Times Without Number is a time travel/alternate history novel by John Brunner.
Publication history
Originally Brunner wrote three stories published in 1962 in consecutive issues of the British magazine Science Fiction Adventures: "Spoil of Yesterday" in No. 25, "The Word Not Written" in No. 26, and "The Fullness of Time" in No. 27.
In the same year, a considerably different version appeared as a fix-up novel under the title Times Without Number, which was published as an Ace Double together with Destiny's Orbit by Donald A. Wollheim (using the pseudonym David Grinnell).
In 1969, Ace Books published the book again, in a version considerably revised and expanded by Brunner, different from both the magazine stories and the 1962 novel.
Historical background to the plot
The book's plot takes place in the years 1988–1989 in a timeline where the Spanish Armada under the command of the Duke of Parma successfully invaded England in 1588, aided by a second army embarked from the Spanish Netherlands under the command of the Earl of Barton, an illegitimate scion of the Catholic Scottish House of Stewart, who entered the service of Spain and turned out to be one of the great military talents of history; after relieving Parma as Spanish commander in the Netherlands so that the duke could assume command of the Armada, Barton launched a lightning campaign that put down their rebellion and perpetuated Spanish rule and the Catholic religion.
At some unspecified later time Spain also managed to conquer and absorb its long-time rival France through circumstances that are evidently not considered as pivotal as the conquest of England. At the time of the Armada, France was deeply embroiled in the Wars of Religion, in which Spain supported the Catholic League while Queen Elizabeth of England and the Dutch rebels supported the French Huguenots. Obviously, the elimination of both England and the Dutch would have made a big difference for the balance of forces in the French wars, but Brunner gives no details.
However, having their hands full in the north, the Spaniards neglected the defense of their own Iberian homeland, which was reconquered by Islamic forces of the Mediterranean Khalifate – a titanic event of which no details are given, either. Spanish refugees moved to Britain, which became the new base of their empire and whose inhabitants were gradually assimilated. Spanish displaced English, which barely survived as "a debased peasant tongue". The Spanish-speaking people of the capital Londres called themselves "Imperials" rather than "Spaniards", and except for a few diehard English nationalists regarded the Armada's victory as a blessing.
Having already conquered South and Central America, the Empire did not have a great need of North America. Rather than conquer and colonize it themselves, the Imperials armed the Mohawks and encouraged them to embark on a great campaign of conquest until the Pacific. The Mohawk leaders, ruling from New Madrid (on the site of New York City) were taken into the Empire's highest nobility. However, other Native American tribes felt resentful of Mohawk dominance and the European backing for it – a resentment which would turn out to have a crucial importance in the book's later part.
In Europe, the Empire was opposed by a "heterogeneous political alliance" of Lithuania, Poland, Prussia, and the Orthodox Russ, known as the "fretful, unstable" Confederacy of the East, regarded by the Empire as its "coeval super-power." Scotland and Sweden-Norway remained independent, the latter as essentially the last bastion of Protestantism, which the Catholic Imperials regarded as a mildly curious local tradition. In the Far East, the dominant power was the Middle Kingdom of Cathay, with a much more modest role played by its cultural dependency, the islands of Çipangu (whose rulers admired the Empire and "sought to turn their geographically analogous location into a politically analogous independence from the mainland culture of Cathay which had dominated virtually their entire recorded history").
In 1892, an Italian named Carlo Borromeo discovered the secret of time-travel, though otherwise the overall level of technology remained not much higher than it was in the 16th Century, with people travelling primarily on horseback and cities lit by open fires. In principle, time travel could have been used as a means of instantaneous travel, but that would have involved the traveller being in two places at the same time, at least for a split second; fearing a time paradox, such use of the device was strictly forbidden.