Today, I give you the first in a series of Summer reading recommendations, dredged up from that place where 'Serious Literatures of Ideas' meet Pulp. I like to think of pulpy SF as the Grisham/Patterson/Brown Thriller for the imaginative. You can see the loose set of criteria that I'm using to pick out these books in my previous post here. I give you S. M. Stirling's Nantucket trilogy.

The three books (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity ) are centered around an incident that takes place around the island of Nantucket where the sky is filled with a red dome which covers the island and parts of the surrounding ocean. The people on Nantucket quickly discover that the island has been transported backward in time by this event to the Bronze Age, about the same time as the Trojan War.

I always go on to introduce this series the same way: by telling the prospective reader about one of the main characters. One of the main female characters in the book is an African-American Woman (whose name I can't recall) in charge of the Coast Guard training vessel The Eagle which is off the coast of Nantucket when the event occurs. She's a strong female character who takes charge of the island's military concerns (which grow to be numerous throughout the series's three volumes.) I should also mention that in addition to being a Coast Guard captain of some distinction, she's also highly trained in the use of a katana and happens to be a lesbian. One of my favorite characters is the Classics Professor who allows everyone to communicate since he can piece together the various Bronze-Age languages encountered in the novels.

If you're a fan of Alternative History in any capacity, you're almost certain to enjoy this. I can recall one instance where the Islanders (as they come to call themselves) do things like colonize Madagascar and Long Island since they're uninhabited and take the leaf springs out of car suspensions and beat them into Roman-style short swords. I'll also mention that I read these books 4 or 5 years ago and enjoyed them a lot then, just don't think too hard, sit back and enjoy. After all, anyone who wrote novels with James Doohan can't be all bad.