Tthis my review of Alan Steele’s ‘Chronospace’. The book itself is copyright to Alan Steele 2001 and the review edition was published by Ace Books in 2002, and the cover was made by Danilo Ducak. In terms of genre, this novel involves time travel and alternate history.
The story opens with a quick look at a reconnaissance mission made to the Anasazi native Americans that gives us an introduction to a growing mystery from our time travelling descendants when what looks like an angel appears to the crew of the chronoship. We’re then brought forward to what was the present for Steele while he was writing this novel, or 1998 where we’re introduced to David Murphy as he makes his way into work at NASA’s Washington headquarters.
Things start taking a strange tack when he’s called into a meeting with his bosses and they’re all over him for his latest article for Analog Science Fiction – personally I think they were just jealous. Apparently, the article looks at the possibility of UFOs being time machines rather than spaceships. This just annoys Doctor Murphy, and when he gets a phone call from Greg Benford inviting him out for a lunch meeting to talk over the article, he’s all excited, and a bit suspicious for Professor Benford said he’d been at a conference Murphy hadn't heard of. But a visit with Benford was too good to pass up on!
The Greg Benford he meets looks good and they have a fairly informed talk about Murphy’s hypothesis, but something just didn’t ring true and when Murphy brings up Benford’s own experience writing about time travel, the award winning ‘Timescape’ (the 1981 Nebula and 1980 British Science Fiction awards, since you ask), the acclaimed author and scientist doesn’t seem to have any idea that he’d even written the book. Murphy makes an excuse and finds a phone where he can phone a lab in California where he knows Professor Benford works. And yes, he does get to speak to The Man! So, who’s the fake? By the time Murphy gets back to their table, though, the fake had done a runner and a desperate search for him didn’t show up anything.
In between Murphy’s sections of the book, we get more about our time travelling friends as they plan a trip to infiltrate the last voyage of the Hindenburg where we’re introduced to the mission setup process, especially how they manage to fit in during the mission. They know the history; how it blew up thirty-seven seconds after coming into land and killed thirty-five crew and passengers. They’d coated the passenger and crew areas in audio visual bugs. But does the Hindenburg go up in flames? Of course, not – we’re only about a third of the way through the book at this point! Our time travellers realise things have gone badly wrong when the agents’ marginal escape from the burning wreck of the Hindenburg becomes a restrained wander over to their escape vehicle and they set a panicked course for home.
But our curiosity isn’t immediately satisfied as we cut back to Doctor Murphy, but this Doctor Murphy, it quickly becomes apparent, isn’t the David Murphy we’d left running for his car (incidentally, Steele has put date stamps on his chapter headings and the last Murphy section was Monday January 14th 1998, and this section is headed Friday 16th January 1998, so the day should be a Wednesday, or the date for the Monday should have been the 12th). When we first meet this Doctor Murphy, he seems to be a bit of a looser, suffering the mother of all hangovers and a rocky marriage. He also doesn’t work for NASA either. Just after the boss of the OPS calls to tell him that there’s been a crash out in Tennessee, he’s sufficiently hung over that it takes him a while to fully comprehend the import of this call.
We get another cut, back to our Time Travellers still stuck in 1937 trying to work out what had gone wrong with the timing of the explosion of the Hindenburg – it finally exploded thirty-five minutes after they expected it to, and just how bad a… screwup this was. Franc, one of the insertion team, reckoned it’s a pretty major mess up; granted the Hindenburg did explode, but none of the people aboard dies, leaving them alive to change the future in all sorts of unknowable ways. His companions didn’t think it was such a big deal, they still existed, and their hopper was still safely up in orbit. When recovered by their pilot, he was even more panicked than Franc, barely waiting to get the time ship out of Earth’s atmosphere before opening a tunnel home but something goes wrong flinging them who knows where?
With an immediate cut back to Doctor Zack’s timeline, we begin to get an idea of what’s caused Doctor Zack’s sudden trip to Tennessee…
We also get to learn that this Dr Murphy is working for the Office of Paranormal Sciences, and we’ve already noted that this US had lost a lot of its technological savvy when the plane Murphy and his colleagues is described as a 15-year-old plane, the last US model available to be purchased by the US government. On the flight, we learn that a couple of F15s had had a close encounter with a UFO, following it down to where it crashed into a lake.
At the crash site, although hidden behind a force screen, the downed craft has been surrounded by the army and when Murphy and his colleagues turn up it looks like a classic standoff. Those aboard the crashed time ship were able to repair the damage caused by the failed time jump and the attack by one of the F15s but they couldn’t make an attempt to go home before finding out just when they were so one of them volunteers to make his way out of the ship and find out. Things were going reasonably well until the time traveller meets up with an annoyed Dr Murphy and the pair had an altercation that left Murphy nearly unconscious.
Making it back to their home time, the time travellers find that a major time distortion had occurred when they almost ran into a quickly decaying planetary ring where the Moon had once been. Earth wasn’t in much better shape, a battered a dead world, at least as far as mankind was concerned.
Back in Dr Zack’s present, he finds he has evidence that time travel is real and a rough idea how the trick is done so somehow, he becomes the lead scientist in getting this project off the ground. This takes years to work through, and thankfully we aren’t treated to any of the intermediate experimentation. instead, we are sent forward to this time track’s 2314 and the one spot on the planet that hadn't been devastated by the destroyed moon, where Franc is re-introduced to Dr Zack Murphy, kidnapped from his time twenty-five years previously in his own personal time where the time travellers are introduced to the solution to the mystery of the so-called angels – Dr Murphy has far less flattering comments about these creatures!
After it becomes clear that the time ships were the reason the angels had initiated the destruction of humanity, the crew of the time travellers reckon it’s worth seeing if they could run a counter adjustment mission on the Hindenburg destruction. All without revealing themselves to the them who were on the original mission. Only they find they weren’t actually on this Hindenburg, and there’d been another anomaly, and we’re on our third timeline… though we find we’ve looped back to Dr David Murphy who was sore about his treatment at NASA and was about to become a well-known science fiction writer, and his son would become a scientist, laying the groundwork for time travel… Franc goes to talk to him as Gregory Benford, but we know how that works out...
Up to this point, the story had managed to maintain a degree of continuity but as the characters from three timelines all converge together this begins to slip, though, to be fair, it’s not that bad, really. The best bit in this section is the interaction between the two Murphies as they drive towards a startling rendezvous.
Overall, this was a fun read, though it does take some thought to keep your position in the various situations they find themselves in and it comes together rather neatly in the end even though you might find it a bit of a let-down if you want a super technical ending. ( )

