Subject: Review: Costello's HOUR OF THE SCORPION

From: [email-masked] (Robert Schmunk)
Date: 3 Dec 91 18:12:09 GMT

HOUR OF THE SCORPION
                         By Matthew J. Costello

                      A book review by R.B. Schmunk
                            (Copyright 1991)

Before I get into this review, I should mention that HOUR OF THE SCORPION
is the second book in Matthew J. Costello's "Time Warrior" series (not to
be confused with the "Time Warriors" books also currently appearing on book
racks). If you haven't read the preceding novel, TIME OF THE FOX, you may
want to give this review a miss and instead read Evelyn Leeper's review of
the earlier book, posted to rec.arts.sf.reviews about two weeks ago.

Anyway, the reason I read this book is not because TIME OF THE FOX was
such a great book (it wasn't) but because I'm an alternate history nut.
TIME OF THE FOX and HOUR OF THE SCORPION are the kind of alternate history
in which somebody travels back into time and makes changes, sometimes
serious enough to re-write the history books.

The premise is something akin to what's used in the television series
QUANTUM LEAP, in that the time traveler does not physically move but
instead occupies the mind of someone who lived in the time and place
the he wishes to visit. Unlike that TV show, however, who he "replaces"
is controllable by the folks back at home at the Time Lab on the Columbia
University campus, somewhere in the early to mid 21st century, and the
only way for the lab to communicate with him is to send someone back
with a message. The main quirk of what's happening is that this Time Lab
is shielded from all forms of external radiation and its existence is
never affected by any changes which a time traveler may effect.
Additionally, it is connected by computer cable to (unspecified) external
databases so that the people inside the building can measure the change
in history without being changed themselves. Oh, and of course, there
are bad guys with their own similar apparatus; they're unreconstructed
neo-Stalinist hardliners hiding out in Soviet Georgia, still angry about
perestroika and still aching to destroy America.

HOUR OF THE SCORPION moves the scene of battle (or change war, if you will)
to 1968 Vietnam, days before the beginning of the Tet offensive, a battle
which the US won militarily but which told the folks back at home that
this wasn't just another police action. One-time Columbia grad student
and now unwitting time warrior Jim Tiber finds himself inside the mind of
a US infantry lieutenant with absolutely no idea why he's there (he got
yanked out of his previous mission without time for de-briefing or re-
briefing). His apparent job would be to stay alive and wait for a message
from the future. The folks back at Columbia send back his girlfriend Ali,
but in order to get a feel for what's really going on, they send her
via Hanoi, where she takes over the mind of a North Vietnamese general's
mistress. The general, by the way, has been taken over by an agent of
the Soviet time travel group. Right after they send her back, the scientists
back at Columbia find themselves evicted from their labs by New York City
cops in a world where the US has gotten a bit fascistic since they last
looked out the window.

That's enough of the set-up to give you a feel for the basic story. Now it's
time to discuss the merits of the book, and I'm sad to report that there
aren't many. I found the characters generally unengaging, and Costello
jumps back and forth between them fairly rapidly, usually within a half-
dozen pages. I suppose that this is to lend an air of tension to the novel,
but I found it only made it difficult to keep track of what the characters
were up to. No sooner had I settled into what one was doing before the book
would move to another.

At least one unnecessary subplot takes up a major portion of the book when
Jim's lieutenant suddenly gets compassionate leave to visit his family in
San Francisco. As the events of the trip do nothing to further the plot
I can only assume that Costello included this to either a) contrast the
danger of the Vietnamese jungles to the Haight-Ashbury flower children,
or b) take up space. If it was the former, then it was very ineffective.

And of course, I had major problems with the inviolability of the Columbia
Time Lab. There would seem to be any number of paradoxes possible with
Costello's description of the set-up. Some sf writers would acknowledge
these problems and either find a logical way around them or else admit
their existence and give them a literary shrug of the shoulders, as if
to say, "What can you do about it?" (e.g., Anderson' Time Patrol stories).
If Costello has done anything to explain these paradoxes away, it comes in
the form of meaningless quantum physics jargon. Given that special tiles
are supposed to protect the existence of the Time Lab, I couldn't help
but wonder what if a historical re-write resulted in the Columbia campus
getting nuked before the lab was supposedly built. Would it sit suspended
over a glass crater, its mystery cable leading nowhere?

When reading an alternate history, I require that a story either be very
well-written and do nothing that overly strains my credulity (e.g.,
Waldrop's "Ike at the Mike") or that it be halfway well-written and teach
me a little something about history that might have been (e.g., Steele's
"Goddard's People"). Unfortunately, HOUR OF THE SCORPION is neither a good
story nor did it tell me much about the Vietnam war. In her earlier review,
Evelyn Leeper recommended that only a Rommel fan would find much of interest
in TIME OF THE FOX. This novel does not even have that sort of limited
appeal, and though I'll read virtually any alternate history I can find,
I'll probably give Time Warrior #3 a skip should it ever hit the book racks.
I recommend that you don't even give #2 a try.

%T	HOUR OF THE SCORPION
%A	Matthew J. Costello
%I	NAL ROC Science Fiction
%O	paperback, US$4.99
%P	335 pp.
%D	December 1991
%G	ISBN 0-451-45128-7
%S      Time Warrior
%V      2

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Robert B. Schmunk <[email-masked], [email-masked]>
SPAC, Rice Univ, Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251 -- (713) 527-4939
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