THE DEPTHS OF TIME by Roger Macbride Allen, 2000

Humanity is running out of time. The settled universe is filled with terraformed worlds linked by timeshafts -- temporal wormholes in deep space. These timeshafts are the only way to travel the vast distances between the stars. The Chronologic Patrol is charged with guarding the timeshaft wormholes and preventing time paradoxes at all costs. But one critical mission ends in disaster, turning Anton Koffield, captain of the Upholder, into a dark legend. And his odyssey through time has only just begun.... (Amazon)

Reviewed by Emily, avid bibliophile

Captain Anton Koffield is a legend - the man who killed a world. Years later, he finds himself stranded in the future, not once, but twice, a span of over two hundred years. 

This is a difficult book to sum up. It's a space opera, but it reads like hard sci-fi. The character development is superb, He's a haunted man who made an impossible choice and lived to regret it. Ostracized by the very people who should have hailed him as a hero, Koffield finds a job with Oskar DeSilvo, an egoistic scientist whose work has all been plagiarized from a long-dead expert on terraforming. 

The colony of Solace is dying. Their world's terraforming has begun to fail, and only the information that Koffield has brought them can save them. But he's arrived too late, victim of an unknown enemy. 

In a mind-bending twist on time-traveling, Roger MacBride Allen creates a fascinating story. Sadly, this is the first in the series, and I have yet to read the second and third. But THE DEPTHS OF TIME is a fascinating take on space travel as well as a multiplicity of other science fictional subjects. 

Market: Adult Fiction
Language: Moderate
Sensuality: Mild/None
Violence: Mild
Mature Themes: Guilt, responsibility, ethics