Background
The background strongly resembles that of H. Beam Piper's Paratime series and Keith Laumer's Imperium Series. One tribute paid to Piper's series is the names of the inventors of temporal transposition: Ghaldron and Hesthor in Piper, Galbraith and Hester in Turtledove. In all of the series the "home timeline" was running low on resources, and it has used its knowledge of time to covertly import supplies from other Earths and save their civilization from collapse. The most important difference is the nature of the home timeline. Piper's world was inhabited by a culture which had been technologically advanced for thousands of years and was even more distantly related to our own. Laumer's series had a civilization that was less advanced than our own in almost every way except for their travel technology. Turtledove's world, although set in the 2090s, resembles our 2010s, with modest general advances in technology plus the crosstime capability.
The books are young adult novels with teenage protagonists, who frequently become stranded in dangerous alternate worlds and must adapt to survive. Their adventures give them increased appreciation for the benefits of living in a civilized, high-tech society. Invariably, each book has two viewpoint characters, a boy and a girl - different ones in each book; in most books one of them is from the home timeline and the other from a visited alternate, which greatly decreases the chances of love interest developing between them being successfully consummated.
While there is considerable violence, the language and plots are restricted by the intended audience. For instance, In High Places includes the prospect of an enslaved girl being sexually abused, but does not use the word "rape" (although the word is later used in The Valley-Westside War).
Read more about this topic: Crosstime Traffic
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