Science Fiction Book Review: The Gate of Time by Philip Jose Farmer

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The late Philip Jose Farmer was a very talented science fiction writer, who had a long and illustrious career. I'm not familiar with his whole body of work, but I read his “Riverworld” series years ago, as well as some of his Doc Savage and Tarzan pastiches. He had a really good imagination and knew how to tell an exciting story. A couple of months ago, browsing through my favourite second-hand bookshop, I found a battered old copy of his 1966 novel “The Gate of Time”. I've just finished reading it. The story is set in the 1940's and starts with an American bomber taking part in an air raid on a heavily-defended oil refinery in Rumania. The bomber is badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire and the pilot – an American Indian called Roger Two Hawks – tries to get the plane to an altitude where the crew can bail out. And then three things happen in rapid succession. The crew experience a strange feeling of dislocation, the flak suddenly clears, and an attacking German fighter plane collides with the American bomber, causing both planes to crash. Two members of the American crew manage to parachute to safety – Roger Two Hawks and a gunner called O'Brien. They find their new surroundings confusing – instead of the heavily-industrialised area they were bombing, then now find themselves in farm country. They're sheltered by a peasant who speaks no language that they recognise, and who hides them from a group of soldiers who act like members of an occupying army, but who don't resemble the German Army that they're familiar with. The soldiers carry old-fashioned 19th Century type rifles, and use a mixture of antiquated internal combustion powered vehicles and ox-towed carts. There are no horses to be seen. The two American airmen are turned over to the care of a group of partisans who are escorting a blonde-haired woman called Ilmika north, away from these mysterious occupiers. Ilmika is clearly a different nationality from the guerrillas, and speaks another unknown language. Although he doesn't understand the guerrillas' language, some of the words sound vaguely familiar to Two Hawks, and he realises that they're speaking a language that's distantly related to his own Iriquios language. But how can that be? Two Hawks is highly educated and a reader of science fiction, so he soon realises that he and O'Brien have somehow slipped into a parallel universe. As the Americans travel with this party, and start to learn the language that Ilmika speaks, Two Hawks starts to learn a bit about this parallel world, which he starts to think of as “Earth 2”. And then he finds a globe map of the Earth, which shows how different this world really is. On Earth 2, the continents of North and South America don't exist – or more correctly they're underwater. That whole hemisphere is mostly ocean, with with chains of islands corresponding to the tops of mountain ranges like the Rockies and the Andes, which are submerged on Earth 2. This means that the ancestors of the modern-day American Indians, who migrated from Siberia to Alaska in our world, had nowhere in that direction to migrate to on Earth 2. So they moved westwards across Asia and Europe instead, leading to all kinds of knock on effects as different populations of people interacted differently, subjugating or combining with other tribes, and leading to a the rise of a whole different set of nations and cultures from the ones we're familiar with in our world. This is a novel idea to me – usually when I read a parallel world story, the differences stem from different decisions made in history, not a radically different geography. Earth 2 is maybe fifty years or so behind our world technologically. Steam engines and basic internal combustion powered vehicles exist. Rifles are either single shot or made on the revolver principle, no bolt actions or automatics in evidence. Airships are used in bombing raids but heavier than air flight hasn't been invented yet. Germ theory hasn't been developed yet. Socially and politically, Earth 2 is even more backward. The European nations are mostly absolute monarchies with very strictly enforced class systems, and slavery is still regarded as normal. This world is going through its own version of World War 2. A central European country called Perkunisha (which roughly corresponds to Germany) is trying to conquer the rest of Europe. They're bigger than their neighbours and a bit more technologically advanced, so they're winning. Opposing them are the nations of Estokwa and Blodland (Earth 2's version of England). Ilmika is the daughter of a Blodlander diplomat who was posted to a country that's just been overrun by the Perkunishans, which is how she ends up being escorted to Estokwa by the guerrillas. So Two Hawks finds himself in the middle of a war fought by nations that he has no emotional connection to or political sympathy with. His primary motivation for most of the story is sheer survival, which is challenging. His adventures include being tortured by the Estokwan secret police when he and O'Brien are suspected of being spies, followed by incarceration in a mental hospital when it's decided that they must be lunatics instead. But both the Perkunisha and Blodland governments have reason to believe that their story of coming from another world is true, and both make attempts to extract the Americans from the hands of the Estokwans so that their relatively advanced technical knowledge can be made use of. Along the way, Two Hawks meets the pilot of the German plane which collided with them when they crossed the “gate” into Earth 2, Horst Raske, a likeable villain who is in the process of developing and building fighter planes for the Perkunishans, and who is skilled at trading his knowledge for political influence. For a while, Raske is able to use a mixture of coercion and bribery to get Two Hawks to help him with this, but Two Hawks is never comfortable working for the Perkunishans – they remind him too much of the Germans he was fighting in his own world. So he eventually finds a way to defect to Blodland, where he creates and leads an air force for them, as the military situation continues to deteriorate. There's more to the story than the brief outline I've given here, of course, including a twist at the end of the penultimate chapter, which I didn't see coming at all. Suffice it to say that the story maintained my interest all the way through, as you'd expect from an author of the calibre of Philip Jose Farmer. Two small criticisms. First, although I found the character of Two Hawks likeable, he's maybe a bit too competent. He's got a university level education in history, so he's able to piece together how the various nations of Earth 2 came to be, and he's also got enough of a technical education to be useful in designing aircraft and weapons. Basically, whatever situation Two Hawks finds himself in, he has the skills to cope. I also found the unfamiliar place names confusing at times – a map would have been useful. But overall, I found this book to be a very entertaining read. I understand it was revised and expanded in the 70s, and a sequel was written by Heidi Ruby Miller in in 2017, so I'll have to read that sometime. Certainly the end of the book left it open for Two Hawks to have further adventures.