best known for his scholarly work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, he was a most reluctant pioneer. The first real test of the Time Displacement Vehicle – and Chaney still uncertain why he had been chosen.
He stepped outside into the chill of the future…’ The operations door rolled easily on rolamite tracks. ‘Chaney fitted two keys into the twin locks and shoved. While paying due attention to the standard sci-fi difficulties of time travel paradoxes, THE YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN is more by way of a post-apocalypse novel or perhaps an alternate future history novel that deals with rather scary stuff - atomic retaliation, the unseemly expropriation of science for short term political gains, and widespread atomic fallout combined with the results of racism literally run riot! While it is disheartening to read this kind of bleak futurism, it is perhaps marginally cheering to contemplate that courageous novels like this or John Howard Griffin's BLACK LIKE ME may have been, at least in part, the reason that what we now see in the 21st century is different than Tucker imagined. Certainly today's readers will be breathing a sigh of relief that the world is not quite the place that Tucker suggested it could be but any thinking reader will acknowledge that it could have easily turned out in exactly the fashion a darkly, deeply pessimistic Tucker suggested. He suggested that he would now be frightened to open the morning's paper for fear that Tucker's powerful novel of a world turned very, very ugly would be truly predictive. Clifford Simak praised the novel as being frighteningly possible. The president has issued top secret orders that a small group of three scientists be sent forward a scant 20 years to apprise the government of the day of the critical issues it would be facing in the decades to come. The US Bureau of Standards has developed a Time Displacement Vehicle in the style of HG Wells' famous Time Machine.
A forgotten gem of time travel and future history!ĭateline 1978.
0 kommentar(er)
