I took a break in the middle of reading S.M. Stirling's Change series to go back and read the trilogy that came before it: the Nantucket or Islander series: Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity. This series is a more familiar sci-fi trope -- the modern day island of Nantucket, Massachusetts and a small radius of ocean, which happens to contain the Coast Guard training tallship The Eagle, is transported by an unexplained Event back to the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC.
Most of the Islanders focus on survival, but a small group decide that this primitive world is ripe for conquest, which ends up, over the course of the trilogy, leading to a world war, pitting the Babylonian and Hittite empires against the proto-Greeks, each side backed by a group of Nantucket Islanders and their future technology.
The triology is a pretty good read, both for the what-ifs of the Nantucket Islanders attempts to recreate various levels of modern technology, and for the personal stories of the various characters we see all this change through.
Like the first triology of the Change series, there's no attempt to explain the Event -- it's just the thing that happens to start the story.
FuzzyCo grade: A-
