Books: The Company of the Dead by David Kowalaski (2012)

I’ve always loved time travel stories, and while the “what if” plot lines of changed history can be fun, I find myself still intrigued more with the mechanisms of time travel than anything else. Books that deal with time travel have always had two big hooks to have fun with,

Beyond Einstein’s theory that states time-travel is not possible –and even with people like Stephen Hawking sort of agreeing with it – it has never stopped science fiction writers from writing books about, or Hollywood cranking out TV shows and movies about the ability to change our past or future. 

Big historical events are the fodder for this “what if” scenarios. The assassination of John F. Kennedy almost fifty years ago remains a watershed moment. Many writers of science fiction –and many others- have always wondered what might have been had not an assassin struck in Dealey Plaza on that late November morning. Stephen King, most notably of late, pondered that in his novel 11/22/63. 

Australian novelist David J. Kowalski explores similar themes in his debut tale, The Company of the Dead, about someone trying to change the history of the ill-fated Titanic in 1912. But unlike King’s tale, this one opens in an altered world, where the action of one man from 2012 who ends up in 1911 changes the course of our recorded history. While this Jonathan Wells prevents the Titanic from striking the iceberg in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, there is some sort of predestined aspect happening, and the Titanic still hits an iceberg, only a few hours later and sinks. This small change, and the survival of a few people who died originally, unwinds the causal nexus plunging the planet into a different timeline –one where Germany and Japan control the world, where America is divided like what almost happened in the Civil War and where modern technology –like mobile phones and the internet- don’t exist and everyone smokes like they’re in an old movie from the 1940s. Then we meet a group of people –one being the grandson of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr who really died in World War II, leaving no heirs, but because of the shift in time, went on to live- who discover a journal stored away in Titanic’s safe (just like in real life, the remains are found and artifacts, like the safe, are brought to the surface). The journal, written by a man named Jonathan Wells, states he was born in 1964 and using a device found in the wreckage of some space ship that landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 travels back in time to 1911 and decides to change the fate of Titanic. These people are convinced that they must travel back and prevent Wells from changing history. Because they also know if they fail, the timeline they are currently living will cease to exist because of rising tensions all over the planet. 

Kowalski throws every time travel trope in, along with exploring a potential alternate universe where America never entered into World War I – a genre Harry Turtledove has been doing for the last decade or so. The book also shifts into a spy novel –which would be fine, if this was a spy novel. 

The author does some great world-building here and obviously spent a lot of time in research, as this book is highly detailed –though I’m curious if never intended the book for American audiences, as the book is rift with different spellings of words like tyre, coulour and carriages (trucks). It’s not distracting, but I was amused by it. The characters have little or no personality, which does become distracting as it sometimes hard to understand who is talking. 

I think the book starts out strong, dismissing some of my unintentional feelings that the book might be a bit too long at 750 pages –after all, you have to know that the team who decides to stop Wells has to succeed. 

But if you are doing an epic novel like this, sometimes the pages are justified. 

And the pages flew by –and it helped, maybe, that Kowalaski kept the chapter’s short- so I was anxious to see what happens. But the problem is, I read this book for the time travel conundrum and not have it mostly be a spy novel about an alternate history of the United States. So there's too much confusion on just what the book wanted to be, and the ending –while clever- does not payoff for the investment of the reader because what it really becomes is an over-long spy novel masked as a science fiction novel and I don’t think science fiction readers will like that.

Books: Redshirts by John Scalzi (2012)

Like many of a certain age who grew up with Star Trek and its various spin-offs, John Scalzi’s Redshirts is a brilliant nod to the workers on the lower decks of a starship; though, more to the point, the red shirted security men and women. We know that any security guard who beamed down with Kirk, Spock and McCoy crew usually ended dying before the opening credit –though they could also be killed off to heighten commercial act breaks through the rest of the episode. 

This is a comic riff on the phenomenon of those apparently expendable and unending supply of security guards who’s jobs, it seems, is to be shot, stabbed, eaten or crushed into stone dust so the main cast can emote and keep the narrative going (in that sort of “we have to do this in the memory of security guard #4”).

Set in the 25th century and centered on the crew of the Universal Union flagship Intrepid, Redshirts focuses on ensign Andrew Dahl, who just transferred to the ship, along with a few other newly assigned security guards. But only a few hours on the ship, Dahl thinks something odd is going on and confronts some of his fellow crew members: 

“So, did you guys get asked about away teams?” Duvall asked, as she brought her mess tray to the table where Dahl and Hanson were already sitting.

“I did,” Hanson said.

“So did I,” Dahl said.

“Is it just me, or does everyone on this ship seem a little weird about them?” Duvall asked.

“Give me an example,” Dahl said.

“I mean that within five minutes of getting to my new post I heard three different stories of crew buying the farm on an away mission. Death by falling rock. Death by toxic atmosphere. Death by pulse gun vaporization.”

“Death by shuttle door malfunction,” Hanson said.

“Death by ice shark,” Dahl said.

“Death by what?” Duvall said, blinking. “What the hell is an ice shark?”

“You got me,” Dahl said. “I had no idea there was such a thing.”

“Is it a shark made of ice?” Hanson asked. “Or a shark that lives in ice?”

“It wasn’t specified at the time,” Dahl said, spearing a meat bit on his tray.

“I’m thinking you should have called bullshit on the ice shark story,” Duvall said.

Scalzi is brilliant at the whole absurdity of the redshirt trope, and yet does not make a mockery of it. The characters are wonderfully drawn and the book itself is designed to poke fun at all the illogical fallacies and cheap tricks –or what Scalzi calls lazy writing- to get their heroes to the next episode, sans a couple of security people. 

It also has some surprising emotional heft to it, and most of the humor is spot on. Also, readers of Jasper Fforde may find a familiarity with it as well.

I really liked it.