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The Cross-Time Engineer | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Leo Frankowski | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Adventures of Conrad Stargard | The Cross-Time Engineer, The High-Tech Knight, The Radiant Warrior, The Flying Warlord, Lord Conrad's Lady, Conrad's Quest for Rubber | ||
The premise of this book, this series, is very simple: Conrad Schwartz is accidentally transported through time, from the late 20th century, all the way back to 1231. Worse, he is in Poland, and that is a mere nine years before the mongol hordes invade. On the good side, he is Polish, not American, so we don't waste time trying to deceipher the language, and he is an engineer with all sorts of knowledge of machinery in his head. So he decides not to run, but to beat those damned Tartars and save Poland!
I love this book. It's just fun to watch him change things left and right and get away with it. And it's believable, so long as you accept the core concept of time travel and how it is run in this series. It works. Knowledgeable readers should be able to see themselves in Conrad's place easily.
I do have three complaints, all minor. First, the author sometimes skimps a little on detail on how Conrad's "inventions" work. Early in the book, for instance, he encounters a boatman grounded on some rocks. He suggests a way to get the craft off, and describes it to the reader and the boatman both at the same time, but despite careful rereadings I still have no idea what was done. The other problem is that Conrad is uniquely qualified, at the start of the book, to go back in time. He knows a lot about machinery, which is fine because that's part of the premise, but he also is passable at fencing and is carrying a backpack full of modern seeds. And lastly, this is supposed to be Conrad's diary, but it not only is not done in diary format or even close to it, but he occassionally mentions that this action or that one would have repercussions years down the road. This implies that this was written years later, and surely his memory isn't so good as to remember conversations so well after so long? The disparity got annoying if I thought about it too much.
But if you can forget those, and it's not hard, it's a fun read. Not funny, just fun.
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