John Schettler

A novel of time travel, Meridian is about a team of scientists at UC Berkeley who develop the Arch, which is a device for moving through time. As the book opens, the team has spent months researching 1612, which is the year they had planned to visit the Globe Theater when Shakespeare presents his play "The Tempest." They begin with an argument over whether or not they should just be in the audience or they should sneak a look into Shakespeare's private papers to see into the modern rumor that he based his work on a shipwreck near Bermuda. The consensus is that they should just do as they'd originally planned; they are worried about originating some event which would cause the creation of a paradox along the continuum of time. While they are arguing about this, one of the team is listening on a short-wave radio to the BBC and discovers that an eruption on the Canary Islands has caused part of the island to collapse, sparking a mega-tsunami headed straight for the east coast of the United States. As they're pondering this latest turn of events and cancel the 1612 visit, they receive an elderly visitor who as it turns out, is a traveler from the future. He briefly explains to them that they have the capacity of going back in time and stopping the events that led up to this pending disaster. After giving them only the vaguest of hints, he disappears, and the team knows they must act immediately.

For a series opener, this book was not too bad. Again, it's a case where you get to slightly know the characters, but they're probably not quite as developed as they could be. The time travel aspect is really fun, and I have to admit, there were a few suspenseful parts where I was tempted to read the end to make sure everyone was okay. But I didn't. My favorite part of any time travel book is the notion of paradox, and the author does a great job here.

This one was okay, but I think I need to read the second one, Nexus Point to see if anything left up in the air gets resolved.… (altro)