FAITH, HOPE & CHARITY by Judith Seaman

Review by Jean Graham

Faith, Hope & Charity is a novelette with a time travel motif - an element not often found in Judith's stories (or in B7 fiction at all, for that matter). She handles the inherent paradoxical problems quite well, however. FAITH, HOPE & CHARITY employs a Final Countdown style time mix-up in which a WWII pilot named John Dare and his plane Charity somehow wind up time crossing into B7's universe. Gan befriends the pilot, but Dare's desire not to return to his own time, where the horrors of war are raging, runs foul of Avon's insistence that the time continuum be restored to proper order, lest all of history (and Liberator's existence!) be altered, a process apparently beginning with Germany's defeat of the Allied Forces when Dare's plane is not defending the strategic island of Malta. But even if Orac can find a way to manipulate the space-time continuum, will Avon's warnings convince John Dare to return to the war and preserve history as Blake's seven know it?

Blake himself is oddly oblivious to the crisis, obsessed instead with reaching the planet Drakon in time to assist in its rebellion. Everyone spends the novel ignoring his rants, raves and petty snipes at Avon for delaying this mission. The fact that Zen is malfunctioning and Liberator showing dire warning signs of vanishing from the time band (with all aboard!) does not seem to penetrate Blake's zeal, a characterization some readers may find a bit incredible. (Was Blake really that thick- headed and blind with devotion to the Cause???) Well, maybe!

FAITH, HOPE & CHARITY is a well-done time story with a touch of historical accuracy - the Charitv really was an RAF warplane crucial to the defense of Malta in 1940.

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