In David Kowalski’s debut novel, The Company of the Dead, you have the Titanic, time travel as well as future Kennedy and Lightholler* families. The book juggles between the original Titanic story and a future caused by a change to the Titanic’s fate. The future looks a lot like Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle with America split between the Germans and the Japanese.
For those of you not familiar with Titanic history, Charles Lightholler was the second officer and the highest ranked officer to survive and tell his story (including how due to his late demotion from first officer to second officer, the original second officer was no longer on the ship and had the only keys to the binocular case on the Titanic).
While the book spends a little too much time in the future (and gets bogged down in places), it’s still a fun read and as fast-paced as a 750+ page novel can be. So, let’s see what happens when you let the Titanic’s watch have high-tech binoculars before the crash.
Late in the night on April 14, 1912, a man named Jonathan Wells handed a lookout on the Titanic a pair of futuristic binoculars. The binoculars could be futuristic, even in 1912, because Wells is a time traveler. He believes that if he saves the Titanic from crashing, the world will be a better place. Wells heads back to his room and soon feels the ship changing course. His work is done. He had tried to avoid changing any future history by only keeping the company of the dead (i.e. people who did not survive the sinking). Until a little while later, he feels a large bump. The ship, successfully avoided the first iceberg and ended up crashing into a second one. Only, since the iceberg hit in a different place at a different time, the list of survivors has changed. And the world is thrown into a new future.
One hundred years later, Joseph Kennedy (son of Joeseph Kennedy Jr) is about to become a fugitive on the run. The Confederate States and the Northern states are both going to be hunting him down, as well as the German and the Japanese. Recently he had been a candidate for the Confederate States President and working on a secret plan (named Camelot) to reunite the two sides into a United States again (including kicking out both the Germans and the Japanese). But he’s gone off radar, hidden several bases around the country and recruited John Lightholler, descendant of Charles Lightholler, who has just successfully piloted the new Titanic to port in an audacious plan to put history back. Kennedy’s boss at the CBI (Confederate Bureau of Investigation) doesn’t know about Kennedy’s plan, but suspects something. And he is working to stop Kennedy, even if it means framing people to do the deed.
Kennedy’s plan involves a carapace (a time travel device) and the diary of Jonathan Wells. Only they might not understand exactly what Wells has planned. And there are suggestions that this might not be the first time this plan has been attempted. Kennedy’s team has to race across a divided, war-torn America to get to the carapace in time to go back in time to save the world.
The biggest problem I had with the book is the middle. The beginning and the end were well done, but the middle dragged for several hundred pages. There is way too much time spent with Kennedy’s team just trying to get to the carapace. And it’s not particularly interesting. You know some members of the group are going to make it to the past. And all the action in the future, pushes off the most interesting part of the story. And then once the team gets to the past, they skip over large chunks of time spent in the past tracking down Wells. I would rather have read the chase in the past than the chase in the future.
But I don’t want to make it seem like I didn’t like the book. Once you get past the dragging sections of the book, the pace picks up and we start getting more hints about the time loop (with possibly multiple attempts to change the past) and start the actual adventure. Can Kennedy’s team stop Wells in time without accidentally changing the future again. The characters are decent and the plot is interesting. A few more editing passes at the middle section (probably losing a couple hundred pages) and this would have been an excellent book. As it is, it’s still a decent read. Mildly recommended.