Review: Bring a sniper rifle on your next jaunt to England of yore
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 6, 2013
Paul Rawlins ends his book "Infinite Diamond" with an author's bio and the sentence, "When he is not pretending to be a writer, he pretends to be a photographer." I'd say Rawlins excelled at writing cutlines to his photos because "Infinite Diamond" is a kick-in-the-pants bit of storytelling and reminds me of my favorite (by far) Michael Crichton novel, "Timeline." Like "Timeline," Infinite heads back to feudal Europe. But Rawlins opts for some 500 years earlier than Crichton, when the locals truly were backward and had horrendous teeth. Rawlins' uses a truly evil character to motivate the plot. The well-developed Luyten doesn't care that his hijacking the past is tearing the future apart. Cool concept: Without the past, we are nothing. A team of semi-oddballs is sent to retrieve Luyten and affect as little of the timeline (heheh) as possible. But they're a bit out of their league and bumble the entire thing. It's only when Skellan, the rescue team leader, takes over that it begins to look like they have a shot. Skellan teams with the beautiful princess like he's Dr. Who with a sniper rifle, and their chances look better. Moral: Don't go back in time without at least one hidden weapon. Our ancestors like to kill people. I just read that Rawlins started the book, his second, in 2004, got 30,000 words into it and then read "Timeline." So what? He's got a great piece of sci-fi here that lovers of the messing-with-time genre can surely enjoy.