Author: Harry Harrison
Publisher: TOR Science Fiction
Year: 1967
Review:
When a desperate movie director stumbles upon a researcher with a real time machine, he comes up with the perfect plan – film a movie on location – in 1000 AD.
This book does start off slow and then it becomes a bit of a comedy of errors. Trying to shuttle crew back and forth through time, having your leading man get serious injured, and then convincing the local Viking to be the star actor in your epic. The fight scenes are insanely realistic – cause they are. But when you can pay people in bottles of Jack Daniels – why not.
It does get into the time paradox a bit at the end and it makes you smile and cringe. There isn’t a chaos effect in that their world changes, but what the world remembers about the past does.
I had not read this one before and while I did enjoy it, it takes the first fifty pages to get back into that style of writing. What I also find interesting is it is copyrighted by Conde Nast in 1967 but wasn’t published until 1981. This implies it may have started life as a short story for one of their magazines. I’ll have to research that later.
