 |
Washington's Dirigible | Rating | |
| B | |||
| John Barnes | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Timeline Wars | Patton's Spaceship, Washington's Dirigible, Caesar's Bicycle | ||
Mike Strang hasn't even graduated from the ATF's official training course when he is attacked by agents of the totalitarian Closers. It seems his next mission, his first mission, is going to deal them a terrible blow, and they're trying to kill him before he can. The mission: go to a colonial America that has convivial relations with a sympathetic England, and find out what happened to the special agent assigned to the timeline. The answer reveals itself quickly: Closers have found the world, and are well on their way to turning it to their own use. Problem is, the Closer agent is Mike Strang!
This book isn't quite as fast paced as the first one. It's never slow, of course. Strang must foil his double's plans, which involves fistfights, gunfights, and investigative work. The climax is extremely long and hard to put down, and I really loved seeing the differences between the real world and the ATN-altered one, since there are technological as well as political changes involved. And, of course, the writing is fine.
The one real, actual problem I had with the story is that, over and over, Strang walks into just the right people to tell him what's going on, or where to go next. Immediately upon arriving in Boston, for instance, he goes on about how it'll take some time and work to figure out why the agent hasn't reported in, and how it's terribly unlikely that he'll know immediately what the trouble is. But then he walks right out... and knows immediately what the trouble is! Why bother having that paragraph describing how unlikely it is if that's not going to be the situation? Unless it was meant to be humor, in which case it just plain fails.
Similarly, Strang doesn't have to search for his double. He just keeps running into him. His double isn't searching him out, either, so it's supposed to just be coincidence that their paths keep crossing? They nearly run into each other in a Boston city street, they pick the same ferry to go to New York City? And he just runs into a compatriot for the ATN side, before he even really starts looking? It seriously strained my suspension of disbelief. Couldn't Barnes have written a few scenes of Strang looking for these people and tracking them down?
This book just never quite grabbed me like the last did. Perhaps if I'd read this on its own it would have received a better grade, but with the last as a point of comparison this one just couldn't hold its own. It was still a fine book, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to get as enthusiastic about it as I did for Patton's Spaceship. Well, they can't all be gems.
| By Title | By Author | By Rank |