Some Chinese translators want to publish my SF novels in China, and I sent them my three "Chronoplane Wars" novels. They then asked for short summaries of the novels, and that obliged me to re-read them.
So over the last few days I've read The Fall of the Republic, published in 1987. I doubt that I've read it since then, so I was pleased and relieved to see that it holds up pretty well.
The novel is the first in the series, chronologically, but I wrote a decade before The Empire of Time, which was my first published SF novel. Del Rey brought out TEOT in 1979. Years later, my editor at Del Rey suggested I turn it into a series. So I wrote two prequels. The Fall of the Republic describes the collapse of the US (and the global economy) in the 1990s, and the start of Jerry Pierce's career as a time-traveling hit man for the Agency for Intertemporal Development. Then came Rogue Emperor, in which Jerry deals with the takeover of the Roman Empire by time-traveling Christian fundamentalists in AD 100. The Empire of Time then became the final part of the triptych, when Jerry ends his career.
The series is obviously dated in many ways: the basic document style is the microfiche, which in the 1970s looked like the best way to pack a lot of information into a small space. And of course the economy didn't implode as early as I'd suggested.
So consider a series about a parallel world that discovers still other parallel worlds in the 1990s, and exploits them as effectively as it can.
Going back to an old story can be like attending a high-school reunion and meeting an old sweetheart: Oh lord, what was I thinking? But when I went to my 50th reunion a couple of years ago, I found that a lot of my old girlfriends were still pretty hot. (I doubt that they felt the same about me.)
And The Fall of the Republic actually hangs together pretty well. The plot works. Jerry Pierce is both hard and fragile, as I'd intended him to be. His colleague Eric Wigner is still a charming son of a bitch, and the decrepit USA feels plausible—just 20 years early.
Some of the social predictions are uncomfortably close. An outfit called the White American Brotherhood tries to take over the US with a cyber-attack on the country's computer network. The CIA is busy with domestic intrigue despite its charter. Something called the Civil Emergency Administration runs the US with little input from the president and Congress. Global warming makes life miserable in New York City. I didn't predict the web, but online communication is the way everything works.
I have no idea how my translators are going to present all this to a Chinese readership. When I taught in Guangzhou in 1983, one of my texts was Hemingway's short story "Soldier's Home," about a World War I vet who comes home too late for the victory parades. I had to take my students through it line by line, explaining everything: "If this is America, why is there a Greek restaurant in his town?" "Our Korea veterans came home and got good jobs and pretty wives; why didn't this soldier, Krebs?"
Well, I expect to swap a lot of explanatory emails with my translators. But I'm happy that the basic story is still good.
I've actually considered going back and rereading some of your Empire of Time stuff (Chronoplane as you call it). It's been about seven or so years before I last dived in and I remember really enjoying them (and the writing book you wrote).
It would be really interesting to see some new stories set in this universe too. Just saying...
Posted by: SMD | June 07, 2010 at 08:45 AM