The Quiet Order - Doug Joseph - A Short Summary and Review
The Quiet Order - Doug Joseph - A Short Summary and Review
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
A Rite of Fancy Book Recommendation and Review
A Short Summary:
Doug Joseph's The Quiet Order begins with the experimental Kronos project, an attempt to push the boundaries of time travel. When a mission goes disastrously wrong, members of the Kronos crew find themselves stranded centuries in the past, in sixteenth-century Germania, with no simple way home. Survival comes first: food, shelter, medical care, security, and learning how to exist in a world radically different from the one they left behind.
But surviving history creates another problem entirely. The crew possesses knowledge and technology that could dramatically alter the lives of the people around them, and potentially the future itself. As they build a new community and begin interacting with the surrounding world, disagreements emerge over when intervention is justified. Saving a life, preventing an illness, introducing a new idea, or changing one seemingly insignificant event may be compassionate in the moment, but no one can know what consequences will follow centuries later.
Meanwhile, those in the future begin searching for evidence of the missing crew, discovering that history itself may contain clues about what became of them. The result is a story told from both sides of time: one group trying not to disturb history while another looks backward to determine whether history has already been disturbed.
My Favorite Quote From the Book:
Questions to ponder while reading:
My Review:
An interesting exploration of time travel, history, and the impossible arguments created by paradoxes. Time-travel stories almost inevitably arrive at the same question: if you could change the past, should you? The Quiet Order complicates that question by asking something slightly different. What if changing the past isn't your intention at all? What if you simply have to live there?
Once the Kronos crew becomes stranded in the sixteenth century, avoiding history sounds simple in theory. Don't introduce modern technology. Don't interfere in politics. Don't alter major events. Keep your heads down and survive. Except people don't encounter history as a list of important dates in a textbook. They encounter individuals.
Someone gets sick. Someone is in danger. A child might die from something the travelers know how to prevent. Suddenly the grand principle of preserving the timeline has to compete with the very immediate moral problem of standing beside another human being and choosing whether to help.
That is where I found The Quiet Order most interesting. The book spends time with the arguments rather than simply declaring one theory of time travel correct. Is history fixed? Does every intervention create a new future? Have the travelers already altered history merely by arriving? And perhaps most importantly: is refusing to act also a choice that changes history?
Joseph also approaches the paradox from the opposite direction. People in the future begin looking through historical records for evidence left by the missing Kronos crew. That creates a wonderfully circular problem: if evidence of the travelers already exists in history, were their actions always part of the timeline?
If you liked The Quiet Order, you may also like:
The Price of Time - Tim Tigner
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
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