Conquistador

January 20, 2003
One adjustment to his radio sends John Rolfe VI, a descendant of the Virginia colonist, from 1946 into a California New World never touched by white men in Stirling's (The Peshawar Lancers) mesmerizing new novel. Having discovered the Oakland Gate that allows one to switch secretly between worlds, Rolfe and a passel of army buddies found New Virginia, a Southern Agrarian "pirate kingdom," and proceed to build wealth and power on both sides. Stirling cleverly switches between vignettes of New Virginian history since 1946 and the "present" of 2009, when a neo-Mafioso is plotting to take over Rolfe's "theme park of perverted romanticism run amok." In this luscious alternative universe, sidekicks quote the Lone Ranger and Right inevitably triumphs with panache. What more could adventure-loving readers ask for?

January 1, 2003
Stirling's endlessly and sometimes perversely fertile imagination now realizes a world in which Alexander the Great lived to old age. Moreover, the East doesn't discover the West until 1946, when John Rolfe finds a gate from his time line to another and sets about discreetly, profitably colonizing the alternate Earth he discovers on the gate's other side. In 2009, Rolfe's granddaughter, investigating a threat to her family's benign feudal despotism, encounters a California fish and game officer tracking down the source of certain mysterious birds and beasts. He becomes her lover, ally, confidant, and spouse, and with odd, assorted allies from both time lines, they defeat a plot to overthrow the Rolfes and viciously conquer the new New World. This is even more of a romp than Stirling's "Peshawar Lancers "(2002), but while its action scenes are state-of-the-art and its femmes wonderfully "formidables," it is the sort of romp that has four appendixes of historical backgrounding, not to mention a blatant opening for a sequel. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)