The Empire of Time by US-born naturalized Canadian author Crawford Kilian (
ISFDB,
Wikipedia,
SFE), a now-retired college professor and occasional Aurora Award nominee, is the 1st novel in his vintage The Chronoplane Wars trilogy of science fiction time-travel adventures involving a temporal agency tasked with preventing disasters by altering history on alternate Earths, this one featuring an especially tricky assignment for one of their top agents who must not only prevent said disaster, but also figure out what the unknown cause will be, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Endeavour Press' Venture imprint.
This was originally published in 1978 by Ballantine's Del Rey imprint. I think this is the first time we've gotten freebie dedicated sf/fantasy from an author who's practically almost local to me (we've previously received ecological disaster thrillers from Ian Slater (
ISFDB), who's also a transplanted expat who settled down to become a professor in this province and write sfnal-ish novels on the side, which does seem to be the usual Pacific Northwest Canadian speculative fiction author career trajectory; cf. Peter Watts, who eventually moved to Ontario), and I'm a sucker for time travel and parallel world stories.
Currently free @
Amazon (available to Canadians & in the UK and pretty much everywhere else Amazon sells worldwide, since this is being done via their KDP Select exclusive-or-else program)
Description
Jerry Pierce was the Intertemporal Agency’s most experienced operative – a time-traveller on the old subway train that whisked him back and forth through the ages.
He’d already altered history by directing the Turkish conquest of Constantinople four centuries ahead of schedule and garrotting an obscure Mongol chief before the man became a problem.
But his biggest assignment lay ahead. Seventy-four years ahead to be exact.
Because somehow, someway – nuclear war, alien attack, no one really knew – Earth was going to be destroyed and left a lifeless cinder.
It was every Intertemporal agent's goal to find out how and to prevent disaster. But suddenly the problem had become Pierce's special assignment…
And he is the only one who could prevent it.