Up the Line

If you like time travel stories, if you like travelling at all, and if you like history - you'll probably like this too. It's an intriguing story based around tour guides leading bunches of tourists back to historical events, while avoiding the paradoxes of meeting themselves on previous tours or interfering with history and changing its course. It's engrossing, informative and funny.

I read this one in high school, and I will never ever forget it. I think we read certain books at certain times, and they are just the right thing to be read at that time. This is that book for me. There is something about the characters in Silverberg's novels that I can really feel for. This is a great time travel story, one of the best.

It's that good, but that imperfect. It doesn't equal _Dying Inside_ (yes, I realize this comes up in every Silverberg review I write), but it is a close second. The subject matter, in terms of the protagonist's existential situation is similar.Byzantium is sheer beauty as represented by Silverberg, the student of history. Some of the longer passages of history in the tour sometimes seem tedious, but I wouldn't want them removed from the text.All the characters are well rendered, but they all seem to be suffering from a slight case of testosterone poisoning. Not too far outside the range of typical behavior for men, but I think maybe we've gotten a little milder in recent generations.This has a much tighter plot than most of my other favorite Silverberg works, and it's well done. I'm of mixed opinion on how a couple of the paradoxes were resolved. I don't think the resolutions were weak, per se, but I think that I would have interpreted some of the logic differently. The ending, by the way, is great. It has a certain amount of negativity to it that is common to Silverberg's work, but the undoing is extremely clever, and the last line makes the whole book that much more worth reading. Highly recommended and, as so often with Silverberg's longer works, saddended that it didn't win the Hugo or Nebula.

'Up the Line' is a VERY good time travel story. It tells the story (in first person) of Jud, a wayward soul who decides to take employment as a Time Courier. Time Couriers are basically time-traveling tour guides, and are responsible for ferrying and watching over groups of tourists to famous historical events. Jud's particular fascination is ancient Byzantium, so he takes on the tour groups going back to see Emperor Justinian, the Haghia Sophia, and other sights. This to me is one area where this book shone. Silverberg made ancient Byzantium come alive for me, and sparked a whole line of discovery and amazement after I had finished the book. I have re-read this great story seven or eight times and never grow tired of it. If you like time travel stories, with a dash of humor and a teaspoon of history, GET THIS BOOK!

Up the line deals with its protagonist Jud who lives in a future society where time travel (only into the past ) is permitted via a newly discovered Bencheley effect :) He joins up in the "time courier" service who are essentially time tour guides and starts taking groups of tourists for visits to Medieval Byzantium. In the process we discover numerous paradoxes of time travel including meting several instances of yourself at the visited spot every time you go back to it. Eventually he falls for his distant ancestor Pulcheria and celebrates an erotic encounter only to lose it all to some tourist in his group that causes a massive time foul up. Overall an excellent read with several sexual encounters to add spice. Intelligent accounts of some time travel paradoxes are visited although the resolution of these paradoxes is fairly weak. Overall an excellent read for a rainy day or a long flight.