Timelines was planned as a trilogy of novels, and a short story that acts as a prequel to the first novel. There are also two novellas placed about fifty years after the end of the second novel. The series has evolved to the point where there will be five novels, the short story noted above, a number of related novellae, and at least two (and probably three) novels “off to the side” in another, related timeline.
The action centers around a near-future world where the United States has created an interstellar-capable Space Force and Space Force Marines, thanks to a breakthrough discovery that led to the building of a working Alcubierre warp drive.
At the same time, the inventors of the drive have discovered it can be used to “rotate” through four-dimensional space, providing instantaneous translation to places even the warp drive is too slow to reach in a reasonable amount of time. And they’ve also discovered it can “rotate” sideways into parallel, alternate timelines.
But the reason other timelines exist, while it’s fairly straightforward in theory, is much deeper than anyone realizes.
Follow our intrepid team and their supporting characters as they work to discover just who that man behind the curtain really is.
Published to date:
The author says: Yeah, OK, you caught me, the first “chapter” of The Lion of God is semi-autobiographical…if I can just figure out how to build a time machine before I’m 84 years old. Sarah is based on a real person who was very dear to me and died before her time. On the other hand, I was never a Marine, though I have a great respect and love for the USMC. And my family never benefited from a mysterious legacy left by an itinerant uncle. (Obviously — my family doesn’t own the land where the recreation area on Lake Monroe sits.) Some other characters are vaguely and tangentially based on people I know. Other characters are entirely of my own fabrication out of my fertile imagination (all the Marines, for instance — and Ariela).
There is a review that claimed the first book does too much political proselytizing. I will argue that point; it is true the first section of the first book does spend a lot of time developing the back story, which involves a lot of geopolitical BS and dings some countries and certain US politicians I don’t like very much, and it is also true that some of the characters occasionally spend some time discussing political subjects throughout the rest of the book, but always in context with whatever it is they are doing. I will also point out that the reviewer claimed to have read only part of the book before setting it aside, and by the number of pages he claimed to have read, he was well past the point where I stopped the data dump from the first section when he did. So I don’t really know what his point was, or why he still gave the book three stars.
Anyway, I don’t intend to be political in the second and third books at all (or much; I might slip and insert a political reference or two, but I’m only human) because neither will spend much time in Earth-space. And the short story The Reason isn’t political at all, unless you think discussing how a gravely-injured Marine gunnery sergeant saved his platoon in Somalia and how he ended up in Walter Reed Hospital with a Purple Heart and being put up for the Navy Cross is political. Neither is the novella A Fox in the Henhouse, unless there’s something politically inherent in an intelligence agent recovering a stolen alien artifact from a bunch of international criminals and getting shot at (and shooting back) in the process.
So enjoy, if this sort of thing is your pot of tea; and if it isn’t, well, I agree with my reviewer’s advice — try it on Kindle Unlimited before you decide whether or not to buy it. I do that sort of thing myself, a lot.