Subject: Prograde Reviews--Terence M. Green:Children of The Rainbow

From: [email-masked] (Aaron V. Humphrey)
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 12:09:01 GMT

Terence M. Green: Children of The Rainbow

A Prograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey

On the back, this was touted as one of the Great Time Travel Novels.  So,
with this expectation in mind, I was somewhat disappointed...

In the late 21st Century, a New Inca priest has discovered a means to send
people backward in time by 100 years exactly, and retrieve them(as long as
they're on or near either the Tropic of Cancer or of Capricorn).  Fletcher
Christian IV, direct descendant of the Bounty mutineer and internationally-
known scientist, decides to go back to Pitcairn Island, former home of his
illustrious forebear.

However, a French nuclear test in the Pacific throws Christian's jaunt
awry, and instead he ends up in chains on the Norfolk Island prison colony
in 1835, while Bran Michael Dalton, the prisoner he replaced, ends up on
Pitcairn in 1972.

Christian eventually manages to convince Major Anderson, the commander of
the colony, that he is from the future, and Bran adjusts easily to life in
the 20th Century.  The former plotline is the most interesting one in the
book; the Christian/Anderson conversations are intriguing.  The rest of the
book--up to the oddly unsatisfying ending, in which all is not put back as
it was--is lightweight, but not precisely _humourous_.  Just...lacking in
conflict, or complication.

Oh, yeah, I guess there is some tension in the Greenpeace III subplot,
which involves a Greenpeace boat attempting to force the French to stop
their nuclear tests.  But this is apparently fact, not fiction, and doesn't
impinge on the rest of the book except for the way the nuclear blasts
themselves muck up time travel.

So, in all, mildly interesting but ultimately unsatisfying.  The Christian
plot, by itself, might have made an interesting novella.

%A Green, Terence M.
%T Children of The Rainbow
%I McClelland & Stewart
%C Toronto
%D Copyright 1992
%G ISBN 0-7710-3550-0
%P 266 pp.
%O Trade Paperback

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