One night in March, 1998, the island of Nantucket was zapped back to the year 1250 B.C. So begins S. M. Stirling’s novel Island in the Sea of Time which, together with two sequels, explores the impact of modern electricity, modern gunpowder and modern thought on the world of the Bronze Age.

One night in March, 1998, the island of Nantucket was zapped back to the year 1250 B.C. — and in the world it left behind, suddenly modern electricity and modern gunpowder, though perhaps not modern thought, stopped working. So begins S. M. Stirling’s novel Dies the Fire which, together with two (supposedly not yet completed) sequels, explores the impact of the loss of these things on the world at the end of the twentieth century.

The story basically follows two characters, and to some extent a third, through the first nine months after the night when everything stopped. Michael Havel, former marine and now a bush pilot for a small Idaho firm, is flying a family from Boise, Idaho, up to their ranch in Montana when everything, including their plane, stops. Havel successfully ditches the plane in a wilderness river and is then faced with the job of getting his passengers back to civilization — which, unknown to him, is in a state of collapse. Faced with a series of gradually escalating crises, Havel eventually finds himself training and running a well-disciplined band of condottieri, working its way west towards an estate (belonging to his original passengers) in the Eola Hills west of Salem, Oregon.

Juniper Mackenzie, RenFaire busker and Wiccan high priestess, and her deaf daughter Eilir, along with a passing friend, Dennis Martin, escape from burning Corvallis, Oregon, and flee the (relatively) short distance to some property that Juniper owns in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where ultimately they are joined by the surviving members of Juniper’s coven as well as a number of other smart and useful refugees. Not just hard work and initiative enable this group to survive; they are the beneficiaries of a number of fortunate “coincidences” that suggest that Juniper has been singled out by Someone to be one of the nuclei around which future civilization will be rebuilt. See in particular the Epilogue. (1)

Havel and Juniper, however, are both confronted with a certain manmade problem that absorbs much of their energy in the second half of the book. Norman Arminger, a history professor in Portland, has decided to seize the chance offered by the collapse of everything to establish his own little empire in the northwest. After largely depopulating Portland, he has turned its criminal underworld into the seed of an army, and is now attempting to conquer east (through the Columbia River gorge) and south into the Willamette Valley. This, of course, brings him into conflict with both Havel’s “Bearkillers” and the Wiccans of Juniper’s “Clan Mackenzie”.

There are some flaws in the book. I found that Stirling has a tendency to be repetitive. Some of his factual material (for instance, the almost instantaneous medical results of cannibalism on the eaters) strike me as being exaggerated. I should probably also complain about his preoccupation with How Things Work, but while I was reading this did not seem overly obtrusive to me. As far as this book alone is concerned, the link with the earlier trilogy (and hence the need to start the series in 1998, thus making it in effect a “What if” tale but without the special characteristics of that sort of story) is a conceit of the author, and an unnecessary one; the fact that Dennis Martin is the brother of hippy blacksmith John Martin, who played a critical role in the earlier trilogy, or that Signe Larssen once dated the villainous William Walker, is pretty much irrelevant to this novel. It remains to be seen whether the story will, in the later novels, somehow reconverge with the “Island” trilogy, or at least its effects; if not, I would suggest that the linkage with the earlier series is unfortunate.

Some readers may also find themselves uncomfortable with a story, not written by Stewart Farrar, that gives them a Wiccan circle (pp 292-294, 481-483), albeit an incomplete one. Stirling also spices the story with snippets of the lyrics from the music of Heather Alexander, though I think it would have been fair to mention W. B. Yeats in connection with the passage quoted from “The Stolen Child”.

All criticisms aside, I think my opinion of this story can best be described by the fact that I read it three times in the first two weeks after I bought it. And I hate the idea of having to wait a year for The Protector’s War.

(1) Reading this book, at one point the thought hit me that this would fit right in as a distant prologue to Diana Paxson’s old Chronicles of Westria.