The Timeline Wars Series

Blending alternate history, time travel, and detective thriller, the “able and impressive” Nebula and Hugo Award nominee gives us Nazis, Tories, and togas (The Washington Post).   An attack by time-hopping terrorists turns Mark Strang’s life upside down, and the Pittsburgh art historian discovers his calling as a bodyguard for hire. Strap yourself in for a ride through alternate timelines in this action-packed series that combines sci-fi, time travel, alien invasion, and high-tech adventure.   Patton’s Spaceship: When he learns the aliens behind the terrorists who destroyed his old life are trying to take control of timelines and subject them to totalitarian rule, Mark Strang will journey to a not-too-distant past to stop them—and get revenge. But he lands in a timeline where America lost World War II. He can help the resistance with his knowledge of future technology, but is he permanently trapped in a Nazi-controlled past?   Washington’s Dirigible: With the inhuman Closers still threatening timelines, Strang joins forces with their enemies, the ATN. He and time agent Chrysamen ja N’wook travel to an alternate colonial America to locate a missing operative and find that the colonies are on friendly terms with England and George Washington reigns as Duke of Kentucky. But he has one real enemy here—himself.   Caesar’s Bicycle: On assignment in ancient Rome, Mark Strang discovers the Closers have infiltrated the timeline and Julius Caesar is under their influence. Even as the Closers rewrite history to tip the scales in their favor, Strang is reluctant to assassinate an important government figure. But as he delays, his life—and those of his companions—hang in the balance, and they face a gruesome demise.

First in the series blending alternate history, time travel, and detective thriller, from a Nebula and Hugo Award nominee. There are a million different Earths across an infinite number of timelines—and every one of them is in peril. Mark Strang became a bodyguard and private investigator when terrorists killed his family; now he spends his days protecting Pittsburgh’s helpless and abused. But while on a mission to save the life of a ten-year-old girl, Strang is inexplicably cast into an alternate reality, transported to a different time on another Earth, where America was defeated in the Second World War and now suffers under the brutal yoke of Nazi oppression. Joining up with the remnants of the Resistance in the Free Zone—and allied with such notable commanders as George Patton and John F. Kennedy—Strang is suddenly a marked man and the last hope in a desperate fight for freedom, not only on this world but on countless others. For a war unlike any other is raging across time and dimensions, threatening every possible Earth, including Strang’s own. And the enemy will not rest until the entire multiverse is in chains. In his epic and action-packed science fiction saga the Timeline Wars, John Barnes takes alternate-history SF to new heights, ingeniously reinventing and reinvigorating a genre popularized by such acclaimed authors as Harry Turtledove while joining the stellar ranks of Robert Heinlein and Joe Haldeman.

The war for a million Earths spreads to an alternate eighteenth century in the second book of the epic science fiction series the Timeline Wars John Barnes has reinvented alternate-history science fiction in his ingenious saga of the battle to save the multiverse from enslavement by an alien enemy who can transcend time and reality. In the second volume of his remarkable trilogy, the war moves to a new battlefield: a different colonial America still happily tied to the British crown, where miraculous machines prowl the skies. There are a million different Earths across an infinite number of timelines—and every one of them is in peril. Former Pittsburgh private investigator Mark Strang is now a fully trained and blooded Crux Ops special agent, dedicated to the fight against the alien Closers who are invading every Earth in every time. Now the eternal struggle is carrying Strang to a different 1775 Boston, home of astounding technologies, where the colonists remain fiercely loyal to their king across the ocean. Something is rotten in England, though, and Strang must ally himself with the well-respected commander George Washington, the Duke of Kentucky, to derail a terrifying Closer plot and put this world’s history back on its proper course. But the enemy has unleashed a secret weapon that could permanently shift the balance: an unstoppable agent of destruction . . . named Mark Strang.

In an alternate Roman Empire, the ultimate battle is being waged for domination of the multiverse in the epic conclusion of the war for a million Earths There are a million different Earths across an infinite number of timelines—and every one of them is in peril. John Barnes’s ingenious science fiction saga the Timeline Wars reaches a breathtaking climax in Caesar’s Bicycle as former Pittsburgh private investigator–turned–Crux Op agent Mark Strang pursues the alien Closer enemy to a new battleground: an alternate ancient Rome of Caesar and Pompey. Strang’s investigation into the disappearance of a fellow ATN operative has carried him along a new timeline to a Roman Empire at once strikingly similar and remarkably different from the one recalled in history books on his own Earth. What he discovers is a world in the process of radical transformation through the introduction of new technologies, centuries before their time, by both sides in the war for the multiverse—enemy Closers and ATN alike. And this time, Strang’s mission carries a new urgency, for the timelines are becoming dangerously unstable and mysteriously starting to close. To prevent the total enslavement of every one of the million Earths, Strang himself will now have to make history. But by ensuring that an infamous assassination actually does take place, Mark Strang could be condemning himself to the most horrible death the Romans ever devised.