A Matter of Time

By Glen Cook

May 1975. St. Louis. In a snow-swept street, a cop finds the body of a man who died fifty years ago. It's still warm. July 1866, Lidice, Bohemia: A teenage girl calmly watches her parents die as another being takes control of her body. August 2058, Prague: Three political rebels flee in to the past, taking with them a terrible secret. As past, present, and future collide, one man holds the key to the puzzle. And if he doesn't fit it together, the world he knows will fall to pieces. It's just A Matter of Time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Night Shade Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781597803731

Glen Cook

Born in 1944, Glen Cook grew up in northern California, served in the U.S. Navy, attended the University of Missouri, and was one of the earliest graduates of the well-known "Clarion" workshop SF writers. Since 1971 he has published a large number of Science Fiction and fantasy novels, including the "Dread Empire" series, the occult-detective "Garrett" novels, and the very popular "Black Company" sequence that began with the publication of The Black Company in 1984. Among his science fiction novels is A Passage at Arms. After working many years for General Motors, Cook now writes full-time. He lives near St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife Carol.

Reviews for A Matter of Time

[klh_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As a detective story with some way-out elements, this book is great. The central mystery is clever and there are plenty of background questions that are slowly answered. For a long time it's hard to have a clear idea just what is going on at all. Once I was about 1/3 into it I ended up reading the next 1/3 late one night and into the wee hours. There's action on three main time-lines with a couple of others briefly thrown in. 1975 or so is the "present" and there's really only one scene in the future (2058). I remember the 1970's pretty well, so seeing the detectives struggle to gather information and sort it out using what now seems archaic means is entertaining and thought provoking. The casual racism and sexism displayed by some characters is spot-on; not a theme, just part of the background. One intimate pairing is mixed-race, if I read it right ,(not that there are sex scenes of any kind) with no fanfare whatsoever. The family and work struggles presented are realistic and could be out of a novel of mainstream fiction. I enjoyed the book, but it wasn't what I'd been in the market for, which was hard SF.Barely any 'science' in here, mostly the word 'tachyons' is sprinkled around in the few parts talking about time travel itself, and not in an explanatory way. Some worries about changing history and then statements that history resists change, smooths out the wrinkles. Think H.G. Wells time travel, rather than, say, Stephen Baxter. Why there's an astronaut in a spacesuit on the cover is baffling - there's not a thing about space or space travel to be found anywhere in the book. I almost tossed the book away when one thread veered into a character consorting with Hitler (I'm sick to death of "SciFi" novels that resort to relying on Nazis as easy villains. Lazy! Cheap appeal to the fetid masses.) but I kept going; it didn't get worse and made sense over all.