Review: Them Bones

Them Bones by Howard Waldrop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tinged with a Cold War-era world-weary cynicism about humanity in the mass that still finds room for an easy friendship between two characters widely separated by culture, this is a structurally ambitious novel from a writer better known for his short fiction. Whether the structure really works, and whether it's more complicated than it needs to be, could be debated. Because part of the experience of reading it is figuring out what the heck is going on, and that's a process that isn't completed until late in the book, I'll put some of the discussion of the structure in spoiler tags.

There are three threads, presented in interweaved chapters. Thread 1, with which we open, is an archaeological dig in Louisiana in 1926, where a 14th-century Native American mound yields anachronistic horse (and eventually human) skeletons, some killed with even more anachronistic cartridge rifles. It's told in close third person, following the viewpoint of one of the archaeologists, as they race to uncover the secrets of the mound before rising floodwaters destroy the site forever.

Thread 2, in many ways the main thread, is the first-person account of a scout, Leake, sent ahead of a larger force through a time portal originating in a nuclear-war-ravaged 2002 (in the future at the time the book was written). They were supposed to end up around World War II and to try to change history so that World War III didn't happen (exactly how is never made clear, and nobody demonstrates any skills that would materially help to do so; the plan is more an excuse to kick off the story than it is a fully developed idea in itself). It quickly becomes clear that where Leake is is not World War II Louisiana, but it takes him some time to figure out exactly when he is.

Thread 3 consists of records of the rest of the force, who didn't end up in the same location as Leake. (Here, I have to note that the ebook version which I read does a very poor job of the formatting of the daily military reports on the status of the personnel, so that they are mangled and hard to interpret. There are also a few editing errors, some of which may have been corrected since I first bought the book, judging from the fact that they were correct in my Kindle highlights when transferred to Goodreads.)

From this setup, things proceed as follows:
(view spoiler)[It eventually becomes clear that Leake is in an alternate timeline, having possibly moved, not back in time, but sideways, to a different version of the world in which a might-as-well-be-Islamic empire has only recently crossed the Atlantic in steamboats, with the help of "Northerners" who pioneered the route centuries before but never really developed it either. (The Northerners wear furs, despite the heat, apparently just to be stereotypical.) The Islamic traders are highly enlightened and don't want to colonise and exploit, or introduce too many new species into the New World; but they do eventually, without meaning to, bring Old World diseases to the New World, setting off a plague - despite it being established that, because their cities are for some reason not large, they haven't had things like the Black Death. This in itself is not especially plausible (the Black Death quite likely came from the large cities of East Asia, which are not mentioned in this account, carried by Silk Road traders, and medieval Florence, say, wasn't that large by modern standards). Also, the New World cities are not large either.

Meanwhile, it also gradually becomes clear that the 1926 archaeologists are finding the remains of the force from which Leake was separated, who apparently didn't go sideways in time but back, just a lot further than they intended to. They also, despite being heavily vaccinated and non-symptomatic, somehow transmit illness to the local Native Americans, who, perhaps implausibly, both figure out that they did so, believe it to be deliberate, and (despite presumably being devastated by disease) easily take their revenge by gradually destroying the force of modern soldiers with modern weapons by shooting arrows from cover. This, one assumes, sets up the American continents to be colonised as per history, because the greatly reduced population couldn't put up much resistance to Europeans - which was in fact the case after first European contact transmitted diseases to which Native American people had no resistance, though it didn't come via time travel. (See Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.)

The fact that illness eventually rages in both timelines led, for me, to some confusion; have they somehow ended up in the same timeline after all? But no; from a single origin, there are two completely different time travel stories (even different types of time travel) which never intersect again, one of which involves two strands of the three-stranded narrative. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, the result comes off as an ambitious novel that should maybe have been two novels, where the justification for the way things happen falls apart if you think too hard about it. The two stories themselves are well told, and Leake, in particular, is an engaging character to spend time with, though both stories have downbeat endings. Despite its faults, it does just barely make it to four stars for me on the quality of the writing alone (setting aside the worldbuilding issues and the questionable structural choice, and despite the tone not being my favourite), but it is definitely well below the threshold for my Best of the Year list. I'm probably being a bit generous with the fourth star, but I did like Leake.

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