Review: An Adventurous Time Travel Saga
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2013
"Perpetual Motion" is a creative and imaginative novel about parallel universes and time travel set in the late 1800's. In this story Otto and Antoinette Hardenberg have journeyed back in time from the apocalyptic world of 4026 to raise their daughter Sibyl in Keewil Switzerland. At their home which they call the Beehive Otto keeps a lab where he works on futuristic inventions like a perpetual motion device, and Sibyl learns martial arts from a computer generated humanoid called Undine. In this time period the Hardenbergs have joined forces with Henry Richardson, leader of the Sons of Freedom to thwart Max Stugel and the Grange, devious time travellers who are trying to change history by having Germany win WW1 and create an imbalance in the parallel universes. Into this mix add a romance between the commoner Sibyl and Fritz von Lassberg an ingenious inventor and aristocrat who`s determined to support Max Stugel in winning the war for Germany.The novel reminds me of Scott Westerfeld`s Leviathan trilogy with its creative inventions, air ship battles and romance between the aristocratic Alex Ferdinand and commoner Deryn Sharp who are on opposite sides of the war.In Perpetual Motion the writer creates a world where nothing is impossible to imagine; the cloudbank where past, present and future merge,inventive machines like the Millipede and the flying serpent are created, people like Tennyson walk across the countryside, and a family can speak multiple languages. This is an adventurous caper into the past which sometimes gets bogged down with a lot of description, but is interesting to read.