Depths of Time: First Book of the Chronicles of Solace » (Reprint)

Roger MacBride Allen is the author of seventeen novels and a number of short stories. He lived in Brazil for some years but now makes his home in Maryland with his wife and young son.

Time is of the essence when you're stranded in the future....

Humanity is running out of time.

The settled universe is filled with terraformed worlds linked by timeshafts — temporal wormholes in deep space. These timeshafts are the only way to travel the vast distances between the stars.

The Chronologic Patrol is charged with guarding the timeshaft wormholes and preventing time paradoxes at all costs. But one critical mission ends in disaster, turning Anton Koffield, captain of the Upholder, into a dark legend....

As ships carrying relief supplies to a crippled planet approach a timeshaft, they are mercilessly set upon by mysterious attackers — their crews are murdered and the sanctity of time itself is at risk.

In response, Koffield is forced to do the unthinkable: he must stop the invasion by destroying the timeshaft. Marooned eighty years in the future, he lives as a cursed figure, the villain who killed a world.

And his odyssey through time has only just begun....

Publishers Weekly

In an era when time travel is essential to interstellar transport, keeping the past from learning the future is the Chronologic Patrol's prime directive. Anton Koffield, captain of the Upholder, one of two Patrol ships protecting the Circum Central timeshaft wormhole, becomes the first person ever to act to preserve causality. Incomprehensible Intruders destroy Koffield's sister ship and cripple his own as they battle through the time shaft the wrong way, from "downtime" (the past) to "uptime." As a fleet of cargo ships heading toward a failing terraformed planet approaches Circum Central for safe passage, the Intruders return, and Koffield collapses the timeshaft to prevent them from returning to the past. The cargo ships are destroyed, the planet never receives its relief supplies and Koffield is stranded in the future with his crew, who have fingered him as the murderer of a world. Forced into isolation by the Patrol, which simultaneously hails him as a hero, Koffield stumbles upon proof that all of humanity's terraformed worlds are doomed to catastrophe. He must overcome his villainous status, pervasive guilt and a second time-stranding to convince others of the danger, even as he uncovers mysteries yet more profound, and a megalomaniac's master plan. With its well-rendered hero and supporting cast, Allen's (The Game of Worlds) latest resists slipping into melodrama. The thoroughly practical use of time travel coupled with visceral evocations of the logical complications of becoming lost in one's own future ground the novel scientifically and emotionally. Slyly, Allen wraps up his story with a maddeningly provocative ending that all but ensures a sequel and another meeting with the intriguing Koffield. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|