Treasure of the Rubbermaids 21: The Great Dixie Machine Gun Time-Mowing Adventure Crossover!



At long last! Because I need a gimmick to drum up some votes to keep Patrick Rothfuss from passing me on the all time reviewer’s list the people of Goodreads demanded it, I proudly present the first crossover of two of my most popular features: The Treasure of the Rubbermaids and The Time-Mower Adventures!



The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers prev

I need a gimmick to drum up some votes to keep Patrick Rothfuss from passing me on the all time reviewer’s list

At long last! Becausethe people of Goodreads demanded it, I proudly present the first crossover of two of my most popular features: The Treasure of the Rubbermaids and The Time-Mower Adventures!“Hey, you just appeared out of thin air. You must be a time-traveler.”“Yeah, after my laptop fused with my lawn mower by a freak lightning strike, I can use it to move through time. My name’s Kemper, and I’m from 2014. And since you immediately knew what was going on, I’m guessing that you’re a member of the club?”“That’s right. I’m Sergeant Troy Harmon of the US Army. I’m from 1983. I‘m here on a mission that‘s vital to the future of America.”“I’m just dicking around myself. So what’s the problem, Sergeant?”“In ’83 I was brought in to a small secret government group that watchdogs classified projects. They were concerned that that a colonel named McCulloch in charge of the security of one of these operations started exhibiting odd behavior. He was buying large amounts of gold. When I interviewed him, he exhibited angry racist tendencies and was extremely uncooperative. Then he vanished suddenly after committing several criminal acts, and I learned that he had also stolen blueprints for an easily manufactured machine gun from the government archives.”“Oh, shit! That crazy bastard was going to come back and give machine guns to the South in the Civil War!”“Wow…. You figured that out remarkably fast. It took me a lot longer.”“Really? I thought you when you put racist, time travel, machine guns and gold together it’s pretty obvious. But since the Union still won the war, and I never heard about any Confederate machine guns, it must never have happened, right?”“That’s what we thought initially, too. One of the scientists working there told me that it could be that McCulloch started an alternate time line, but I wondered if the reason he failed was because I came back and prevented it. Plus, I hated the idea of his plan succeeding even if it was in a parallel universe. So I volunteered to come back and stop him.”“You volunteered? Uh…Sergeant, forgive me for stating the obvious, but you’re African-American.”“I’m not familiar with that term.”“Oh, right. 1983... What I mean is that you’re black.”“I am.”“And you volunteered to come back in time when slavery was still legal and American society was incredibly racist?”“I did.”“Well, Sergeant, I gotta give you credit. That’s a brave thing you did.”“Thank you. I admit that I have a few regrets about leaving 1983 forever.”“You can’t go back?”“No, our time travel method is one way…. Uh, that time-mower of yours, you can use it to go back to the future?”“Yep. Once you settle McCullouch’s hash, do you want a ride?”“Yes, please. This time sucks ass.”*****This particular Rubbermaid treasure is the result of Jeff's review of The Guns of the South which sounded incredibly familiar to me with it’s story of a time traveling racist giving machine guns to the Confederates in the Civil War, but I didn’t think I’d ever read any Harry Turtledove books. A little digging in the basement unearthed this paperback which I'd almost completely forgotten about, and I see that it was released almost a decade earlier than. I don’t know what the story is there, so I won’t say that Turtledove completely LaBeoufed his book, but the plots sound more than a little similar.This isn’t bad as far as time travel stories go. It’s fast paced with a light breezy style that doesn’t get too bogged down in any timey-wimey aspects. However, there’s a frustration to reading it that may not be entirely the author’s fault.My copy of this has a picture of a Confederate soldier holding a machine gun on the cover along with the picture of a man in a modern suit with a Confederate flag as the background and the tag line “The South Will Rise” under the title. On the back, there’s a drawing of Robert E. Lee along with the schematic of a machine gun with this little blurb that asks what if the North could still lose the Civil War.Then you start reading it, and there’s this racist colonel hoarding gold while working on a top secret project. Then he murders some people and vanishes when he realizes he’s being investigated. Troy Harmon learns about the time travel and the machine gun plans, and yet he still doesn’t figure out that he’s gone back in time until halfway through the book.So any reader probably knows where this was going the entire time, but the first half of the book plays out like it’s a giant mystery. Anyone hoping for extensive action in the past will probably be disappointed because all of the 1859 stuff happens after that. The whole thing ends up feeling pretty lightweight and thin.Maybe Harry Harrison intended for the book to start out as a modern mystery that took a sci-fi turn but the marketing gave it away. The book might play better if you didn't know what was coming. But when you’ve got Robert E. Lee and Confederate soldiers with machine guns on the cover, it feels like a huge let down when you don’t get more of that.