| Author: | John Brunner |
| Copyright: | 1984 |
| Date Reviewed: | 11/29/85 |
| Rating: | 5.5 |
Synopsis: Gene and Stacy are running away from someone. Aboard their self aware Boat, they land on a small island in the Greek Isles. Gene prefers the safety of a large continent because of his ancestors but for Stacy the island is good. After setting up home in a cave to hide themselves from the storm; they go to sleep and wake up the next day years in the past in the 1980's era. Now Stacy is an heiress and she and Gene are running away from family and press just to find some peace and quiet. Each day now, they live a life for one day with all memories of events leading up to that day intact and then wake up in a previous epoch. From my present they travel back to World War II to face a German invasion, they receive a visit from two rich men aboard a 1880's style yacht, and they are visited by a Venetian galley loaded with trading goods. The captain of this ship recognizes Gene and Stacy but his language is strange and he goes away.
For the next few series of events, the pair do not find the island together. Rather, Stacy was born there an orphan and grew up to be the most beautiful girl on the island. But instead of picking one of her local cousins for marriage, she marries a blackamoor who came to the island and now has the scorn of all the people she knows. Now this island named Oragalia is invaded by Crusaders on their way to free the Holy Land from the Moslems. They pillage, plunder and rape for a while and go. Next the couple is visited by a trader in the post Roman period and after that by a legion of Romans led by a captain determined to catch a black runaway slave for the games. The final trip into the past is during the Ancient Grecian era where Stacy is taken as a seeress.
Just as Stacy is about to give birth 500 years before Christ, future technicians break into their shared cave and force her and Gene back into the future. The shock is too much for Stacy and she dies. Through a long explanation we find that Gene and Stacy were volunteers aboard a faster than light space ship which forced their minds to live outside of the known universe. They came back and were quite insane just as all the other volunteers were. After running away from Project Go, they lived there own little world of past histories. They did not actually meet the other people but the people they imagined had once lived. Each story ended with Stacy or Gene relating a story about some explorer seeking something - wealth, adventure, security. These were the other volunteers. Gene realizes that if the doctors of the project had just left the volunteers be, they would have come out of their insanity instead of dying with it.
Review: I can't say a whole lot of good things about "The Tides of Time". Each story was interesting in its own right but on the whole the book was very boring. I didn't mind the first few chapters where they were falling back through time but when the captain/doctor came to the island, that should have been the beginning of the reversal process. Instead we have another 100 pages of the same story told over and over again in a slightly different setting. Most of the stories were so much the same that there was no suspense. We always knew the villagers were against the couple and that some how the couple would ride out all the injustice done to them. This book is very predictable except perhaps for the part about traveling faster than the speed of light. This came in from left field and did nothing for the story