Manco, Jean. Ancestral Journeys.

Rev. & Updated Ed. London: Thomas & Hudson, 2015.

I’ve been a history junky all my life, and it started when I was an Army brat in the 1950s, living in and traveling all over Europe. Wandering around the Forum in Rome, actually putting my hands on solid history, and knowing that other people had been doing the very same thing in that very spot for more than twenty-five centuries — that realization hooked me for life. And my growing interest in the far past led me to wonder about things. Like, why were there so many blue-eyed blonde Italians in Milan? (Weren’t Italians supposed to be Mediterranean?) Why do Spaniards in the north of the country seem so different from those in the south? In college, I learned about the long history of human migration, beginning with the slow departure of the species from Africa and on into the many population shifts down through history, and the domino effect of population pressure that resulted in virtually everyone (at least in Europe) having a lot in common biologically with everyone else. I ended up with a couple of degrees in history and I’m still learning.

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Elton, Ben. Time and Time Again.

NY: St. Martin, 2014.

I’m old, and I’ve been a science fiction fan for close to seventy years now. I started young.) It’s a broad field with lots of distinct sub-genres, and my favorites among them have always been time travel stories and alternate histories. This engrossing yarn is heavy on both — and also, as you get deeper into it, you’ll find it’s also a sneaky example of the “secret history,” in which things are going within your own world right now, behind the scenes, of which you have no clue. The hook is a common one in time travel yarns: What if you went back and changed some key event in the past? (Keeping in mind that some authors reject the idea of a “key event.”) Would that “fix” things in our present? In this case, a way to travel through time was discovered three centuries ago by Sir Isaac Newton — but it’s not something you can manipulate.

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Bradley, Kaliane. The Ministry of Time.

NY: Simon & Schuster, 2024.

This intriguing multi-genre novel won The Observer’s award for Bet Debut Novel, and it certainly deserves it. New York magazine called it “a sci-fi romance thrill ride,” and it’s that, too– though probably not the way you expect. It’s one of those books that, once you get a few dozen pages into it, you really hate to have to put it down, even for a minute.

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Taylor, Jodi. Killing Time.

London: Headline Publishing, 2024.

This is the fifth volume in the excellent “Time Police” series, a spin-off fom the even more excellent “St. Mary’s Institute” series (now up to fifteen volumes), both of which are brimming over with time travel adventure, Good Guys vs. Bad Guys (not all of whom remain on their original sides), blaster battles, time slips that threaten Time itself, conspiracies that span generations, and a good deal of very British humor of the wry and snarky variety. But there’s also some very thoughtful writing on the nature of loyalty, friendship, duty, and doing the job no matter what.

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Silverberg, Robert. Up the Line.

NY: Del Rey, 1969.

It’s always nice to come across a book I haven’t read in three decades, and realize that I still remember large swathes of the plot ad the characters, even though most of the details are gone from my aging memory. That means I enjoyed it a lot the first time, which means it’s worth re-reading. And I’ll admit up front that I love time travel yarns, and that my undergrad major was history, with a focus on Late Classical and Early Medieval, so I’m predisposed to want to read anything about the centuries of the Byzantine Empire, from Constantine to the city’s conquest by the Turks in 1453. (Hey, I even use that date as the passcode on my cell phone.)

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Evison, Jonathan. Again and Again.

NY: Dutton, 2023.

When one of the caregivers in his desert retirement home in the Mojave north of Los Angeles remarks on how short life is, 105-year-old Eugene Miles silently begs to differ. His earliest memory is as a homeless street thief in Seville in the 11th century, and after a thousand years of inhabiting a succession of bodies (including six years as Oscar Wilde’s cat), most of it lonely and loveless, he’s had enough. He’s ready to die. But he’s afraid he’s only facing yet another unwanted reincarnation to add to the seven he has already suffered through. Eugene has become adept at being alone and largely avoiding the company of others, but when Angel, a young Hispanic room-cleaner is openly friendly, Eugene surprises himself by opening up and telling the young man his story. And so we follow him from the days when he was Euric, a Visigoth — and of lower status than the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Berber-dominated Andalusia.

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Utley, Steven. Where or When.

Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing, 2006.

Steve Utley died in 2013 at a relatively young age, and that was a particular shame. He was diagnosed with cancer and a month later, he was gone. I got to know Steve in the ’70s, when he was one of the founders of ArmadilloCon and the Turkey City Writers Conference, both in Austin, together with Howard Waldrop, Lisa Tuttle, and Bruce Sterling. (It was a great time to be a science fiction fan and/or budding writer in Texas.) He never made it to the level of national recognition, but you may have read “Custer’s Last Jump” and “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole,” two of the most influential precursors of steampunk. Steve was an Air Force brat (I grew up in the Army) and I remember spending a long lunch across the table from him, comparing experiences in rootlessness.

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Taylor, Jodi. Christmas Pie.

London: Headline Publishing, 2023.

Jodi has become renowned among both science fiction fans and lovers of dry, snarky, British-style humor for her tales of the time-traveling historians of St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. There are fifteen novels in that series so far and each of the half-dozen major characters has a considerable (and complex) backstory now, and there are also four more books in the spin-off “Time Police” series, plus another dozen and a half novelette-length Christmas-themed shorter works, of which this is the latest.

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Taylor, Jodi. The Good, the Bad and the History.

NY: Headline Publishing, 2023.

This is the 14th of the author’s novels about Dr. Lucy Maxwell and the adventures of the time-traveling historians of St. Mary’s Institute, which are always a raucous romp brimming over with sarcastic British humor, but they often have a more philosophically serious (and nerve-wracking) side, as well. I’ve bee reading the spin-off series about the Time Police lately — they’ve been both the Good Guys and the Bad Guys in the original series — and I had to go back to my own earlier reviews to remind myself of what exactly had been going on recently at the Institute.

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Beard, Mary. Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World.

World.NY: Liveright, 2023.

Beard is a classicist and has become one of the most widely known “public historians” in the English-speaking world. Her field is ancient Rome and her previous book, SPQR, which won awards and was a best seller, provided a thought-provoking and highly readable overview of how Rome was founded and how it evolved over its first thousand years into the largest and most powerful political entity of the ancient world. This volume, more of a companion work than a sequel, examines the Roman imperial system from Julius Caesar, a dictator who made one-man rule acceptable to the Romans, and his nephew, Octavian (Augustus), the first actual “emperor,” through almost three centuries and thirty rulers to Alexander Severus. After Alexander, the Roman imperial system changed rapidly and dramatically into something quite different, but the idea of one-man rule itself was accepted by all levels of society until the fall of the Eastern Empire to the Ottomans in 1453.

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