The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream / Stranger Than You Think

by G.C. Edmondson

Book Overview

This is one of two printings of the 1978 Ace edition, which was newly expanded from the novel's 1965 debut. Nebula Award nominee. A rollicking, if somewhat dated, yarn about a Navy ship finding itself... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0007EA2W0
• Release Date: January 1965
• Publisher: ACE BOOKS
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"He's Not Really Mad-- He's Just Catholic"

_Stranger Than You Think_ and _The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream_ (1965), both by G.C. Edmondson are one of the better entries in the Ace Double series. The first title is a collection of Edmondson's "mad friend" stories, and the second is his first (and one of his best) novels. Let us take the collection first. It consists of seven stories from _Fantasy and Science Fiction_ between 1959 and 1964, featuring the author, his mad friend, and assorted wives and children (all unnamed) who encounter odd situations in the American west or in Mexico. The tales are eccentric-- similar in an odd kind of way to those of Avram Davidson, Kris Neville, or R.A. Lafferty. One story, "The Sign of the Goose," opens when one of the wives gets a letter from her (now deceased) aunt saying that she is about to be evicted. A bit later, in the same tale, the author and his friend interview witnesses to a UFO landing in Mexico in which a ship came down at midnight, "with a scream like a communist lawyer" (31). At the end of the story, the odd elements of Mexican bureaucracy, a UFO, a weather balloon, a glove, and arguments about the serpent in Eden all fall together. The other tales are like that as well. Lots of odd irrelevancies are suddenly shown to be parts of a whole. The stories involve a Byzantine time traveler ("The Misfit"), two UFOs ("The Galactic Calabash" and "The Sign of the Goose"), reincarnation ("From Caribou to Carry Nation") a mysterious missing writer ("The World Must Never Know"), and strange goings-on at Project Mohole ("The Third Bubble"). "The Country Boy" involves time travel, Neanderthals, Arizona speed traps, a Paris bistro, spies, explosive bullets, and Presidential politics. Honest! You may need to read some of these tales more than once. But they will reward you on rereading. _The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream_ is a bit more straightforward _voyage extraordinaire_. The _Alice_ is a Navy sailing ship equipped with a Christmas tree and a moonshine still. It gets hit with a bolt of lightning and is sent a thousand years into the past. As the crew of the _Alice_ struggle to find a way out of their plight, they find themselves becoming more entangled. Most of the characters are well-done, but the most memorable is Raquel, a lovely spitfire of a barbarian girl. Pirates and thugs are no match for her. I give a rating of four stars for each book and a global score of four stars. The covers and some interior illustrations were by Jack Gauughan.

One of my favorite books

Bought this about 1968 and have read several times. Excellent book about a sail boat that gets mixed up in the time stream. Good SyFy book.