THE WAR OF THE GIVENS

The past, present, and future are at stake in multiple universes as the Silvers trilogy (The Flight of the Silvers, 2014; The Song of the Orphans, 2017) comes to an explosive conclusion.

Two years ago, a small group of people were rescued from the destruction of an Earth very similar to ours and transported to a parallel Earth whose technology utilizes the manipulation of time energy, or tempis. These refugees learned that they had chronokinetic abilities—they could mentally manipulate tempis without the use of machines—and that their misfortunes had been orchestrated by the Pelletiers, a trio of technically, psychically, but decidedly not morally advanced people from a possible future. In the Pelletiers’ time, society suffers from a devastating disease, and the trio believes that the cure will come from children produced by cross-mating the chronokinetics from the present and future Earths, with or without their consent. As the Pelletiers violently up the pressure on the small, secretive community of chronokinetics, our heroes desperately scramble for a way to save their new home from the same type of catastrophe that obliterated their original Earth. Ioni Deschane, a mysterious woman from a different potential future, offers her help, but can she really be trusted? The considerable time gaps between this trilogy’s installments, the intricacy of the plot, and the monumental page count require the reader to retain a considerable amount of detail; aware of these issues, Price provides extensive summaries of the previous books on his website. Given the otherwise careful and involved construction of the story, it is a glaring weakness that we never really understand why the Pelletiers—two of whom are purportedly gifted scientists—become so fixated on these cross-world babies as a cure for their ills and so stubbornly hold to this belief in the absence of any evidence. But to its considerable credit, the story has plenty to offer in its exciting, exceptionally complicated plot and well-crafted characters. It continues to thoughtfully explore issues of xenophobia and quasi-colonialism; the people of this new Earth are even more openly racist and prejudiced against perceived outsiders, and the future people believe they are justified in treating those from alternative pasts like lab rats and breeding animals. The survivors of these travails decidedly earn their happy ending.

A slightly flawed, but ultimately emotionally satisfying, end to a long story.