Curious Notions
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
In a parallel-world 21st-century San Francisco where the Kaiser's Germany won World War One and went on to dominate the world, Paul Gomes and his father Lawrence are secret agents for our timeline, posing as traders from a foreign land. They run a storefront shop called Curious Notions, selling what is in our world routine consumer technology - record players, radios, cassette decks - all of which is better than anything in this world, but only by a bit. Their real job is to obtain raw materials for our timeline. Just as importantly, they must guard the secret of Crosstime Traffic - for of the millions of parallel timelines, this is one of the few advanced enough to use that secret against us.
Now, however, the German occupation police are harassing them. They want to know where the Gomeses are getting their mysterious goods. Under pressure, Paul and Lawrence hint that their supplies come from San Francisco's Chinese...setting in motion a chain of intrigues that will put the entire enterprise of Crosstime Traffic at deadly risk.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Time travel and its fascinating paradoxes get surprisingly slack treatment in the second episode (after Gunpowder Empire) of Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic series. Crosstimer Lawrence Gomes, a 21st-century entrepreneur who travels to alternate time lines to trade for goods and services, and his teenage son, Paul, sidestep to a world where Germany won WWI and still dominates the globe. They set up a shop called Curious Notions in San Francisco to sell electronic equipment, but their state-of-the-art wares quickly arouse the suspicions of both the occupying German constabulary and crime lords of the local Chinese triads. Plucky Paul complicates matters when he befriends Lucy Woo, a working girl whose family is inadvertently swept up in their cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. Turtledove does his usual fine job of developing the alternate history, but he lets other details slip: he never explains why Paul and his father, who hope to conduct business unobtrusively, call attention to themselves by selling blatantly futuristic goods, and he makes the Gomes's German and Chinese pursuers seem so easily outsmarted that the plot never develops tension or suspense. A finale in which Paul is saved from a predicament by miraculous intervention, rather than through his own resourcefulness, may disappoint the target audience of younger readers who might otherwise identify with its teenage hero and his colorful adventures.
