A Long Time from Now by Michael Z. Williamson

A Long Time from Now by Michael Z. Williamson

I loved this book for about the first 80% of the novel, then I felt like it (or maybe it was me) ran out of steam just about the time we were hitting the climax. On its basic level this is a story of ingenuity and survival in the far past. Ten U.S. soldiers are mysteriously transported through time to the remote past where they have to learn to survive without any support from modern civilization. That in and of itself is quite interesting, but Williamson spices things up considerably first by having the soldiers encounter stone age peoples and then by having them encounter other accidental time travelers.

 

It's all quite fascinating until you start to think about just how much this random ten soldiers knows about living in the stone age. The tech specialist makes sense, she’s trying to keep the modern tech working. The medic has knowledge that makes sense as well. But honestly, do we really think that a random ten soldiers will know how to weave, tan leather, forge metals, etc. It was a bit too much and that started to be really driven home for me somewhere around the 80% mark when future time travelers were seriously impacting the storyline.

 

I also frankly didn’t like the resolution of the story. I don’t want to give spoilers here, but I liked the setup and thought that there was a whole series to be developed on that idea. The resolution felt a little too close to a deus ex machina to me. It wasn’t quite that, but it felt close to it.

 

So, in summation, this is a good book if you’d like to read about 10 people trying to recreate civilization in the ultimate wild.