Conquistador

This is a story with a great scenario and Stirling's usual very thorough research and above-average writing, with plenty of detailed scenic descriptions.

It's the story of two worlds: one very similar to our own (though not exactly the same), and an alternative world in which Alexander the Great didn't die at 32 but lived on to be 76. As Alexander lived a dangerous life and seems to have been a heavy drinker, this scenario is rather unlikely, but possible.

The consequences include no Roman Empire, no Latin, no Christianity, no Islam, no surviving Judaism, retarded technological development, and no European discovery of America; until a young Virginian ex-soldier called John Rolfe steps through a private, accidental gateway in 1946, from ‘our' California to the other California. Developments are rather interesting for those involved.

Characterization is competent and reasonably varied, considering that most of the main characters have military training and combat experience (in different times and places). However, there are more memorable characters in some other Stirling books.

The first half of the book describes limited and secretive interaction between our California and the alternative version. This part of the book is well paced and fascinating.

Halfway through, all the action moves to the other world, and suddenly slows down as we're given a sort of guided tour. This is mildly interesting but fails to maintain the pace that we've become accustomed to.

The rest of the book is basically the story of a quasi-military operation in the alternative California; the distinctive characteristics of the other world are still there, but the story becomes preoccupied with tactics; readable enough, but the initial sense of wonder has dissipated because we're now familiar with the whole situation.

At the end, the story is wound up briskly and in a fairly satisfactory way, though it leaves me wondering how events would unfold on the other world in future. I suspect the answer is that it would gradually become more like ours, although that would disappoint both the author and most of his characters.

This book started with a really great idea and exploited it well, but Stirling was unable to come up with a second half that maintained the impetus and matched the standard of the first half.

When I first read it, I thought the political system created by Rolfe on the second world rather bizarre, and I wondered why Stirling chose it when he had a free hand to choose anything. I've since come to realize that he didn't really have a free hand. The whole situation rests on the key issue of gate security: if the US government in the first world discovers the gate, Rolfe and his partners stand to lose everything they've built up, and would surely destroy the gate to avoid that. So strict gate security is essential, which has implications for the political system. In fact, as the story reveals, Rolfe's gate security is strict, but not strict enough.

The gate is fragile and unreliable, and no-one understands how it works. For all Rolfe knew, it could have closed permanently at any time, from his first visit onwards. He was very lucky to have continuous use of it for decades; if he had as much sense as the author credited him with, he presumably took into account that any passage through it might be his last.

He was also lucky in finding partners that he could trust. If in the early stages he'd needed to kill someone (or even just prevent him from visiting the first world), and that someone was known to be linked to him in the first world, the police might have noticed a missing person and might well have searched his house in a routine attempt to find the body. Discovery of gate, end of game.

After rereading and reconsideration, I've decided to uprate the book from 3 to 4 stars, because I really like the scenario, the first half, and the eloquent descriptions. The second half could have been better, but it's adequate and doesn't ruin the book.

John Dye's review makes the valid point that Rolfe allowed some troublesome people into his kingdom, although he was smart enough to have known better. At the beginning he had a real need for Colletta; but he reckoned he could trust Colletta up to a point. Later on, he could and should have been more choosy. He had no urgent need for more people, especially as everyone was breeding like rabbits.

The obvious conflict in this book would have been against American-led Settlers fighting for more equal division of political power and wealth. But Stirling wanted to paint Rolfe as a relatively good guy, and it would have been hard to do in that kind of conflict. So he imported a colourful bunch of nasty non-Americans for the specific purpose of making Rolfe look good by comparison. Rolfe wouldn't have done that: he wasn't that desperate to look good. Stirling did it for him.

Near the end of the book, the triggering of the gate's autodestruction was deliberately arranged by the author for maximum drama, depending on Adrienne's personal initiative and luck. She could so easily have failed. John Rolfe was an old radio enthusiast, and would surely have arranged a wireless trigger (independent of Nostradamus) that he could operate himself from a safe distance.

At the very end of the book, when they open a new gate, they're aware in principle that it could open into another universe of any kind, but they don't seem to be prepared for the full range of possibilities. It could open into the vacuum of space, or under the sea, in which case they'd get a nasty shock. They probably wouldn't drown in the flood, because the gate would close when the water reached the equipment, but it would be a life-threatening experience for an old man. It's unlikely that the gate would open inside the sun or another star; but, as they didn't really know what they were doing, it was a possibility. It might open into a world with an advanced (possibly non-human?) civilization that could be a threat to them.