Revisiting Richard C. Meredith’s Timeliner Trilogy

At The Narrow PassageI recently came across an announcement that writer-director Robert H. Gwinn is planning to film his own three part adaptation of Richard C. Meredith’s Timeliner Trilogy. Given Gwinn has only a handful of shorts and one feature, the poorly received Renovation (2.6 rating from 133 votes on the Internet Movie Database) to his name, this seems unfeasibly ambitious. Done properly the Timeliner books would take a summer blockbuster budget and a highly experienced director. Given the state of Rampant Films’ website I don’t have high hopes. Still, according to the press release Gwinn has the support of Meredith’s widow, so we’ll see. However this turns out, this seems like a good moment to revisit the Timeliner Trilogy.

The books are At the Narrow Passage, No Brother, No Friend and Vestiges of Time, originally published in the US in 1973, 1976 and 1978. There was no equivalent British printing, and the trilogy was not published in the UK until 1987, when it appeared in a single volume edition as Number 14 in the Venture SF/Arrow Books imprint. That edition featured a revised text prepared by the author in 1978 and is the version I discuss here.

The trilogy is narrated by Eric Mathers, a mercenary officer in the pay of the Kriths, beings naturally able to ‘skud’ between parallel worlds, or timelines. The Kriths, employing human agents, are working behind the scenes on hundreds of earths to manipulate history so that as many timelines as possible will be sufficiently technologically advanced to meet a threat to the earth in the mid-distant future. The Krith have evolved on a parallel earth far to the ‘temporal east’ of our own, but the danger from the future is the same in all timelines, so human and Krith interests coincide. At least, this is what Mathers believes when we first meet him.

No Brother, No Friend, first, 1976, Doubleday

In At the Narrow Passage Mathers adopts the role of a British army officer and is involved in a Krith-backed plot to kidnap a German count in a timeline which is fighting its equivalent of the Great War. It is 1971 and there has been no American independence. George X is on the throne and Europe is largely ruled by the Holy Roman Empire.

The kidnapping goes wrong, largely due to the intervention of a second group with the ability to cross timelines. Mathers finds himself a prisoner in the equivalent of Florida, where he is confronted with the possibility that the Krith are not what they claim. A labyrinthine war is being fought across the parallel worlds by Krith, humans and Paratimers, and the stakes are much higher than Mathers thought.

The first two-thirds of No Brother, No Friend consist of chase-capture-escape sequences and military machinations in a German-Gothic America. The book builds to a series of dramatic revelations but it is a shame that in revising the trilogy Meredith did not make more radical alterations, deleting unnecessary flashbacks in the second and third volumes and cutting much of the military maneuvering from the middle volume. No doubt this material was commercially necessary to bring the second title up to novel length for separate publication, but reading the story as a single volume much of it is superfluous. As with so many trilogies, book two consists largely of wandering around and fighting, before a major confrontation and some vital developments which could as easily have been worked almost directly onto the end of first novel.

Timeliner Trilogy UKIt is the final volume, Vestiges of Time, which really makes the Timeliner Trilogy rewarding. Meredith shifts to a caste-dominated America colonized not by Europeans but Asians. Here starships are a reality and the elite live in decadent luxury. Mathers finds himself a rebel general being trained to psychically control an army of clones, and from this point Meredith takes the trilogy onto an unexpectedly high level of storytelling. The verve and ingenuity with which he weaves his sprawling plot together is breathtaking. An enormously complex tale twists and turns through time and across parallel worlds, sometimes re-twisting around itself. Yet every detail is accounted for, and those moments which had perhaps earlier seemed improbably convenient coincidences slot neatly into the narrative. It may be argued that one particular chain of causality is never satisfactorily closed, but it is a minor point.

These are adventure stories and very much products of their era. Almost every woman is young, beautiful and described in terms of how much her breasts strain to escape inadequate clothing. Equally, almost every woman is keen to leap into bed with Mathers, who acts like an inter-dimensional James Bond. This sexism is partly off-set by the fact that Meredith does place women in positions of authority, and gives them some of the action beyond the bedroom.

