Time's Tapestry

About the Time's Tapestry series

Time's Tapestry is an alternate-history series built on a single premise: a fragmentary cache of prophetic writings, the Weaver's Tapestry, has been circulating and being reinterpreted for two thousand years, and in various eras characters who act on its warnings inadvertently change the course of history -- creating divergent timelines that ripple forward from each disruption. Emperor opens in Roman-occupied Britain, following a family across generations as the Tapestry's fragments first surface and reshape the province's relationship with Rome. Conqueror jumps to the Viking and Anglo-Saxon period, Navigator to the era of the Crusades and Norman conquest, and Weaver to the aftermath of the Spanish Armada in an England whose entire history has, by this point, been repeatedly bent away from our own.

Rather than time travel in the conventional sense, the series treats prophecy and historical knowledge itself as the disruptive force -- people who read the Tapestry and act to prevent or hasten what it predicts are the ones who create the divergence, a self-fulfilling-prophecy structure that lets Baxter examine several distinct periods of British history while asking what a society does with unearned foreknowledge of its own future.