To Sail the Century Sea

Time Stream #2

by G.C. Edmondson

"All hands--abandon present!"

The Navy hadn't believed Leutenant Commander Joseph Rate and the crew of the yawl Alice when they had tried to explain their absence-without-leave as a freak display of time travel--and they hadn't believed Rate's warnings about how dangerous such travel could be. Instead, they had crippled the careers of good men for almost ten years, just long enough to decide that time travel worked, and just long enough to forget Rate's warning.

So now Rate and the crew of the Alice are being sent back in time again, to nursemaid a landlubber scientist and a gun-crazy Company assassin on a mission to abort one of the pivotal encounters of all time and make the world safe for democracy at last.

Or else unfit to live in . . .

Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel

194 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1981

About the author

Garry Edmondson (full name "José Mario Garry Ordoñez Edmondson y Cotton").

He also wrote Westerns under the names Kelly P. Gast, J. B. Masterson, and Jack Logan.

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is, apparently, the sequel to "The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream" - wch I haven't read but I suspect I wd've enjoyed this more if I had. I don't think I've enjoyed any of Edmondson's solo bks as much as the 2 I've read that he coauthored w/ C. M. Kotlan ("The Cunningham Equations" & "The Black Magician") so maybe I shd seek out more by Kotlan to read.

"To Sail the Century Sea" has its time travel centered story as an excuse to make the plot somewhat hodge-podged & I reckon it works but I still didn't find it that compelling. It was kindof like alotof subplots flying around w/o their being a deep enuf central narrative. W/o resorting to spoilers I can at least say that the ending was sufficiently satisfactory & probably wd've been much more so if I'd read the 1st bk.

My perception of Edmondson is gradually deteriorating to the point where he's beginning to seem to be a hack(ish) writer like Barrington J. Bayley. I'll read more.. but I'm not likely to recommend his bks to anyone.

[Timothy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book serves as a sequel to The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, but is, alas, nowhere near as good. Both books move about in history — in the “time stream” — but the first one seems less scattershot. This second novel needed another draft. The action got confusing in Byzantium. The goings-on there — with the Council of Nicea, of all things —were not described well. There is cleverness towards the very end, but it seemed rushed, ill thought-out. Some elements were not properly prepared.

I cannot recommend the book. The first one, however, made a satisfying back-to-the-past pairing with Poul Anderson’s The Dancer from Atlantis, which I read just a few weeks before.

[Nicole Normand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book for my 2022 Challenge; this is my honest review.
-The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream first sailed in 1965. After they returned, they waited 10 years to be believed by their superiors, so ~1975 or later.
-This book starts when they are finally acknowledged, so ~1975 or later. At the end, the sailors are wrong when they arrive back in town in 1976 and say they arrived 10 years before they left. That should have been 1985 or later.
-More confusion in this book than in the other one. More conversations between lines, sort of "are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "yes", but I had no idea what they were thinking, which brought more confusion.
-We are also left with unanswered questions such as what happened to Raquel (again) and her entourage? Did the trigger-happy man finally die or not?
-For people who were supposed to be prepared, they were not prepared at all. They had their first accident in the harbor, of all things, probably a bad omen since their time machine was never guarded and anyone could use it at their whim, which is what occurred in this case.
-Less engaging, no really fun moments except for the Indian guy and his exuberance. I loved Margaret and her faithfulness to her boss. I really liked Theodore too. Joe was always tired, just like in the other story.
-Editing needs another pass. Missing words. Too many words. Missing letters.

[Burcu · Rating 1 out of 5]

would have given 3 stars with a decent review, but epilogue contained a slur so thats not happening.

[De Owner · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me 30 yrs to find this book. The first book was much better. I didn't really like the entire concept of the story line.
I should have read the reviews before wasting my money.

[Mark White · Rating 2 out of 5]

The sequel to The Ship That Sailed The Time Stream, unfortunately isn't nearly as good. We find the characters from the first book 20 years later, disillusioned and stalled in their careers when nobody believes their tales of time travel. However, a secret government agency (it's a dystopian future USA, possibly following the 2023 election...) brings them together to crew a mission to change the past to produce a "better" future. This is when the problems start, for the reader as well as the characters.

The chosen point of interference is the early Christian religious Council of Nicaea in Constantinople. It lacks appeal in that I - like most readers I suspect - don't know what went down there, so any changes and effects are hard to imagine. The problems with the story are further compounded as there's a lot of action (nearly half the book) that is pretty much irrelevant to the main event. There's some play with temporal paradox but TBH it isn't particularly well done.

The resolution, when it comes, is deus ex machina, with no explanation of how it really came about or ongoing consequences. Then the author commits the sin of fixing it in time, and making something of a political statement, with the then current president. All in all a disappointing follow up to a very good original.

[Tomislav · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book brings some closure to some plot threads started in Edmondson's more well-known 1965 novel The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, but without as much humor. It is thus a good follow-up, but barely stands on its own. I didn't realize I would be counting this in the religion category when I started it, but I should mention now that I am married to a Unitarian Universalist minister, and am myself a UU (http://www.uua.org) The Council of Nicea (4th century common era), is the time at which Christianity settled on the doctrine of Trinitarianism, and excluded followers of the Arian heresy among other things - and Arianism is considered by many to be ancestral to contemporary Unitarianism. So I was surprised to find that in this book, the US government is sending the crew of the Alice back in time to change the outcome of the Council. But the book does not deal very realistically with the significance of the event, and the ship and crew accidentally take a long detour to the west coast of Mexico to deal with the Yacqui people, with whom G.C. Edmondson is fascinated here and in other books such as his 1971 novel Chapayeca. Fortunately, To Sail the Century Sea is a quick read.