What drew me to this novel was the protagonists from the 24th century boarding the Hindenberg for a little historical research. Naturally, something went wrong, creating a paradox and thus ending all life on earth.

The characters were real and the plot twists exciting. To be honest, I had expected the story to unfold differently, but I was excited and intrigued with where Allen Steele chose to take it.

The only drawback was a disconcerting number of typos that should have been cleaned up during the publishers edits. No misspellings, but missing words and incomplete sentences. Great story otherwise. ( )

Based on a multiple award-winning short story which I haven't read (". . . Where Angels Fear to Tread"), this novel takes a hard-sf approach to time travel. Some centuries in the future, the Chronospace Research Centre runs carefully monitored historical field trips to important moments of the past to find out exactly what went on. One of these is to the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 . . . except that in the event the chrononauts inadvertently make some tiny but significant alteration in the proceedings: the bomb planted by an anti-Hitler terrorist (for the sake of plot, the novel subscribes to the conspiracy theory) detonates some while after the passengers have disembarked, rather than while the airship is still mooring. This trivial divergence is enough to alter the course of subsequent history.

In parallel with the narrative about the chrononauts, we're told about events occurring to NASA scientist David Murphy, who has earned the ire of his bosses by publishing a Science FACT article in Analog endorsing the notion that UFOs could be timeships from the future. As he makes his way home from the office, he finds his footsteps being dogged by a scruffy older man whom he sort of vaguely recognizes . . . and you're never going to guess who it might be, are you?

Once the chrononauts, post-Hindenburg non-disaster, star trying to make their way home, we move with a jolt (this is very effectively handled) into Murphy's altered timeline: now he's working for the Office of Paranormal Sciences, a government body set up by the same dimwitted Congress that, a while back, killed off NASA because its work was irrelevant. As an OPS "scientist", Murphy is one of the team sent to examine the appearance of a UFO in remote countryside. Needless to say, this is the timeship of our chrononauts, one of whom Murphy runs into. His conviction that this character is from the future leads him to take a pivotal role in the development of the world's very first time machine. (Later he'll discover that, in his original timeline, his Analog article and a later sf novel he wrote inspired his son to do the basic research that gave birth to time travel.)

