MERIDIAN V: Golem 7

JUST RELEASED! (12/12/11)

Book V in the award winning Meridian Series Time Travel novels has just been released. The book brings this quintet of novels blending sci-fi and historical fiction to a satisfying conclusion, with the promise of more to come. Buy Golem 7 on Amazon.

Book V: Golem 7

"Nordhausen is back with new research and his hand on the neck of the new terrorist behind the Palma Event. Now the project team struggles to discover how and where the Assassins have intervened to restore the chaos of Palma, and their search leads them on one of the greatest naval sagas of modern history--the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck.

REVIEW:

The title Golem 7 refers to an industrious grouping of Kelly Ramer’s search Golem programs, which specialize in uncovering alarming variations in history by comparing live data on the Internet to a massive RAM bank of known recorded events. As soon as a variation of contradiction is detected an alarm is triggered to warn team members involved in an elaborate time travel project at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. This time the alarm produces a strange event. By some means the German battleship Bismarck was not sunk on its maiden voyage, and now the team must sleuth the course of events in the Bismarck campaign to find out how and why, and try to put the ship back in its watery grave before its fifteen inch guns wreak havoc on British convoys, and the time continuum as well!

 

This volume presents a new approach in the telling of the story. The same crisp and informative dialogue is used here to set the parameters of the history and mission, but the main weapon used by the project team this time is information. After identifying the key Pushpoints involved, the author then launches into a convincing and exciting alternate history retelling of the campaign, where all the little details in the history are keenly elucidated and one comes to feel that the history itself rested on the most precarious stack of small, inconsequential events.

These live history scenes alternate in groups with the more familiar chapters set in the Berkeley Lawrence Lab facility, as the author shows us results on a live stage peopled by the real historical figures instead of having his team members just talk about it in the lab. In those scenes, the team tries to understand how their interventions have affected the history we have just witnessed on stage, and try again with another intervention until they get the change they are hoping for.

As it turns out, the Bismarck is one slippery fish to reel in! In fact, after reading this you will come to feel that it was sheer luck that the British managed to sink the German ship at all, and wonder if someone actually was operating in time to control these odd events--a possibility darkly hinted at by the conclusion of the novel. The details here, some ferreted out of individual ship logs and eyewitness reports, are astounding. If you like naval sagas, as the author clearly does, you will love Golem 7. The treatment of the live history scenes, while unique, reads much like a C.S. Forester novel, and that is a compliment, to be sure."

Meridian V: Golem 7 is now available on Amazon.com here

This was the novel that inspired the author to continue his interest in naval fiction and write the popular Kirov Series featured prominently in this blog.