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Robert Adams is best remembered for the long-running Horseclans pulp fantasy series, but the Castaways in Time books are the more interesting late-period project. Of Chiefs and Champions is the fourth in the sequence, with a group of modern Americans accidentally transported to a Tudor England that has been altered by previous arrivals from their own world.
Adams is doing exactly what he always did: writing battle sequences with too much enthusiasm and ethnic generalizations that have aged poorly. He is also having an enormous amount of fun with the conceit, and the alternate-history version of the late 16th century gets some genuinely inventive set pieces. The Bass Foster ensemble is broad, the politics are pulpy, and the violence is constant.
Three stars. Recommended only to readers who already know what they want from Adams and accept the era he was writing in. Not the starting point for the Horseclans-adjacent reader; start with the original Castaways in Time.
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Of Beginnings and Endings
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The sixth Castaways in Time novel. Robert Adams closing out his alternate-Tudor sequence with appropriate pulp enthusiasm.
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