A Door Into Time – an Alex Hawk Time Travel Adventure
Alex Hawk is an ex-United States Special Forces soldier. He is divorced and lives alone in a house in Central Oregon. His 4-year-old daughter Amy lives with her mother nearby, but Alex has been an unreliable father, missing too many of Amy’s special life events.
One day he notices an anomaly in his basement. He pulls down some wood paneling, only to discover a brick wall. He breaks through the brick wall only to find another brick wall. Once he breaks that down, he finds a letter of warning from the previous owner of the house, next to a black outline of a door, a portal.
After gathering some survival gear into his backpack, he takes a few weapons, including a hunting rifle, and steps through the portal just to check it out. The world he finds himself in is vastly different from what he came from in Oregon. A flock of giant aviary creatures attacks him and wounds him. Then a group of human warriors rescues him from the attacking beasts, but they don’t let him return to the portal. They take him away as a prisoner.
Will Alex ever make it back home?
Minor Spoiler Alert
The portal in Alex’s basement leads into a human world in the far, far future, so far indeed that all traces of human civilization have been erased. There is no more technology. Humans are just individual, loosely connected tribes with stone-age weapons. The most advanced weapon is bow and arrow. There is no technology whatsoever.
Alex is taken prisoner and eventually adapts to their way of life. After stepping through the portal a few pages into the book, he never comes back, and the entire story plays in that ultra-future stone age world, where Alex makes his life as a warrior of the tribe. He spends years with them and becomes a general in their wars.
There are some plot holes, though. Think of it, a guy lives alone in his house and one day disappears. Years go by and nobody seems to investigate and follow him? There is a gaping hole in his basement with a door to another world, and nobody finds it and sends law enforcement through it? I was hoping that there would be some resolution at the end.
This is NOT a time travel book. I found it by searching for time travel, and it has the words “time travel” in the subtitle, but it’s really an alternate history / fantasy /adventure novel that plays in an imaginary human stone age environment. The premise is: How would a modern human, albeit with special forces training, fare in a stone age society?
If you’re interested in that, this book will work for you. If you’re looking for science fiction or time travel, stop right here. It’s neither.
I enjoyed reading the story, I wanted to know how the hero would do, and especially how he would get back home. But I didn’t get what I was looking for.
It turns out, this is the first book of seven in this series, and the end is abrupt and completely unsatisfying, simply to set up for book number two.
The book reminded me of Stephen King’s Fairy Tale. A kid goes through a portal in a shed in his yard and ends up in another world. But he comes back in the end, and the story is done.
The story also reminded me of the Sterling books starting with Island in the Sea of Time. The premise there is that an entire ship is transported 3,000 years into the past. Not quite the “future” stone age as here, but the bronze age in human history.
Since I don’t have time to spend seven more books’ worth of reading just to find out how Alex makes it home, I decided to stop right there. I am not sufficiently interested in the stone age world and its politics to spend more time in it.