Vestiges of TimeMeredith has a vast story to tell and he takes the reader to some marvelous and terrible places: KHL-000, home of the Krith Troma gestalt; a single beautiful civilization spread across many adjacent parallel worlds, and which may not even exist; the fourth planet of the star Pollux, the storm-wracked water-world home of genetically engineered colonists; the Albigensian Timelines, devastated by a terrible war which may yet consume all humanity.

Aged only 41, Richard C. Meredith died in of a brain hemorrhage on 8 March 1979. He is not a well known writer but the SF world suffered a notable loss with his passing. I suspect that had he lived he would probably have become an important name. His imagination was so bold he would not have remained in obscurity forever.

*This is a revised and updated version of an article which originally appeared in Vector (#204, March/April 1999) as. ‘A Man Out of Time: The Timeliner Trilogy by Richard C. Meredith – A Retrospective’.

Please take a moment to support Amazing Stories with a one-time or recurring donation via Patreon. We rely on donations to keep the site going, and we need your financial support to continue quality coverage of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres as well as supply free stories weekly for your reading pleasure. https://www.patreon.com/amazingstoriesmag

Previous Article

Gods Will Be Watching: We Can’t All Be Heartless

Next Article

BEHÍQUE 2013 6ta edición dedicado a la ciencia-ficción Post-apocalíptica.

You might be interested in …

5 Comments

  1. It’s great that you found this page and to have this input from you Robert. I really hope the trilogy works out and makes for some great cinema. Just be true to the idea of the source material, but not slavishly faithful. Adapt and update as necessary in the spirit of the original books.

    1. All of the updates and changes are not only being done with Joy Meredith directly involved as well as several Meredith fans that have a real passion for his work. We have modernized elements such as the treatment of the female characters and from time to time locations or other details have been altered from the novels, for the sake of screen visualizations and story progression. It has been our priority at all times to try to do something that Richard would have loved. My many conversations with Joy have been invaluable to me in adapting the three screenplays. We have done live table reads of each script, with Joy on Skype as actors read in character. Richards voice is clear and resonant, particularly in the first two adaptations. The third book was the biggest challenge, but we are very happy with the results on the first drafts. Second draft editing will happen starting next year, but all three needed to be finished in order to move forward. We are also developing all new material based on the trilogy, to pitch to television networks as a potential prequel series. The hope is that a series will help us better to get up to speed and build a new audience for the subject matter, which as you know has been out of print for many years. We promise, we are working hard not to disappoint the wonderful fans like you, who one by one are gathering to show their support.

    2. Hello, and good morning. Good news. We are in production of an audio dramatization based on Book one of the Timeliner Trilogy. It’s the first steps to getting these properties back in front of the public. Immediate reprinting of the original material ended up being more cost prohibitive for us than launching some sort of multimedia effort simply because of the lack of interest in print from the general population. We still intend to bring the original printings back, but look forward to the first episode of the audio adaptation later this year. We are also working with a team of visual effects artists to produce a teaser preview of our vision for potential investors and patient fans of the RCM universe.

  2. I wanted to thank you for the mention. But more, I wanted to reassure you, that we are taking this project very seriously. We are working diligently to be true to Richard Meredith’s work and are not rushing into things haphazardly. We are planning, developing, adjusting and doing as much as we can to make this the project of quality that it deserves to be. As Interest grows and fans begin to realize what we are doing, the momentum is slowly building. While your concerns you stated above are completely understandable, I can say happily that the link you have is out dated now. I can also reassure you that “Deadly Renovations” is just as disappointing for me as a film maker as it is to much of it’s audience, for reasons I won’t expand on just now. Please look up The Timeliner Trilogy Fan Page on Facebook, and look around at the more recent developments on this project. We will not make these movies without the proper financial support and every attention is being payed to the details. Our number one priority is to be true to the source material and to ensure that not only will the fans be happy, but Richard himself will continue to smile down on this work, proud to have his name remembered with honor, love and respect. https://www.facebook.com/Timeliner.Trilogy.Movie

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.