
Sense of humor - Cynical sense of humor
Intelligence - Smarter than most other characters
Physique - very athletic

Setting
Terrain - Jungle - Desert - Water - Mountains - Forests
Earth setting: - general past
Takes place on Earth? Yes

Style
Person? - mostly 3rd
Accounts of torture and death? - very explicit references to deaths and torture
scientific jargon? (SF only) - a significant amount of technical jargon - the book is simply packed with technical jargon
Sex in book? Yes
What kind of sex: - descript of kissing - descript of touching personal anatomy - licking - impregnation/reproduction - actual description of sex - lesbians! - description of breasts - descript. of non-breast female anat. - rape/molest (yeech!)
How much dialogue? - roughly even amounts of descript and dialog - significantly more descript than dialog

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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s).

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