From the Files of the Time Rangers

Richard Bowes' From the Files of the Time Rangers is one of those novels that fans of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and J.G. Ballard's Vermillion Sands should check into. It's a novel in stories, each story able to stand on its own, but all becoming something different together. It's a mosaic structure that Bowes uses to take trips into the various corners of Western history, and it works beautifully. If you like your contemporary fiction to reflect the roots of where we came from, this book is for you. At once science fiction in its conceit of time travel, and fantasy in its methods. Time travel for Bowes seems to be an act of memory and remembrance. After reading this book, you'll have a hard time forgetting it.

This 'mosaic' novel was apparently pieced together form a series of short stories. The integration is surprisingly good and the quality of writing superior. Bowes presents an imaginative world in which time travel is possible both up and down history and also between alternative worldlines. There seems to be a main sequence and Gods, particularly the Olympian Pantheon, attempt to direct history. The overall thrust of the plot is the effort of some Gods and their human agents to direct the course of history in an ultimately beneficial way. Bowes' clever admixture of time travel, alternative history, and mythology brings something new to the genre.

A terrific book from this author, a dizzying spin along the Time Stream through history and alternate history reminiscent of River World and the Amber series. And a character that stands above all in recent Urban Fantasy and deserves her own novel - Lady Olivia Wexford. I plan to marry Lady Olivia.

Richard Bowes' From the Files of the Time Rangers is an ambitious and satisfying novel by a writer of dazzling talents. What makes it so great, apart from the story itself, which I'll get to in a minute, is how it's told. Bowes presents snapshots of his characters and his plot in different times, and in realities that diverge from "reality" to varying degrees, scattering them through his narrative like pieces in a jumbled-up puzzle. Only gradually, as you read, do the pieces come together, and it's one of the joys of the novel to see its patterns and structure take shape before your eyes. Overall, the novel is speculative fiction, with gods and alternate histories and time travel, but Bowes pulls from other genres--mysteries, thrillers, noir, literary mainstream-so that Time Rangers is also a masterful mosaic of styles. You keep asking yourself, Can he really pull it off? But he does. Like the urbane Roman poet Ovid, to whom he tips his hat in an afterword, Bowes imposes order on chaos, and the results are glorious. He's telling a story about America as a land of promises kept and broken, America as ground zero in a war between gods (mainly in Greek and Roman incarnations), humans, and strange machine intelligences of the far future who seem destined to replace them both. The machines are relentlessly pressing back the advent of their future triumph, so that it occurs earlier and earlier, while the gods are struggling desperately to hold on to what they've got. The Time Rangers of the novel's title are humans who serve the God Apollo; but there are also humans aligned with other gods, notably Mercury, Pluto (Godfather Death), Dionysus, Diana, and Ares (Lord Storm). Nor are the gods and their followers always allied with each other against the threat of the machines; on the contrary, the gods are as protean and volatile as mythology paints them--and Dionysus and Apollo, for example, have very different ideas about the best way to fight the machines. But this is merely the backdrop of the novel; it informs everything, yet Bowes' real story is elsewhere, in the dreams and aspirations of his human characters, in the lives they lead, which are, to a greater or lesser extent, shaped by the gods for their own purposes. Thus we have the Timothy McCauley, groomed by the gods for the Presidency; Robert Logue, blessed/cursed by Godfather Death with the ability to sense the deaths of others; Nancy Kane, Ed Brown, and Jake Stockley, three young Rangers who in the course of the novel grow old and young and live and die and live again; and many, many others, a cast of Dickensian scope, each portrayed with sensitivity and acuity. Bowes writes with enviable economy and precision of detail: the amount of information and feeling he can convey in a seemingly simple sentence is truly amazing, and his narrative voice possesses unimpeachable authority yet is capable of devastating irony and profound sympathy. From the Files of the Time Rangers is his b