It's 2291, more than a century since mankind finally made peace with
itself. With skill and technology, agents of the Temporal Planning
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Commission spot trouble and gently divert conflicts before they erupt.
But if Atlan stage magician Ari Khalik doesn't stop them soon, his
colony world will die. With the help of a freighter captain and a
renegade TPC agent, Khalik came to Earth to plead his case. Which was
how Healer Gillian Thomas ended up in a forced coma from an impossible
drug reaction. Both sides thought that she was just another pawn in the
game, until she twisted causality and changed the rules.
“The Shoals of Time” traces the widening ripples of the splash made when
Healer Thomas' former contract mate was blasted into the TimeStream by a
man he thought was his friend. It follows Gillian's desperate search for
help, and how it caused 19th century mystic Mark Rosnet to lead a band
of 20th century science fiction fans across time to rescue her from the
man who killed her former lover and spearheaded Khalik's silent
revolution. People from 1864 to 2378 are drawn into this maelstrom of
warped causality, their separate event chains tangling with one another
until each breaks free and finds its own ending.
At the heart of the tale are the twin concepts of the Web of
Connectivity and the TimeStream — etherial links between people and the
medium that supports causality. When Gillian escapes her comatose body
in 2291 and searches the Web for an answer, she stumbles on the two
people that developed the technology used by the TPC to keep the peace,
and by Khalik's man to kill her former lover. Shunted back to 1983 to
protect the secrets of the two people who could help her in 2137, she
begins to search for a way back.
The review of this Book prepared by Philip Zack