My, but this book is filled with folks who aren’t politically correct.

The premise is simple. Following WWII, a vet named John Rolfe, a Southerner, settles down in a house in Oakland, California. A freak accident with his shortwave radio set opens a gate between his basement and…somewhere else: an alternate California that’s approximately as it was when Columbus first came to the New World. A California that’s unspoiled, unpolluted, by modern standards almost unpeopled. Rolfe knows a good thing when he sees it, but he realizes that he can’t make use of his discovery all by himself. Who else to enlist but his old army buddies and their families? After all, there’s plenty of land–and there’s gold in them thar hills!

Flash forward six decades. A game warden named Tom Christiansen is on a bust of a ring that smuggles endangered species…including a California condor. Except that every California condor in existence has been tagged and tracked from birth; and this condor is unrelated to any of them. Something very odd is going on.

The story jumps back and forth between Tom Christiansen’s detective work and eventual discovery of the gate, and vignettes of the history of Rolfe’s new country, the Commonwealth of New Virginia. Ultimately, Tom gets caught up in a power struggle between the Rolfes and some of the other “Thirty Families” who lead the Commonwealth.

Surprisingly, Stirling doesn’t gore any of my personal team of oxen with this book. On the other hand, he certainly expected to gore somebody’s cattle, for the book’s dedication page includes the following quotation: “There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. That term is ‘idiot’.” I find it interesting that Stirling felt this disclaimer was necessary. In the power struggle that concludes the book we’re definitely on one side rather than the other; but it’s also clearly presented as a choice between lesser and greater evils. One would have to be an idiot to think that novel celebrates Rolfe’s imperalism; and yet I can’t think of anything else in it which would motivate such a disclaimer. Unless he’s all for imperialism despite Rom Christiansen’s concerns about it? Perhaps he’ll step in and let us know what he was thinking.

Anyway, I liked it, and wouldn’t mind reading further tales set in the same world.