On The Oceans Of Eternity

Author : S.M. Stirling (b. 1953)

Title : On The Oceans of Eternity (2000; 630 pages)

Genre : Alternate History (Part 3 of a Trilogy)

Rating : B

This Month I Read...
On The Oceans of Eternity is the third and final part of an Alternate History trilogy known informally as the Republic of Nantucket ("RoN") series. In RoN, the modern-day island of Nantucket is time-warped back to about 1250 B.C. and its inhabitants have to learn to survive. The first two books in this series have been reviewed here-(1) and here-(2).

OTOOE is primarily concerned with the marshaling of the forces of Nantucket and its allies (Babylon, Troy, England) as they try to out-flank and out-diplomacy the bad guys, who essentially control the entire Mediterranean Sea. There are a couple of side-plots (a 'Lewis & Clark' expedition to the Pacific by the good guys, and the courting and allying of Egypt by the bad guys); but those storylines are by-and-large peripheral.

What's To Like...
As usual, there's lots of action; both diplomatic and warfare. Once again, the bad guys aren't Ultimate Evil personified - they're innovative, calculating, Machiavelian, and ambitious. That's still a nice change from the simplistic "white hats / black hats" dualism present in most sci-fi stories.

OTOOE is a page-turner, and even comes to a dramatic conclusion; albeit enough 'loose strings' remain to where Stirling could've written a Volume 4 had he so desired.

What's Not To Like...
The usual minor irritations mentioned previously (voiding, weapons sounds, and "Ayup") remain. In addition, the final resolution of the build-up between the two equally-powerful forces left many readers dissatisfied. There are charges of plagiarism (from the Michael Caine movie "Zulu"), which I frankly find to be much ado about nothing.

Some feel that the character-development was shallow, but I find that rather petty. You have a choice - a fast-paced, action-packed trilology with moderate-to-minimal CD, or a 10-volume opus (a la Robert Jordan) with tons of CD. Personally, I like Stirling's choice.

Finally, there's no action happening on the Island of Nantucket. So the pages dealing with the politics and lives on the mother island are boring.

Do Publishers Dictate the Number of Pages in a Novel?
There's no doubt about it - the resolution of the conflict that's been growing for three books and 1800 pages is quite anti-climactic. A lot of readers feel Stirling lost interest and finished it up quickly and sloppily.

Instead, I get a sense of haste. The plot(s) in OTOOE are proceeding along nicely, up until around page 500, when everything suddenly goes into overdrive. I'm not an author, so I wonder : do publishing companies ever (try to) dictate the length of novels? After all, every printed page is an expense for them.

I imagine different authors would react in varying ways to such an edict. If James Patterson had to write a 400-page book, I think he'd let forth a loud moan, and divvy his book into 200 Chapters so as to have a lot of blank spaces on each chapter's first-page.

OTOH, any attempt to limit Robert Jordan to less than 800 pages per book, would probably cause him to kill off a few characters, or else add a couple more volumes to Wheel of Time.

So with OTOOE, I wonder if the deal was that it was to be 600 pages long, and Stirling looked up at Page 500 and freaked out. Maybe he called the publisher (ROC) and told them he couldn't possibly finish the story in the next hundred pages, so they told him, "Fine. You get 5% more pages. But not one page more." That would make 630 pages, which coincidentally is how long this is.

But I digress. The RoN trilogy gets an overall A rating and a "highly recommended" endorsement from me. Lots of action, lots of different places to read about, and the whole thing gets wrapped up in only three books. Considering the way Eric Flint's 163x series has become bogged down, and the way Harry Turtledove has to take 12 novels to tell the "If The South Had Won The Civil War" alt-stroy; it's nice to only have to make only a 3-book reading investment to fully explore this alternate timeline.

FWIW, many of the initial readers (back in 2000) felt that Stirling had left enough loose ends to write one more book in the series. But, as he hasn't done that in the last 8 years, I think in retrospect that was wishful thinking (which in a way, is a nice compliment re this storyline). Stirling did write a subsequent series ("Dies The Fire"), dealing with the changes wreaked upon the present-day world when Nantucket got zapped back to the Bronze Age. I haven't read any of those books yet, but they certainly look enticing. However, the next Stirling book on my TBR shelf is Conquistador. Stay tuned.