TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER, an old-school (read: No effin' majgickq!) Alternate History by John Brunner

TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER
JOHN BRUNNER
Gateway Essentials
$1.99 Kindle/ebook edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: If the past is tampered with, the present might be totally transformed. So the whole fabric of reality depends on the watchful efforts of the Society of Time. Don Miguel Navarro is a junior officer in this force dedicated to defending the Spanish Empire and the mother church from the results of meddling in history by time-travellers.

But he begins to wonder just how dedicated the Society really is when he has to deal with a case of corruption involving fellow officers...

After he has to rescue the entire court from death at the hands of Amazon warriors brought through time, his greatest trial becomes unavoidable. Facing a threat to the most vulnerable event in his world's history, can the young Don prevent catastrophe?

Or will the glorious triumph of the Spanish Armada never have occurred?

My Review: That was a nice ride. It took me several days to read its 156pp due to a 2017 siege of thrice-damned migraines. Loaded onto your device, however, it's a long-post-office-line's worth of interruptable reading.

The ISFDB entry on the book describes it as a collection of three stories, only loosely interconnected. I don't feel argumentative, so I'll stipulate that the book started out that way and, in the 1969 edition I read, was made into a reasonable stitch-up.

Brunner wasn't the best-loved British SF writer of his day but he was popular in the US because of Stand on Zanzibar (1969 BSFA Award for Best Novel as well as the Hugo that year), and The Sheep Look Up (1972). It appears to me that the UK readership liked his third famous book, The Jagged Orbit, which won the 1970 BSFA Award for Best Novel best of all, as the US reviewers simply chewed it up for continuing the typographical trickery of its elder sibling. Something got up their collective British nose, mutterings about Brunner being too American. For what, one wonders; his writing was at the peak of its development and uniformly of high quality; that seems to me to be without a nationality. What do I know, I like good wherever I find it from Gwyneth Jones (criminally underknown-to-US Welsh author) to Jo Walton (Canadian by way of Wales) to Elisabeth Vonarburg (Francophone Canadian also criminally underknown and seldom translated).

This book is a minor entry into the Brunnerverse, it's true, but it's one I'll treasure now that I've read it because I*AM*MORTALLY*SICK*OF*ALT*HIST*ABOUT*WWII (this from a big fan of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, whether PKD's novel or his daughter Isa Dick Hackett's TV series) and/or the US Civil War. Good Kleio above us! History contains so incalculably many stories with so incalculably many potential outcomes! Get y'all's heads outta Hitler's stinkin' ass and away from fuckin' Gettysburg! It. Has. Been. Done. To. Death.

The Spanish Armada succeeding is a wonderful, refreshing change of PoD. I suspect that the idea occurred to Brunner when he needed something to fulfill a deadline, because he does not do anything like justice to the potential for the story's effects. The ending of the third part feels as though it was in his mind from the moment that the idea was born...it's a true ending, in other words, not a stopping point...but the immense amounts of fatty, yummy, bacony story left cavalierly on the butcher's block...! The merest hints of the Northern Native American nations's development without a United States resulting from Protestant pollution of these shores alone could fill a trilogy.

Well, anyway, I read it, I liked it, it's O.P. in print though not on your ereader platform of choice in the Gollancz SF Gateway series. Hunt it up, alt hist fans. Civilians...well, it's got the virtue of being short, so maybe it's a good quick intro to the idea that History isn't A Story but really and truly His Story.