In High Places
A Novel of Crosstime Traffic
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the 21st-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway.
But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed. That's because Khadija is really Annette Klein from 21st-century California, and her whole family are secret agents of Crosstime Traffic, trading for commodities to send back to our own timeline. Now it's time for Annette and her family to go home for the start of another school year, so they join a pack train bound for their home base in Marseilles, where the crosstime portal is hidden.
Then bandits attack while they're crossing the Pyrenees. Annette/Khadija is separated from her parents and knocked out, and wakes up to find herself a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. She's in a tight spot.
Then the really scary thing happens: her purchasers take her, along with other newly purchased slaves, to an unofficial crosstime portal…leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her! Harry Turtledove's In High Places is the third book in this parallel adventure series.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alternative history maestro Turtledove deals a tad heavy-handedly with the issue of slavery in his third Crosstime Traffic novel (after 2004's Curious Notions). In one alternative time line, the Black Death continued far longer than it did in the "home" time line with the result that Muslims occupy much of Europe, which is made up of small, insular principalities and kingdoms. When bandits in this medieval world capture 18-year-old Annette Klein (aka Khadija the oil merchant's daughter), she's separated from her parents, with no way to return to the home time line from which she and her family originate. Worse, the bandits are slavers who send people into another alternate time line where they're forced to work in miserable conditions. Turtledove convincingly portrays the conflict between Christians and Muslims, but takes less care in depicting male-and-female relationships. Didactic pronouncements on slavery notwithstanding, the book should satisfy its target audience of younger readers.
