The Cross-Time Engineer (Adventures of Conrad Stargard, volume 1) by Leo Frankowski

[james_davis_nicoll]

A Polish engineer is transported into the past, ten years before the first Mongol invasion of Poland. Luckily for him, his allies include the book's author.

The Cross-Time Engineer  (Adventures of Conrad Stargard, volume 1) by Leo Frankowski 

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

I learned two things from these books: that countercurrent exchange is a thing, and that Frankowski was a sick fuck.

[kedamono]

I remember thinking of just how convenient some of Conrad's "inventions" were, and disliked his base 12 numbering system. (Other than reducing the number of fractions). At the time I read it, I will have to sadly say that the ick factor didn't kick in till later. It reminded me a bit of H. Beam Piper's Paratime series, especially Lord Kalvan, but more wish fulfillment than plausible.

[scott_sanford]

Base twelve has reasonable arguments if one is starting from scratch - but I don't see any advantages that outweigh the nuisance of switching over once base ten is established.

For one thing, we'd all have to re-bead every abacus and who has that kind of time? :-)

[patrick_morris_miller]

I can count to 99 on my fingers. I can't count to 143.

[ba_munronoe]

I suppose you might also call it Isekai avant la lettre?

I read the first few of these shortly after they came out, being younger and poorer in tastes. Aside from the Huge Hordes (he had some sort of distinctly flimsy rationalization for why the historical record was wrong which my brain can't quite reconstruct now), the thing which bugged me most about the Mongols and annoys me to this very day, was his claim the Mongols were originally white people and only became asian as a result of taking multiple brides from all over conquered eastern Asia.

[chrysostom]

I honestly don't normally try to commission reviews of books that James will hate...but I will confess that this time, I thought, "Oh, THIS should be juicy."

[kedamono]

Yes it was, and I totally agree with his opinion, even though I read I think, the first two-three books in the series. I couldn't be arsed to buy the rest of the series as it was the poor man's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen series with underage sex.

[chrysostom]

I have to admit I went as far as #5 - hey, I was in middle school! I stopped when a) I realized that Frankowski had run out of ideas, and b) the creepy sex stuff was really starting to become obvious to me.

[roseembolism]

Wow. I think you've defined the attraction of isekai in this review.

[rwpikul]

Yep, it's the same as why there was a wave of self-insert fanfics after Undocumented Features came out to a good reaction. ("Hey! I can also write a story where my life intersects with an anime and I get both power and and anime babe girlfriend.")

[patrick_morris_miller]

Oh, and also: if an author's web site has a page titled Should I Buy Authorname's Books, they are an insufferable ass and the answer is no.

[(Anonymous)]

If I recall, his webpage also had a page celebrating the idea of mail-order brides, though I believe he himself moved to Eastern Europe to marry his newfound beloved.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Yeah, it's linked in James' review. I cannot imagine what made Frankowski think it was a flex.

[(Anonymous)]

Was it Frankowski or another fellow who got a Russian mail order bride that Pournelle used to defend?

[armiphlage]

Yes.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

I remember his Eversharp Sword™, but I don't remember his miraculous horse.

I also recall that the protagonist thought of himself as a communist, but figured he would have to invent a free market and capitalism before he could introduce communism to his new society. 😄

Conrad Schwartz --> Conrad Black 😁

[patrick_morris_miller]

I also recall that the protagonist thought of himself as a communist, but figured he would have to invent a free market and capitalism before he could introduce communism to his new society.

That's pretty much orthodox Marxism, isn't it?

[(Anonymous)]

If anything, it's a covert ideological attack against the CCP; the big ideological debate between Moscow and Mao was that under orthodox Marxism Mao was foolhardy to try and move a peasant/feudal society straight into communism. History has laws, and trying to skip a stage of social development is as unlikely to succeed as a machine designed without regards to the laws of thermodynamics.

(When I was in grad school for history, I got a lot of exposure to Marxist historical thought. It's not nearly as bad as it's caricatured by the Right, but I sure didn't become a convert.)

--
Nathan H.

[(Anonymous)]

The Soviet astronaut in N&P's Lucifer's Hammer had the same idea, I think - Hammerfall had pushed humanity back to feudalism, so his job was to get it back to capitalism.

[bunsen_h]

I recall that the horse was extremely intelligent, enough for him to ask simple questions and have it answer by head movements and hoof taps.

There was also the Plate Armour +5 which the Agency planted for him, but which he missed picking up. Even when I read the books as a teenager, I was very skeptical of the premise that the Agency used. "We've got a video recording of him, but nobody has watched the recording yet, so things can be changed. As soon as someone watches the recording, the events become fixed."

[neotoma]

In my defense, I was 13; I think I read four books in this series.

But this was one of the first series where I read a book, hit an ick, and said 'nope'. I probably read as far as I did because I really do like time-travel stories.

[bunsen_h]

I was annoyed that the author knew a lot less chemistry than he thought he did, but didn't bother to have someone check. Narrator mentions that he could draw a picture of the "sodium nitrate molecule", I respond that sodium nitrate doesn't have molecules. Narrator comes up with a clever scheme to use a counter-current process for washing fleeces, which isn't a bad idea. But instead of making soap ("a mixture of ash and fat") and using it to launder, he figures that the fleeces already have lots of oil/fat, and can just be laundered in a strong hot lye solution. This would be very bad for the wool; it would chew up the proteins. Soap is the product of a chemical reaction between lye and oil/fat, not a mixture of them.

But what made me give up on the series, and resolve to never touch any of his books ever again, was the rape scene and its aftermath.

[jbwoodford]

Despite having a friend who was really into the first few, I managed to avoid reading them. Leaving aside his horrific ideas on gender roles, it's the bad science in his stuff that would jar me out of WSOD. I don't remember the title (and can't be arsed to look it up now), but IIRC he had a novel set on a world that's what was left of a very large gas giant after its sun went supernova. All the volatiles went away, and what was left zone-refined as it solidified from an undifferentiated melt. So all the high-melting point metals were the crust, and the core was a glob of metallic mercury.

While this is kind of a cool image, the idea that the lower-melting point elements didn't vaporize from the melt, or form intermetallic compounds with some of the other elements as they solidified, is less than realistic. IIRC the world had no volatiles--again, superficially reasonable, but someone forgot how much carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen can dissolve in molten metals. I was not impressed.

[bunsen_h]

I hadn't heard about this one, and your description made me curious enough to look it up. A Boy And His Tank, FWIW.

I don't think it would work the way he thinks it would. Assuming that the entire planet was liquefied, yes, the mercury would have vaporized, and under the circumstances I think it would have escaped. Carbon has a pretty high boiling point, so I wouldn't expect it to go away if a number of other elements remained. I agree with you that a variety of intermetallic solutions would form, as well as solutions with things like carbon. High-melting but high-density substances wouldn't just sit as a crust on top; they'd sink. I'd expect convection to mix things up, just as here on Earth.

[(Anonymous)]

My sweetie - who generally has good taste, right? - refuses to get rid of these because of their deep and abiding love for time-travel stories. I am re-invigorated to try to put my foot down again.

PS: The reCAPTCHA didn't like that I was better at spotting cars than it was.