Timeslip!

Murray Leinster Timeslip! (1967)
This was the second of Leinster's three novels tied into the television series, which itself seemed to draw inspiration from Murray's earlier but unrelated novel of the same name. As with the one I read back in May, there's not much point getting upset over points of continuity shared with the Irwin Allen version because this takes the same cast of characters in a completely different direction; which I suppose might be attributed to the magic of time travel.

Here we have the intrusion of yet another officious type hell bent on cutting funding, in this instance by exposing the time tunnel as a massive scam - which he intends to achieve by sending a nuclear warhead back in time to some crucial point in history, which will of course be impossible because it's all a massive scam. My guess is that he probably hadn't quite ironed all of the wrinkles from this particular cunning plan, which goes somewhat awry when our curmudgeonly bean counter inadvertently succeeds in depositing a nuclear warhead in the garden of a nunnery in Mexico City just as the Mexican-American War of 1846 kicks off, the silly fucker.

What happens next is somewhat dry, leisurely paced if not actually slow, but more or less works because the novel is too short to outstay its welcome, and Leinster seems very thorough with his historical details. Furthermore, for all the respects in which Timeslip! reflects the era in which it was written, it's difficult to predict where it will end up, and the author engages in surprisingly lively speculation as he's getting there. At one point he effectively predicts Reagan's Space Defense Initiative - although there may well have been some earlier example of this - and his estimation of the most terrible potential aspects of war between time-active powers is unusually chilling for being applied to a world which most of us will recognise more than the usual science-fiction scenarios.

Timeslip! isn't anything amazing and would have benefited either from better editing or a more generous deadline, but neither is it anything like so shoddy as might be expected for something featuring television personalities on the cover. Its failings are easily ignored, leaving just the good stuff, of which there is more than enough.