A man named John Rolfe opens a portal to a parallel universe with a shortwave radio set in his basement. The world on the other side is the same year as ours, but significant world events have not occurred. Europeans never discovered North or South America and technology has not advanced much beyond the bronze age.

Rolfe gets a group of his war buddies together and they slowly begin to colonize the "new" world, bringing along with them many discontent people from "first side" as they call it.

This was a slow read for me, the author is very descriptive and you sometimes feel like you are right there alongside the characters. Battle scenes are also depicted with great detail, down to the types of weapons used.

A good read, but I enjoyed Dies the Fire by the same author a bit more. ( )

ZB4

Great book. Grabs you right away and moves quickly. I enjoyed reading this one a great deal. Time travel through a parallel universe. Very clever. ( )

Not as good as Dies the Fire, felt it was slower paced. May not read another Stirling anytime soon. His telling of a fictional world and the thought process that went into all the characters is quite impressive. I felt though a lot of it could be dropped out and the main story could be told very well in a shorter novel. Too much going on for me. I think it would be better if left to two timelines and not the four to five he has in the book. Although most of the reviews are praising good I did not find the book as enjoyable. Read my rating system to better understand my review. ( )

This book was an interesting look at an alternate Earth, particularly western America. I liked the interactions between characters Tom, Adrienne and Tully and the ways Tom and Tully noticed the differences between New Virginia and First Side (current Earth). ( )

Good quick read. Simple, feasible entry into alternate world. Strong characters, bad guys a little sterotypic, sneaky Italian, brutal Russian and racist Afrikaans. Thoughful picture of prehistory California and the effects of the modern invasion on the indigents. Ends with a believable special ops takeout by the good guys. The modified Mosquito type fighter bomber is a nice touch. I would hope for a next installment as they explore their new gate into the land of sabertooth tigers and giant sloths. ( )

Great story line--alternate dimension/realities based on alternative histories. ( )

Two Words: Draka-lite.

A great story and nicely handled - I do like Stirling's alternate historys, but like a lot of his material there's a wiff of the Draka from his original claim to fame.

While there's nothing here like WIlliam Walker or Norman Arminger from some of his other books, the 'New Virginia' society strikes me as a sanitised version of the European Draka we saw in 'Under the Yoke'. ( )

Excellent novel of alternate history / alternate dimensions. However, the author is sometimes too in love with nature, and will go on describing it long enough to lose my attention (it's a very different style, but all I could think of was J.R.R. Tolkein - great story, but far too much detail that bogs it down sometimes).

Great concept, and when it wasn't bogged down in details, it was quite a page-turner. ( )

The concept behind this book was great: in a parallel world, Alexander the Great does not die on schedule, causing history to widely divirge. I would have liked for Stirling to go back further and show us more of that alternate history, instead of simply plopping us down in an alternate California that is just less populated and cleaner. Yes, we get it: We have overpopulated and screwed up the environment. Still the story was a pretty good page-turner, and it did bring up some interesting questions about the proper use of power in a situation like that. If you were essentially rediscovering the New World, what would you do differently than the original "Conquistadors"? What type of government would you set up? How would you keep your secret, and control who comes into your new world? One last nit-pick: The main character is a walking stereotype. Most people won't care, because he is a stereotypical burly Scandanavian from North Dakota who says "Yah, you betcha" on every page. As a North Dakotan, I was annoyed by this. If I want that crap, I'll watch "Fargo." ( )

After enjoying Stirling's Dies the Fire series, I decided to test the waters with some of his other works. I chose the stand alone novel Conquistador as a quick way to evaluate if my enjoyment was purely from good writing and storytelling, or if it was tied up merely in the thematic material of the original series of novels.

Even prior to finishing the book it was obvious that Stirling has developed a keen ability for providing interesting and fast moving narratives. Though it was not as enjoyable as my experience with his more recent series, it was still a fun work to read and with a completely different milieu, ranging from a modern mystery detective story to something like a western action novel.

Back and forth in time and spanning across two universes, the narrative of this story is given an air of mystery as critical elements of the plot are revealed much like unwrapping a gift one small piece of paper at a time. The core of the story revolves around a gateway to a parallel universe discovered by an American soldier after his return from the second World War. Using the abundant natural resources of the the alternate reality as seed capital, he sets up a new feudal society there. The story develops around efforts sixty years later to keep the gate and the new society secret from the First Side, as internal political forces threaten to expose the gate and tear the new society apart in civil war.

The story is set primarily in the Bay Area both of our world and the alternate reality. Stirling uses his geographical knowledge well, and the places will be familiar to anyone who has lived or spent time in the area. He also uses the ecological contrasts between our world and the untouched primitive land on the other side of the gateway as a unique way to expose the details of environmental changes that have occurred during post-industrial history. Along with this, he paints a morally ambiguous portrait of the inner politics of this new world (representing a more agrarian society) and compares it with our current post-industrial society. He dispels our sometimes mythic, grass is greener view of history while at the same time pointing out some of the good things we may have lost during the societal changes brought about by large population growth and industrialization. This is one of the areas I appreciated more in Conquistador as opposed to the philosophical bits that came from Dies the Fire, which were generally painted in more black and white terms. ( )

What I like about Stirling is that he doesn't get all technical in his explanations. He just stretches your imagination and you go with it.

He alone has brought me to thuroughly enjoy alternate reality novels. ( )

A very enjoyable tale. A nice twist on Alternate History by making the change point so far back in history that only the geography remains the same. Also some interesting ideas on colonisation and the effect of the Europeans on the Americas during the Age of Discovery. ( )

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