The Ordeal of Colonel Johns

Colonel Peter Johns fought for liberty in 1776. Two centuries later, a professor's Reintegrator pulls him forward to demonstrate for the Patriot Daughters of America, and the old soldier finds himself staring at a world that claims to honor him. He meets his great-great-great-great-granddaughter Rebecca Johns-Hayes, a woman who exists because of choices he made, but the America she inhabits is not the one he died to create. The satire cuts both ways: the Colonel is bewildered by modernity, but he's also forced to confront what his revolutionary ideals actually produced. Machines, customs, perhaps a young man who doesn't measure up to his standards, all of it compounds his growing disillusionment. The question becomes not whether he can return to his own time, but whether he wants to. Smith writes with sharp, economical prose, using the inherent absurdity of time travel to explore something genuinely poignant: what we owe our ancestors, and whether they'd recognize what we've become.