Another Space in Time

     I found this to be a very entertaining read, which helped give me a real feel for the period when the electricity cables started to connect the cities and then towns of North America. Moore did a great job of invoking a sense of place and time. I felt the magic of those times, so appropriately generated, by profound technological progress. The alchemy of turning night to day was of an order of wonder only matched in my lifetime by the Apollo missions to the Moon.      My difficulty with this reading is small and to many will seem pedantic. That being my strong preference that writers of historical fiction never play fast and loose with the known timelines of events. Facts and the time on which they act should be sacrosanct in the reporting of history. The writer should only weave his fiction, his story, on the solid framework of all commonly accepted truth. He may of course dispute details if there is a case to be argued, such that perhaps in one...

     There was a brief period at the start when I thought that there was going to be rather too much engineering talk about helicopters, but this soon passed. Then very soon I was being drawn into the real story, the one about the characters that pilot those machines, and particularly the sub-culture of well-travelled pilots that ply their trade wherever it is called for. The story centres on a group of pilots working a fictitious site of oil drilling platforms of the coast of East Africa.      As the story begins to generate pace, we soon realise that its main theme is a clash between wealthy, privileged Western and a strong African culture that manage to sustain its people despite appalling relative poverty. The central figure, a form-filling, technically efficient if less than naturally talented, pilot is both naïve and prejudiced in his attitudes to foreigners in general, and especially those that live under African skies. He isn’t racist, that ...