The Depths of Time

For fans of Roger Allen's work, this story doesn't dissapoint. The action in the first few chapters pulls you in, and the mystery needing to be solved keeps you going. Allen likes to mix a liberal dose of science into his stories, giving you the feeling that given the right conditions, the story could and in fact should actually happen. Allen takes you to the outer reaches of the galaxy, and makes you feel like you belong there.

This is as good as science fiction gets, in my experience at least. BUT bear in mind that The Depths of Time is the first volume of a trilogy. The entire arc of the story encompasses *all three volumes*, a total of something like 1,300 pages. Yes, the first volume leaves large unresolved plot elements. It had to! I had all three books at hand when I started reading this first one in the series. Finished this one, read the second one, and now am half way through the third. Good all the way, and I hope well resolved in the next couple of hundred pages.The trilogy has several lines of science (ecology, space travel, wormhole time travel, artificial intelligence, and more) and social science. Characters develop and are revealed over the course of the series. Well crafted, very entertaining, and a good balance of detail (for example on spacecraft landing procedures) and of prudent omission of details where the "science" simply has to be taken as a given.

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 e

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...

This novel is exactly the opposite of the Star Trek/Star Wars vision of the future. The feel of the book is much more along the lines of Alien/Outland, a very gritty future where there is no faster-than-light warp drive, and travel between the stars is a slow, tedious and sometimes dangerous business. What makes the trip possible is the use of wormholes to manage the time dilation effects. These wormholes are guarded by the Chronologic Patrol, one ship at each end, their job to prevent at all costs any occurence of time paradoxes. The novel opens with an attack on one of the wormholes, an unheard of event, and a very gripping portrayal of how one ship, the Upholder, and it's captain, Anton Koffield, respond to that attack. This book is a fascinating portrait of a man who has great integrity, and knows how to handle duty and responsibility. It starts with him at a high point in his career, and then follows him as he becomes a political hot potato, promoted to Admiral and assigned a desk job. Although he made the hard decision and did his job by the book, the public sees him as a monster. He is approached to write a history of terraforming, and discovers an approaching cataclysm. If you have read any of Daniel Quinn's books (Ishmael, The Story of B) this approaching cataclysm will be very familiar.I enjoyed the exploration of Anton Koffield. The author does a great job of getting into characters heads and showing us what is motivating them. It's interesting to me to witness a man who falls from grace, loses everything, and is flattered into doing work that may or may not be important, then discovering a hidden secret that has dire implications for all humanity. Seeing Koffield's opposite motivated by ego and grandiosity made a perfect counterpoint. I also enjoyed the exploration of the idea that terraforming may not be a viable concept. As I said before, I'm a fan of Daniel Quinn's, and this dovetails nicely into his ideas that our civilization is in trouble because of our need to control and our addiction to power. And what is terraforming but the ultimate expression of the need to control?I agree with the other reviewers that it would help to know that this book is part of a series. There is a hint of that in the dedication, but luckily for me I read the reviews here before I reached the end of the book.This novel is a parable, with direct implications for the time we are living in right now. The characters actions, the way crisis is portrayed, the way motivation is revealed, and an untypical vision of the future made this novel a very enjoyable read for me. I'm looking forward to the next two volumes.