Up the Line

Rating:
Summary: For any fan of time travel stories!
Review: 'Up the Line' is a VERY good time travel story. It tells the story (in first person) of Jud, a wayward soul who decides to take employment as a Time Courier. Time Couriers are basically time-traveling tour guides, and are responsible for ferrying and watching over groups of tourists to famous historical events. Jud's particular fascination is ancient Byzantium, so he takes on the tour groups going back to see Emperor Justinian, the Haghia Sophia, and other sights. This to me is one area where this book shone. Silverberg made ancient Byzantium come alive for me, and sparked a whole line of discovery and amazement after I had finished the book. I have re-read this great story seven or eight times and never grow tired of it. If you like time travel stories, with a dash of humor and a teaspoon of history, GET THIS BOOK!

Rating:
Summary: For any fan of time travel stories!
Review: 'Up the Line' is a VERY good time travel story. It tells the story (in first person) of Jud, a wayward soul who decides to take employment as a Time Courier. Time Couriers are basically time-traveling tour guides, and are responsible for ferrying and watching over groups of tourists to famous historical events. Jud's particular fascination is ancient Byzantium, so he takes on the tour groups going back to see Emperor Justinian, the Haghia Sophia, and other sights. This to me is one area where this book shone. Silverberg made ancient Byzantium come alive for me, and sparked a whole line of discovery and amazement after I had finished the book. I have re-read this great story seven or eight times and never grow tired of it. If you like time travel stories, with a dash of humor and a teaspoon of history, GET THIS BOOK!

Rating:
Summary: A bawdy Silverberg
Review: As best as I can remember, this is the first novel I read by
Robert Silverberg. Since I was maybe 12 or 13, I was of course
very intrigued by all the, ahem, fornicating bits. Of which
there is a lot in this book. I hadn't run across such a
combination before: sex and time travel. It certainly wasn't
like _The Time Machine._ The main character (I certainly can't call him a hero) decides to join an organization that shuttles
tourists back in time so they can visit famous historical
events. He then screws up. Repeatedly, actually. This causes
all kinds of paradoxes and problems. The ending is memorable. The only thing I will say about it is that is there no period
on the last sentence of the book. Read the book and the reason for it will make perfect sense.

Rating:
Summary: I'd give 4.5 stars if I could...
Review: It's that good, but that imperfect. It doesn't equal _Dying Inside_ (yes, I realize this comes up in every Silverberg review I write), but it is a close second. The subject matter, in terms of the protagonist's existential situation is similar.

Byzantium is sheer beauty as represented by Silverberg, the student of history. Some of the longer passages of history in the tour sometimes seem tedious, but I wouldn't want them removed from the text.

All the characters are well rendered, but they all seem to be suffering from a slight case of testosterone poisoning. Not too far outside the range of typical behavior for men, but I think maybe we've gotten a little milder in recent generations.

This has a much tighter plot than most of my other favorite Silverberg works, and it's well done. I'm of mixed opinion on how a couple of the paradoxes were resolved. I don't think the resolutions were weak, per se, but I think that I would have interpreted some of the logic differently. The ending, by the way, is great. It has a certain amount of negativity to it that is common to Silverberg's work, but the undoing is extremely clever, and the last line makes the whole book that much more worth reading. Highly recommended and, as so often with Silverberg's longer works, saddended that it didn't win the Hugo or Nebula.

Rating:
Summary: I'd give 4.5 stars if I could...
Review: It's that good, but that imperfect. It doesn't equal _Dying Inside_ (yes, I realize this comes up in every Silverberg review I write), but it is a close second. The subject matter, in terms of the protagonist's existential situation is similar.

Byzantium is sheer beauty as represented by Silverberg, the student of history. Some of the longer passages of history in the tour sometimes seem tedious, but I wouldn't want them removed from the text.

All the characters are well rendered, but they all seem to be suffering from a slight case of testosterone poisoning. Not too far outside the range of typical behavior for men, but I think maybe we've gotten a little milder in recent generations.

This has a much tighter plot than most of my other favorite Silverberg works, and it's well done. I'm of mixed opinion on how a couple of the paradoxes were resolved. I don't think the resolutions were weak, per se, but I think that I would have interpreted some of the logic differently. The ending, by the way, is great. It has a certain amount of negativity to it that is common to Silverberg's work, but the undoing is extremely clever, and the last line makes the whole book that much more worth reading. Highly recommended and, as so often with Silverberg's longer works, saddended that it didn't win the Hugo or Nebula.

Rating:
Summary: A Minority Viewpoint
Review: This book deals with all the permutations, combinations, paradoxes and complications inherent in humans traveling back and forth in time. For me, it's a bit too much and I got satiated with page after page of what-ifs. Also, I was not fond of the book's major locales way back centuries ago, nor was I particularly fond of the main character, whose main concern in his time travels seemed to be centered on his crotch. Maybe it's me, but I connot recommend this book except maybe to a die-hard fan of time travel stories.

Rating:
Summary: You did WHAT to your grandmother?!
Review: This is another book I haven't read in at least twenty years -- but I remembered enjoying it. It's 2059 and Jud Elliott, graduate in Byzantine history and dissatisfied law clerk, joins the Time Service. The Service has two divisions: the Time Couriers, who escort groups of paying tourists into the past, thereby generating the financial support for the research the Service carries out, and the Time Patrol, which enforces the integrity of the time stream by retroactively preventing "timecrime." (All of this under-structure is predictable to any experienced fan of time travel stories.) Jud does pretty well on the Byzantine run, showing his tourists all the vivid highlights of Constantinople's history, until he begins researching his own ancestry and falls for the lucious Pulcheria Ducas, his great-great-multi-great-grandmother in the late 12th century. Then he panics and duplicates himself, and the paradoxes begin to pile up. Silverberg, a very knowledgeable student of history, fills the narrative with considerable by-the-way Byzantine history and takes the opportunity to poke fun at the mores of the mid-21st century . . . which are clearly modeled on those of the 1960s. The characters of Black Sam and sly old Metaxas are pretty well done, too. This certainly isn't Silver-Bob's best, but it's a lot of fun.

Rating:
Summary: A nice (erotic) preview of time travel paradoxes
Review: Up the line deals with its protagonist Jud who lives in a future society where time travel (only into the past ) is permitted via a newly discovered Bencheley effect :)

He joins up in the "time courier" service who are essentially time tour guides and starts taking groups of tourists for visits to Medieval Byzantium.

In the process we discover numerous paradoxes of time travel including meting several instances of yourself at the visited spot every time you go back to it.

Eventually he falls for his distant ancestor Pulcheria and celebrates an erotic encounter only to lose it all to some tourist in his group that causes a massive time foul up.

Overall an excellent read with several sexual encounters to add spice. Intelligent accounts of some time travel paradoxes are visited although the resolution of these paradoxes is fairly weak.

Overall an excellent read for a rainy day or a long flight.