The Valley-Westside War
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- 109,00 Kč
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- 109,00 Kč
Publisher Description
Usually, Crosstime Traffic concerns itself with trade. Our world owns the secret of travel between parallel continuums, and we use it to trade for much-needed resources with the worlds next door; preferably without letting them know about any of that parallel-worlds stuff. But in one parallel world, Crosstime Traffic is present, not to trade, but to study what went wrong.
In a Los Angeles where nuclear war broke out back in 1967, survival is a matter of neighbourhood versus neighbourhood. When the Westsiders block Sepulveda Pass, the inhabitants of the San Fernando Valley are forced to fight back. With the help of some prewar machine guns, the Valley prevails, and their forces occupy the Westside.
In this brutal world, Liz and her family are undercover Crosstime Traffic agents living near the ruins of UCLA. Dan is a soldier in the occupying Valley army. Dan thinks Liz is the most impressive woman he's ever met. Liz thinks she'd better avoid Dan if she wants to protect the mission.
To complicate matters, when Dan catches Liz in the UCLA library, he fears she may be a spy for the Westsiders. After all, what reason could anyone have for reading about the Old Times, if not to figure out how to reconstruct old weapons systems?
Then a real spy for the Westside government-in-exile shows up at Liz's house...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The thought-provoking sixth Crosstime Traffic book (after The Gladiator), set in a time line where 130 years have passed since the devastating worldwide nuclear war of 1967, shifts the series focus from commerce to wartime ethical dilemmas. The people of Westside, one of the tiny fiefdoms around what was once Los Angeles, don't know that friendly trader Jeff Mendoza and his family are actually scholars visiting from the "home" time line, where the Soviets and Americans never launched their missiles. Jeff's teenage daughter, Liz, chafes under the local conditions, struggling to get along with the sexist, condescending locals. When troops from the nearby Valley invade Westside, Liz finds herself fending off a love-smitten Valley soldier who, much to her surprise, is not stupid, just ignorant. Turtledove subtly challenges Liz's assumptions about the superiority of her own culture, raising the question of the home time line's responsibility to help the people of other lines, but leaving it for presumed sequels to answer.
