It's 2291, more than a century since mankind finally made peace with itself. With skill and technology, agents of the Temporal Planning Commission spot trouble and gently divert conflicts before they erupt.

But if Atlan stage magician Ari Khalik doesn't stop them soon, his colony world will die, so he set out for Earth to plead his case. Meanwhile, on Earth, the conflict between Khalik's renegade TPC agent and the head of the agency has turned into a battle of wits, which was
how Healer Gillian Thomas ended up in a forced coma from an impossible drug reaction. Both sides thought that she was just another pawn in their game of cat and mouse, until she went out-of-body and escaped into the past.

"The Shoals of Time" follows Gillian's desperate search for help, and how it caused 19th century mystic Mark Rosnet to lead a band of 20th century science fiction fans across time to rescue her from the man who killed her former lover and spearheaded Khalik's silent revolution.
People from 1864 to 2378 are drawn into this maelstrom of warped causality, their separate event chains tangling with one another until each breaks free and finds its own ending.

At the heart of the tale are the twin concepts of the Web of Connectivity and the TimeStream — ethereal links between people and the medium that supports causality. When Gillian escapes her comatose body in 2291 and searches the Web for an answer, she stumbles on the two
people that developed the technology used by the TPC to keep the peace — and by Khalik's man to kill her former lover. Shunted back to 1983 to protect the secrets of the two people who could help her in 2137, she begins to search for a way back.

Shana Harvey had "hosted" for a visiting consciousness before, but that didn't prepare her for having Gillian as a live-in guest. While they were adapting, Gillian crossed the Web to answer a call for help from Rosnet, and sat in on a brief hosting with a woman from a future not her own — a future torn apart by the convergence of two different
histories. And when TimeShips from that future set out through the TimeStream to find a solution to their own crisis, they are drawn into the center of the struggle between Earth and Atlan.

Synopsis provided by the author.