Renegade time travelers meddle in the outcome of the Second Punic War, bringing about the premature deaths of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Scipio Africanus at the Battle of Ticinus in 218 BC, and thus creating a new timeline in which Hannibal destroys Rome in 210 BC. This meant that western European civilization came to be based on a Celtic-Carthaginian cultural synthesis. This civilization discovered the western hemisphere, and created certain inventions long before the corresponding events happened in actual history, but overall technological progress has been slow, since most developments are arrived at through ad hoc tinkering. At the time of the story It is the year 1800 AD, Britain, Ireland, France and Spain are under Celtic control, and the Celts also colonised North America, known as Affalon in this timeline. Italy is under Germanic domination, Switzerland and Austria exist within Helvetia, Lithuania controls Scandinavia, northern Germany and much of Eastern Europe, while a Carthaginian successor empire dominates much of Northern Africa. The Han Empire controls China and Taiwan, as well as encompassing Korea, Japan and eastern Siberia. Punjab comprises western India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The major global powers are Hinduraj, centered on India but also encompassing Southeast Asia, Indonesia, New Guinea and Australasia, and Huy Braseal, which controls much of South America. Technology is at roughly a 19th-century level, and transport is reliant on the steam engine, although rudimentary biplanes exist for the purposes of combat. Christianity, Judaism and Islam do not exist in this polytheistic world. There is greater gender equality in this world, but slavery has also survived — though it is not connected with any particular race or ethnicity. Manse Everard, 20th-century Time Patrol agent, finds himself in the new timeline, in Catavellaunan, facing the moral dilemma: Should he return to the past before the events that led to Carthaginian victory, and restore his original timeline by negating the assassinations and military upset that led to the new alternative timeline, thus wiping out its billions of inhabitants when the course of human history reverts to his own?
Similar themes in other works
' The Timeline Wars series has the same basis assumption - an Alternative History timeline starting from Hannibal winning the Second Punic War. However, Anderson assumes that the Carthaginians would not have been able to fill the Roman niche and create something similar to the Roman Empire, and that it would have been the Celts which became central to the successor culture. Conversely, Barnes assumes that the victorious Carthaginians would have succeeded in creating a world empire - an extremely cruel, aggressive and oppressive one, which is the undoubted villain of his books.
