 So I just finished reading the sequel to Island in the Sea of Time, against the tide of years, and in a lot of ways it's a perfect sequel. Like, it takes the story characters and the world from the first one, and it builds on them to make something that's bigger and better than its predecessor. But in a couple of other ways it's not very well thought out, it's very clumsily put together, and it even has some problematic aspects to it. So a quick recap. Island in the Sea of Time is about the island of Nantucket in 1998, just getting transported back to the year 1250 BCE, and the people there just kind of have to survive and make their own way in this world. But then one of them decides to take all of their knowledge and technology and fuck off over to another place and try and take over and build his own empire. And at the end of that book they defeat him and they crush his army and all that, but he survives and escapes somewhere else. So when this one starts off he's building up his army again, this time in Greece, whereas last time it was in England. So he's building up his empire, he has allies, and he knows that Nantucket is the only place that really poses a threat to him, so he's preparing to destroy them, and meanwhile they are planning to fight him and destroy him. And well, that is the main thrust of the plot to this book as well. And well, there's more to it than that, but that is the gist of it, yeah. So I want to start off with all the things I liked about this book. I liked that there was more of a focus on trading and peaceful relations and politics in this one, because in the first one we had some of that, but then there was also a lot of fighting with the natives and fighting with the people that were already there. Well yeah, I guess natives is a good word for it, the people back in 1250 BC. And well, in this one there's much more of a focus on trading with them, like okay, we need this, they need that, let's give them that, and everyone is the better for it. And then there's stuff like okay, we're gonna colonize these small islands and strategic areas for trading outposts and naval bases and that sort of thing. And then there's also the politics on the island itself where they have to try and convince people that hey, this is the best way to do things, because they set up a very democratic system. And then it's also contrasted with Walker setting up his very authoritarian empire, complete with secret police and everything. And so it does raise the question of like, okay, what would I do in this situation? How would I deal with it? What sort of system would I want to set up? What sort of role would I want to play in it? And so it's endlessly fascinating to me. I absolutely loved that. All of the battles are still cool and they're well written and I enjoyed them. There's just less of them in this one. And they don't really come around until around one-third to halfway through the story. And I'll get a little bit more into them in a few minutes, but just yeah, they're fun, they're cool. I still enjoy them. I really like seeing the interactions and the culture shock basically between the nantucketers and everybody else. Like the natives sometimes reacting to them and to their technology is great because they think, oh, they're gods or they're sorcerers or something. And just seeing them try to comprehend this and seeing just the difference between their mindset and modern American mindset is really, really cool. That's fascinating as well, just as much as the trade and the politics and everything, just seeing how different people have become over the past several millennia. And most of the main characters are also just, they're likable enough. You know, we have Mary and Alston still. She's great. Her wife, Swindapa, she's also great. And then there's more minor characters. They're all generally decent people and I enjoyed seeing them. I didn't want them to die. So yeah, that's another positive in this book's favor. It's not like spectacular or anything, but I'll give it a few points. And I guess the overall conflict of this particular book was, I guess it was fine because the thing is with Walker in Greece and he has an ally in southern Spain that is controlling the Gibraltar Straits, they're kind of cut out of the Mediterranean. And so they want to strike at Walker, but they don't really have the opportunity to. So what they do is they're going the long way around and they go to Mesopotamia and they try and ally themselves with Babylon and the Hittites and they try and, you know, build up their armies as well so that they can be useful allies to them. And I guess it's fine, but the problem being that this is a proxy war to the greater conflict. Like it's just a stepping stone to Walker himself. And so you kind of lose sight of that a little bit while reading. And the book kind of does as well, really, which that's more of a problem with how it's framed, as opposed to a problem with the actual events themselves. If they had just brought up like a little more often that, okay, we're doing this for this reason, like all this suffering and everything in the Iraq desert, like we're doing this because we need to defeat Walker, we need to get upriver. Like if that had been a little more prominent, then I guess it would have been better. But as it is, it's still fine. Now I want to talk about all the stuff that I didn't like. The most prominent is probably the villains because Walker is the main one, but then he has some of his allies and some other more minor villains. And none of them are very interesting because the way I see it, you can do villains one of two ways to make them good. You can make them complex or you can make them threatening. And, you know, making them complex, that one's pretty self-explanatory. You make them have an interesting moral code or they have interesting reasons for what they're doing. And this book doesn't do that because Walker, as well as all of his friends, are kind of just power hungry assholes. You know, they want power because, well, they want power and they're willing to go to extreme lengths to do it. So they don't have much to them. Even though the book, when it focuses on Walker, when it has scenes with him, it seems like it's trying to make him seem a little more complex. It really just, it doesn't work. And the other way to do it is just to make them threatening, which I hope that one's also self-explanatory. But, you know, even if a villain is not particularly interesting or cerebral or anything like that, if they're a threat, if they're intimidating, then if they have a presence whenever they're on screen, then it can still work out pretty well. Shut up, phone. It can still work out pretty well. Like, the Terminator from the first Terminator movie is a good example of this. You know, he's not a complex character, but every time he's on screen, you feel this sense of dread. And Walker doesn't work that way because, well, we saw him get beat at the end of the first book. You know, for the second half of that book, when he becomes the villain, you feel a threat from him because, okay, you see him building his power. You see him getting ready to attack. You see him getting ready to strike. But then he's beaten at the end. Like, not only is his army smashed, his army is destroyed, but he himself gets beaten in one-on-one combat. He gets wounded. I was about to say crippled, but I guess losing an eye isn't really crippled. But anyways, he gets wounded and he's forced to flee. So after that, it's kind of hard to see him as any sort of threatening or imposing figure. Even though on, you know, an