Teaser

With the United States in the grip of a religious dictatorship, one man is sent back in time to change the course of history. Yet Eugene Spillman is not convinced of the righteousness of the plan, and the rebels may find their assassin is their own greatest enemy . . .

Review

We All Died at Breakaway Station was one of the surprise hits of last year. Granted I came to it five decades after publication, but it was an absolute joy to find a new-to-me author whose work I enjoyed so much. Obviously, I took note of the author’s other works, and it happily turns out that many of Richard C. Meredith’s were also rereleased under the Venture SF banner in the eighties. I’m still on the hunt for The Sky is Filled with Ships and The Timeliner Trilogy, but I was recently able to get a hold of other time-travel novel, Run, Come See Jerusalem!

This is another quick read at only 232 pages, but the story jumps around a lot within those short chapters. Broadly speaking, there are three time periods. The 2030s (far-flung at the time of writing, but now just around the corner), in which Spillman is brought into a conspiracy, the nineteenth century, and an indeterminate prehistoric date. The latter era feels a lot like padding, and is easily the weakest section. It’s hard not to think he book would have been better without it.

Romance, or rather sexual attraction, does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to Spillman’s motivation. He is beguiled into joining a resistance moment by one woman, only to travel back in time and find himself falling for anther. Despite Spillman’s protestations, neither of these relationships feels genuine. It’s quite clear that his resistance contact is manipulating him, and his historical love affair is an adulterous spur-of-the-moment thing that, in a shocking coincidence, brings him back to the reason for his travel. There was a lot of sex in Meredith’s other novel, so I have to assume it was something he was interested in writing. This was, after all, the free love generation.

Where Run, Come See Jerusalem! really shines is in its time travel. Naturally, we’re deep into paradox territory by the end of the novel. One of the things that always bothers me in time travel stories (cough *Doctor Who* cough) is they present deadlines as important. You know the sort of thing. We’ve travelled back a hundred years and now only have ten hours to find the villain. Well, no. You have a time machine. You have literally infinite time. There’s no rush. Meredith employs a little logic, having Spillman re-tread his own timeline to avoid disaster. At the same time, there are lasting effects of all the time travel. The final pages of the novel deliver one of the finest literary gut-punches I’ve ever encountered, and one that more than makes up for a slow and winding start to the novel.

If you’re a fan of US history, there are extra treats for you too. I’ve never been to Chicago, least of all in 1871, but Meredith brings it alive. The English family and their cohorts feel like fully realised individuals, and all the little details of their lives forma perfect image of life in the period. I also have to give Meredith credit for writing accents in a way that doesn’t make me want to claw my eyes out. I bet a historian would be able to spot the inaccuracies in the timeline that result from Spillman’s actions. For a novice like myself, however, I was just happy to go along it with.

It might not be quite on the same level as We All Died at Breakaway Station, but Run, Come See Jerusalem! is still a brilliant piece of time-travel fiction.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Originally Published in 1976
• This Edition Published by Venture SF
• 232 Pages