Rebel in Time

An African American Vietnam vet pursues a criminal time traveler bent on helping the South win the Civil War. The villain wants to build simple machine guns for the Confederate army. The story includes effective details on the Underground Railroad and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. The novel exemplifies Harrison’s skill at writing unpretentious science fiction adventures.

This is not a bad time travel story but I have a few problems with it. I first thought the basic premise was going to be hard to swallow: black guy gets picked to go back in time to the pre-Civil War South to carry out a mission to stop the South from winning—yes, that should certainly work out fine. The author, however, does make a pretty good case of making sense out of it. He spends way too much time though on setting up the story before getting to the main plot. It is no secret to the reader (we know what the title of the book is and have read the blurb) what the bad guy is planning but it takes the good guys half the book to figure it out. But even if you had come to the first chapter blind, you could still do it faster. I kept show more saying to myself: get on with it already. Once we get on the mission things pick up nicely for the most part. There is one plot point that I found totally unbelievable however. Without giving a spoiler, let’s just say that it depends on the villain not knowing something that it seems impossible that he did not know. Not just not being aware of a particular detail but never have heard of something that I believe he would have known about. It just seems like laziness on the part of the author. Worth a read if you like time travel or Civil War alternative history but not a top notch story. show less

Good sci-fi/time travel story of men who try to change the course of the Civil War.

#276 in our old book database. Not rated.

I thought this was rather feeble, and politically overcorrect in a very unsubtle way. I don’t enjoy being preached at, even when I agree with the message. There are better books by this author.