Cowboy Angels

In Cowboy Angels, McAuley breathes new life into a fairly well worn idea. This is a story of alternate histories and parallel worlds, of people travelling through magic doors to worlds that are almost-but-not-quite their own. This was an idea that wasn't new when Andre Norton did it in The Crossroads of Time, much less when Keith Laumer tackled it in Worlds of the Imperium or when Harry Turtledove more recently dusted it off for Gunpowder Empire. But as Cowboy Angels shows, it's an idea still worth exploring, if an author can come up with a novel approach to the subject. McAuley's twist here is to view the interactions of different histories through the lens of American foreign policy, and in particular the CIA's "dirty tricks" in the mid-20C Cold War. The superpower in this particular multiverse is the "Real," a version of America that didn't experience our WWII, but in which physicists at a high-energy physics lab in Brookhaven in 1963 discovered the secret of creating "Turing gates," doorways to parallel worlds. The US government takes control of the technology, and uses it to "spread democracy" to the various alternate Americas it finds out in the multiverse. The various worldlines, or "sheaves," are known by the name of whomever was in charge of America when contact is first made, hence the designation "Nixon sheaf" for our own history. The structure of Cowboy Angels is part thriller, part murder mystery, with a fair number of pulse-pounding action scenes along the way. But it's really in the examination of the history of the 20th Century seen from a variety of angles, and the history of America and her foreign policy in particular, that Cowboy Angels shines. Highly recommended.

I've been a fan of Paul McAuley for a long while now, ever since I read Pasquale's Angel, so it was nice to see him dipping into the alternate history genre once more. Cowboy Angels is a thought-provoking and truly intriguing vision of just what the cost of empire-building actually is - the Americans of 'The Real' (the alternate history which invented cross-time travel) see it as their sacred duty to bring freedom and democracy to as many different versions of the United States as they can find. Sometimes this involves rebuilding Americas destroyed by nuclear conflict, but just as often it involves overthrowing communist or fascist Americas and instilling their own brand of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whether the inhabitants want it or not. As the story opens, it's 1980, and Jimmy Carter has just been elected President of the Real America, promising to end 15 years of cross-time war and focus instead on peace, not bloodshed. But there are those who want to preserve the status quo... This book is just hands down good. McAuley mixes Ludlum spy-games, Wambaugh police-procedural, pop culture, gee-whiz science fiction, and just plain old-fashioned excellent story-telling to create a fantastic novel. The characters are sympathetic and interesting, with enough back-story and vivid dialogue to make them really come alive and relate to each other like real people. The twists and turns will keep you guessing, and the ending is not to be missed. Five stars.

As a big fan of the alternate history genre, I do tend to enjoy novels that have the lead characters bouncing between different versions of our world. "Cowboy Angels" did this, with action taking place across five or six different versions of the United States. The story, itself, was suspenseful and held my interest to the last page. I won't give more details, because I've read reviews of other books where the reviews were so detailed as to give spoilers. But if you enjoyed the TV show "Sliders" or books like "Coming of the Quantum Cats" (Frederick Pohl), you'll likely enjoy this one, too.