otherhood

However, in the Otherhood's timeless headquarters, all this is still to be done.

The first chapter is connected to the story only in that it explains the origins of the time machine later used by the Otherhood.

Rather, the Otherhood's basic aim of creating "a peaceful world of stable hierarchies" has generated countless unintended changes which accumulated exponentially and created this world.

The members of an exclusive club known as the "Otherhood" - imbued with all the confidence of the British Empire in its heyday - do dare.

OTHERHOOD isn't something Ms. Cook-Tench does halfway, either.

Invited to the Otherhood's secret headquarters, located out of normal time and space, Winterset is told that there had been "An Original Situation", whose description suggests our own familiar history.

This society, which calls itself the Otherhood (because it is not quite a brotherhood), was endowed by Cecil Rhodes in 1893 with the goal of preserving and expanding the British Empire.

Of course, feminist groups sport buttons saying [M]Otherhood and FAKE Women (a slam at REAL Women, a conservative women's group).

All this was averted only due to the ability of the Otherhood's agents to go back in time, change the past, and create the peaceful, British-dominated world which Winterset had hitherto taken for granted.

The President thinks that to effect such a change in evolution itself, somebody must have traveled a million years into the past - though the Otherhood always took care never to go earlier than 1893, so as not to risk annulling itself.

Otherwise, in the late 1890s Rhodes would change his will and dissipate much of his fortune, the Otherhood would never come into being, and the terrible nightmare of "The Original Situation" Twentieth Century would be restored.

At this point, the story line leaves the young Winterset and shifts to the President pro tem, who is later revealed to be a different manifestation of Winterset and who travels into the future, something previously outlawed by the Otherhood.

He must go back, prevent Winterset (who is himself) from killing Rhodes - and thereby annul the Otherhood, destroy this alternate history which the Otherhood brought into being, and restore the "true" Original Situation.

For their part, the Angels feel acute pain at any new change, "like the snap of a whip infinitely long" - starting from the very moment when they felt themselves come into being "Oldest of the Old Races, though the last which the Otherhood's changes brought into being".

Rhodes survives, the Otherhood is therefore never formed, and Winterset is trapped in the past and enters the service of Rhodes and witnesses first-hand the ugly and brutal side of Empire-building, conveniently hidden in the later British Empire where he grew up.

However, the energetic Britons of the Otherhood think otherwise; having found out about Last's invention, they take it over and embark on making a sustained and intensive use of time-travel for preserving the peace of the world and the existence of the British Empire (aims which they consider to be virtually synonymous).