The Timeliner Trilogy

Timeliner Trilogy #1-3

by Richard C. Meredith

The Timeliner Trilogy: "At the Narrow Passage", "No Brother, No Friend" and "Vestiges of Time".

Genres: Science Fiction

716 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 1987

About the author

Richard Carlton Meredith was an American writer, illustrator and graphic designer, best known as the author of science fiction short stories and novels including "We All Died at Breakaway Station" and The Timeliner Trilogy.

Meredith's works give unfamiliar twists to many familiar SF themes: A human Galactic empire and its struggle with a non-human rival (We All Died at Breakaway Station) or with independence-seeking human subjects (The Sky Is Filled with Ships); a theocratic dictatorship, nuclear and biological warfare, and the effort to change history by time travel (Run, Come See Jerusalem!); or the "sidewise" travel into alternate histories and the struggle for control over a multitude of divergent timelines (The Timeliner Trilogy).

Meredith's protagonists tend to be highly motivated and devoted people, wholeheartedly taking up Earth- or Universe-shaking causes to which they give their all - and often discovering that they had been duped into serving an evil cause, or that an action taken with the best of intentions actually makes a bad situation worse. A reader opening a Meredith book can by no means count on a happy ending - indeed, some of the books can be classed as dystopias.

In the preface to Breakaway Station, before the reader had yet met the protagonists, Meredith already tells that all of them would eventually die heroic deaths comparable to those of Leonidas and his three hundred at the Battle of Thermopylae — and indeed, the book duly comes to precisely that ending.

Meredith died unexpectedly on 8 March 1979, aged only 41, following a stroke brought on by a brain hemorrhage.He was survived by his wife and four children.

Reviews

[Mhorg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Richard Meredith. I wish his books would see a renaissance. The Sky is Filled With Ships add We All Died at Breakaway Station are my favorites. This was a bit of a disappointment. The first book was fine, the second dragged a bit, the third wss a letdown; too long and too slow.

[Mobocracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waffle between three and a half stars and four stars. The first two books were the better two books, with a good mix of action, alternate history and a fairly intriguing cross-time conspiracy. The third book was the weaker of the three, getting going and then hastily ending in a blur of hazy pscyhobabble that left the series ending in a kind of incomplete state or at least an unsatisfying ending.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not only read through the trilogy several times, I am currently working on the second screenplay for the trilogy!

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