Heavy Water gives us Ben Haukelid, a citizen of New London in Reichsland. He lives in a future controlled by the Nazis, and the one thing that really makes him special is a notebook from Knut, his ancestor in WWII. In their society, the population doesn’t have access to any historical records beyond what their leaders allow them to have. The notebook makes Ben invaluable to an underground group of rebels who intend to fix the past by stopping the Nazis from developing the atomic bomb first.
I’m a sucker for well-thought-out time travel stories, and I really enjoy the way Heavy Water presents a two-front war. The rebels in the future are under siege, and when Ben travels back to 1943 he fights Nazis alongside his ancestor. And in both time periods, the good guys are the underdogs. The Norwegians weren’t exactly in a position to stand up to the German Army, and the rebels of New London have only an unreliable time machine that has yet to be tested on humans. It’s a little bit like Star Wars in that way, only with actual Stormtroopers.
