James Nicoll Reviews

Barbara Paul​’s 1980 Under the Canopy is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Gaia is the Interplanetary Union’s outermost and least significant world. The only IU official on the whole planet is Margo Kemperer, who finds herself in that lonely position due to the death of her boss and a short-lived interstellar civil war that cut off communication for a time. Margo does her best to keep her little patch of Earth civilization functioning.

The insurrection having ended, colonial headquarters dispatches Stephanie Leeds to Gaia, there to assist Margo. What senior bureaucrat doesn’t want an underling or two? Had Margo suspected the problems that Stephanie would cause, she would probably have refused the reinforcement.

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Barbara Paul’s 1979 Pillars of Salt is a time travel novel. 

Transporting physical matter into the past is, of course, impossible. However, projecting consciousness into the bodies of past humans merely requires the correct technology. Mid-21^st-century America (and presumably the rest of the planet) possesses the means and uses it freely. 

Angie Patterson believes she is quite familiar with the mechanics of time travel. A foray into Elizabethan England reveals to her something of which she (and most other travelers) had been utterly unaware.

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