In due course the chrononauts team up with both the Murphys -- the young one from one timeline and the much older one from the other -- but not before they discover that the future for the world if time traveling continues is doom: an ancient alien species, policing the galaxy precisely to make sure the practice never arises, blow the moon to smithereens and thereby render the earth uninhabitable. This is because (pages 264-5)

Apparently, time travel is the most dangerous thing an intelligent race can discover, because a civilization capablke of exploring its own history is likewise capable of changing it. When that happens, more often than not they destroy themselves . . . and sometimes they take other races with them.

It therefore becomes imperative that Murphy neither does the science himself nor publishes the writings that will encourage his son to do it -- better, in fact, that he lose himself somewhere in history. For the chrononauts the challenge is somewhat similar: without the invention of time travel, the future from which they came does not exist.

The book's title (sans Spielbergish capitalization) refers to Steele's mechanism for time travel. The medium of chronospace can be thought of as akin to hyperspace, only with the wormholes extending through time rather than through space. (Yes, I know, hyperspatial wormholes would have a time aspect too; but that's not relevant to this novel.) Here's a description of the timeship Oberon making an entry into chronospace (pages 144-5):

Oberon's AI discovered a quantum irregularity in Earth's gravity well; exotic matter contained within the pods beneath the saucer enlarged the subatomic rift into a funnel large enough for the timeship to pass through, and laced the funnel's mouth with energy fields that would keep the wormhole temporarily stable. Within moments, a small area of spacetime was warped into something that resembled a four-dimensional ram's horn: a closed time-like circle. Relentlessly attracted by the wormhole it had just created, the timeship plummeted into the closed-time circle.

It's a neat piece of verisimilitudinal hokey science -- certainly good enough to convince me!

ChronoSpace is a very ingenious item, but I have to confess I found the writing a bit pedestrian; matters aren't helped by the countless proofing errors. One puzzling glitch is that the name of veteran sf author Cleve Cartmill is spelled incorrectly throughout ("Cartmell"). What grated also was the sort of sf and sf fandom orientation of a lot of the book. I was told more than I needed to know about the content of classic issues of Analog -- treated as a well known magazine even though perhaps 99% of the population will never have heard of it. When Greg Benford made an appearance (sort of) as a minor but significant character in the tale I winced at what seemed like a sort of in-joke without the joke. And so on. In a way I suppose it's reasonable to direct an sf novel so especially toward sf fandom -- to people who're dedicated readers of the genre -- but my own preference is for narratives that (with obvious qualifications) are accessible to the rest of the fiction-reading public. If you mind none of these things, then I'm sure you'll love ChronoSpace; even if you do, it's still well worth reading.
( )

A group of time travelers from the 24th century travels back to observe the Hindenburg disaster, but accidentally alters the timing of the airship's destruction, with, of course, dire consequences to the timeline.

I don't know why it is, these days, that every time I take a vacation I end up bringing a bad time travel novel along with me. But, look, here's another one! Well, OK, this one isn't terrible. But it is dull, which is certainly bad enough. There's nothing terribly innovative in the plot, the writing isn't particularly engaging, and the characters are paper-thin. It's also full of implausibilities, even once you accept the basic time travel premise.

I vaguely remember enjoying Steele's Orbital Decay ages and ages ago, but Coyote, which I read much more recently, did not impress me. I think Allen Steele and I are now pretty much done. ( )

This is a fast pasted, easy read that has enough time-travel paradoxes to keep the reader interested. The chapters are broken down by past and future time periods until the characters meet in the same time. In 1998 Dr. Murphy has written a non-fiction article speculating that UFOs are time-machines. In 2314, the crew of the time-ship Oberon travel to the past to gather information on the Hindenburg disaster. A rift is caused in chronospace and an alternate worldline is created that leads to destruction.

The story is great, but the book editor should be fired. I have never read a book with so many printing errors before. Every page had either a word left out or double words. The copy I read was a hardback first edition. Hopefully later printings were cleaned up. ( )