intellectual level, I understand that, yeah, he is very much a threat to Nantucket, and I understand why they have to do this. And I still want him to lose. I want to see him lose because he's a terrible person and he's done terrible things. But I mean, he's just not that good of a villain. At least not yet. Maybe the third one, he'll be better. But right now, just no. And the other big thing that I really didn't like about this book is that it's definitely the middle part of a trilogy. And what I mean by that is that it feels more like a bridge between the beginning of the story and the end of the story, as opposed to being a story unto itself. Like, rather than having its own conflict, its own resolution, all that, it just feels like, okay, we're getting ready to get to the climax. We're getting ready to get to the better stuff. So we just have to do this, like it's necessary for us to do, but we just want to get it out of the way really quick. Like, the main conflict of this book is, again, with them in Mesopotamia trying to help out the Babylonians and the Hittites. And at the end, it's, well, that conflict is still ongoing. You know, the Hittites are at war. They're in the process of falling to Walker and his allies and the Nantucketers are there trying to help prop them up and trying to help prepare them for a greater war. But they aren't really preparing to strike on Greece itself, or rather, they are preparing, but it doesn't feel like much of a cliffhanger. It feels more like, okay, they're about to attack and then the book just sort of ends. And well, that's disappointing. And beyond that, this one, again, like is kind of typical with the second book in a trilogy. It is the most padded or rather it is more padded than the first one because I haven't read the third one yet. Maybe that one will be even more padded. But I don't know, this one has several plot points and several plot threads that just sort of aren't needed. Like for example, partway through the book, Alston is on a ship that gets caught in a storm and gets wrecked on the coast of Africa way out in the middle of nowhere. And for a while you're thinking, oh, this isn't going to be good. How's she going to get out of this? This is going to be really bad. But it doesn't take up that much time. And it doesn't even seem like that big of a deal, really. They're just on, they're in Africa for a while. They fix their ship. They have a run-in with some unfriendly people and then they are on their way. And that's kind of the end of it. And another one being that there is a group of people that are going on an expedition into the interior of North America. Like they're heading from New England all the way over to Montana and then they're going to head back. And that one also doesn't really go anywhere. Like by the end of the book, they haven't even come back yet. So I'm not, I'm not sure what the point was if there was one. And also it's brought up so infrequently that I kind of forgot what was going on every time it got brought up. Like every time it switched to that character, I had to stop for a moment and think, wait, who is this guy? What's going on? Oh, right, right, right. That's what's happening. It's just little things like that, really. But after a while they do stack up and well, I guess individually some of them are okay, but it does bother me when you consider that this is part of a series and well, it's just distracting. It's distracting and it's padding. And this last major bit that I have to talk about actually ties into something that I felt about the first book, but I didn't really bring it up because it seemed really minor and it was right at the end. And so okay, I'm not going to dance around it anymore. Basically, these books have some white man's burden vibes to them. So if you're not familiar, white man's burden was this idea during the age of European colonialism where everyone in the rest of the world were just uncivilized, they were savages, and so by colonizing them, the Europeans were actually helping them because they were bringing them civilization, they were bringing them technology, they were bringing them Christianity, so they wouldn't all go to hell, that sort of thing. And for the most part, these books stay away from that. Like, when they interact with natives, it's either through just straight up armed conflict, or it's through, you know, trade where they're both better off for it. And that's fine, that's fine. And it's only really near the end of the first book that it starts to take on that vibes. And it's really only in the area of religion because when you see all these different old Bronze Age cultures, the Nantucketers, for the most part, see them as different. You know, they don't see them as being stupid. They see them as ignorant, yes, but once they teach them, they realize, okay, they aren't stupid, they're just as smart as us. And just because they have a different lifestyle, they don't see them necessarily as being barbaric, for the most part. But on the subject of religion, the Nantucketers really seem to have this excitement to spread Christianity and to get rid of all these old pagan religions. And again, it only comes up once in a while. Like in the first book, there's a moment where Jared Cofflin is like thinking very triumphantly to himself that, yes, we're gonna wipe out the Sun people's pagan religion soon, because then they'll start treating women better once they're Christians, which is kind of stupid when you consider that Christians have not always treated women well either. But that's kind of a, you know, that's another subject. And at the end of the last book, there's also a brief moment where Marion thinks to herself that Muslims are probably never going to exist because they've changed the timeline so much, and she's like really fucking happy about it. And that was off-putting. And it's really only that one moment that's like that. It's not like Marion had any sort of bigotry towards them, at least none that was really mentioned before that, or after as far as I can remember. And so it's just that one moment which feels really out of place. And then in this book, it's mentioned that they've gone on punitive expeditions to wipe out things like slavery and human sacrifice. And I'm not even saying that that's necessarily bad, because, you know, slavery's nasty. And human sacrifice is pretty bad too. But the main reason that I didn't feel too bad about the Omex having their human sacrifice taken away is that the first book really went out of its way to make them seem as horrific as possible. So I just... Honestly, I'm just confused by this whole thing. Like, I don't think the author is a racist or anything. I'm not saying that at all. Especially when you consider the way he writes characters like Marion Alston, you know, I don't think he's any sort of bigot. I just... I'm just very confused by all this. It has that white man's burden undertone to it, but it's very, very minor and it only shows up at a couple of points. So I just... I just don't know what to make of it. I just have to bring it up because I would... I would feel bad if I didn't bring it up. So yeah, okay. I'm sure there's angry comments already, so I'll just wrap this up. Against the Tide of Years is about as good as the first book, you know? So if you liked the first one, then you'll probably like this one just as much, if not more. Or maybe a little bit less if you're more of a battle fiend, but I personally am not. And, uh, well, that's... Yeah, that's everything. So, uh, subscribe, comments, like, thanks to my patrons, all of that. And, uh, bye.