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Bridgehead
There's a secret in the basement of the engineering building. Three travelers, claiming to be from a utopia six thousand years hence, are helping Dr. Gustafson and his graduate staff invent a time transport. Their stated to stop war and secure a peaceful future.
Overloaded and overtaxed, the transport experiments start to go wrong. Dreadfully wrong. What the professors don't know is that the Travelers have their own plans for the machine. And their own secrets….
The future isn't peaceful. The past is not the past. And the machine in the engineering building has everything to do with an unimaginable war.
Overloaded and overtaxed, the transport experiments start to go wrong. Dreadfully wrong. What the professors don't know is that the Travelers have their own plans for the machine. And their own secrets….
The future isn't peaceful. The past is not the past. And the machine in the engineering building has everything to do with an unimaginable war.
279 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
76 people want to read
About the author
David Drake
318 books888 followersDavid Drake is an American author of science fiction and fantasy literature. A Vietnam War veteran who has worked as a lawyer, he is now one of the major authors of the military science fiction genre.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 13, 2017
Bridgehead is something a little different that Drake's more well-known epic fantasies or military books, being a time-travel story with a large cast of characters and questions that are less clear-cut than one might expect. It's more slowly paced and thoughtful that many of his action books, and well worth picking up.
June 17, 2023
This is only my second David Drake novel, the previous one I read was his excellent _Time Safari_. _Bridgehead_, copyright 1986, was another time travel story but unlike _Time Safari_, the time travel aspects are actually a bit secondary at times. In a nutshell, humans from the far future, 12,000 AD, have come to the present, to a university to work with “the locals” to build a time machine. The future people, the Three Travelers, Keyliss, Astor, and Selve, two women and one man, are able to visit their distant past and the main character’s present with time machines but they also want the locals to build their own time machines with local materials under the direction of the Three Travelers. The motivation of the Three Travelers is basically stated as “our future will not exist unless you develop time travel” and oh “don’t tell anyone especially your government about us.” So, the researchers and engineers don’t really question the Three Travelers too much and build working time machines, with under their future friends’ guidance, make early on in the novel a trip to the swampy forests of the Carboniferous. Nice, safe, a demonstration of concept.
Only, the Three Travelers aren’t being truthful, at all, about a lot of things, some of their lies and omissions quickly revealed when they take a bunch of the locals to visit the dinosaur-filled Mesozoic…and are attacked by chlorine breathing aliens known as the Vrage, who attack the locals and the Three Travelers with energy weapons and tanks. The rest of the book is basically fighting the Vrage throughout space and time, the locals coming to terms not only with the Vrage, not only the lies told by the Three Travelers, but to the grave danger posed to present day earth by both the Vrage and the Travelers.
I think the Vrage were very interesting aliens, if you like science fiction combat there is an awful lot of it, I think well done and something I understand David Drake excels at. There are some nice twists and turns in the story, and I enjoyed how even with far future weaponry the dinosaurs were no joke as far as being threats. I think descriptions of the Mesozoic environment were vivid and also mysterious too, though the mystery aspects become explained later. I liked how the locals, despite being in way over their head, definitely are proactive in trying to fight and to save the Earth, even using technology they really don’t understand at all going to places they don’t understand at all.
Downsides, early on in the book the author throws a lot of present-day characters at the reader and I had a hard time keeping some straight or even understanding why they were in the story in the first place. Also reminded me of watching Alien, that on the initial viewing, it isn’t clear that Ripley will emerge as the main character. Main characters, two, a man and a woman, emerge in the story, but looking back I couldn’t have picked them out at the beginning. It kind of surprised me how at times the Vrage and the future people could be a bit incompetent and sloppy, though I supposed that humanized them (the present-day characters also made mistakes too). I do think some of the few scenes with the Three Travelers talking to themselves were questionable, as early on one scene of what they say to each other doesn’t seem to fit what we learn later in the book (I went back and reread that scene); not a deal breaker, but I think if one is going to have twists and surprises, maybe maintain the mystery and not include scenes that at least appear contradictory.
I think my biggest complaint was so many of the human characters were kind of thinly fleshed out and a bit interchangeable, at least at first, reminding me of a Tom Clancy novel, that the main characters are distinctive but so many others just feel cut from the same cloth and hard to keep track of; I wonder if this is a common issue with military fiction.
It was a fun and fast read though. The fight scenes are exciting and the locals visit some interesting places. Twists and turn go right up to the final pages too.
Only, the Three Travelers aren’t being truthful, at all, about a lot of things, some of their lies and omissions quickly revealed when they take a bunch of the locals to visit the dinosaur-filled Mesozoic…and are attacked by chlorine breathing aliens known as the Vrage, who attack the locals and the Three Travelers with energy weapons and tanks. The rest of the book is basically fighting the Vrage throughout space and time, the locals coming to terms not only with the Vrage, not only the lies told by the Three Travelers, but to the grave danger posed to present day earth by both the Vrage and the Travelers.
I think the Vrage were very interesting aliens, if you like science fiction combat there is an awful lot of it, I think well done and something I understand David Drake excels at. There are some nice twists and turns in the story, and I enjoyed how even with far future weaponry the dinosaurs were no joke as far as being threats. I think descriptions of the Mesozoic environment were vivid and also mysterious too, though the mystery aspects become explained later. I liked how the locals, despite being in way over their head, definitely are proactive in trying to fight and to save the Earth, even using technology they really don’t understand at all going to places they don’t understand at all.
Downsides, early on in the book the author throws a lot of present-day characters at the reader and I had a hard time keeping some straight or even understanding why they were in the story in the first place. Also reminded me of watching Alien, that on the initial viewing, it isn’t clear that Ripley will emerge as the main character. Main characters, two, a man and a woman, emerge in the story, but looking back I couldn’t have picked them out at the beginning. It kind of surprised me how at times the Vrage and the future people could be a bit incompetent and sloppy, though I supposed that humanized them (the present-day characters also made mistakes too). I do think some of the few scenes with the Three Travelers talking to themselves were questionable, as early on one scene of what they say to each other doesn’t seem to fit what we learn later in the book (I went back and reread that scene); not a deal breaker, but I think if one is going to have twists and surprises, maybe maintain the mystery and not include scenes that at least appear contradictory.
I think my biggest complaint was so many of the human characters were kind of thinly fleshed out and a bit interchangeable, at least at first, reminding me of a Tom Clancy novel, that the main characters are distinctive but so many others just feel cut from the same cloth and hard to keep track of; I wonder if this is a common issue with military fiction.
It was a fun and fast read though. The fight scenes are exciting and the locals visit some interesting places. Twists and turn go right up to the final pages too.
May 16, 2017
Time travel. Future visitor here on a "peaceful" mission. What could go wrong?
November 3, 2007
Well this book was definately something a little different for David Drake. Having read many of his other books, this one, while still sci-fi, definately has a different kind of element to it. My impression was that the book should have been about 1/3rd the size, almost a longer short story and that he added a bunch of stuff to it so that it would be long enough to publish as a stand-alone book. This is evident in the idea of there being way too many characters interacting in a small story, much too many different points of view, and not enough things really going on to necessitate the number of people. Dispite all of that, there are definatel some very fun elements in the story, so I can't give it too negative of a review.
Read with a grain of salt as it takes a while to really get into this one.
Read with a grain of salt as it takes a while to really get into this one.
November 26, 2015
Review to come! :D
November 25, 2018
Interesting story. Time travel, deception, aliens, inter-dimensional travel, oh my.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews