9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An original kind of civilization shock, December 31, 2002
This book's strong opening chapter confronts scientists with the unthinkable: a superatomic bomb has fallen on Middletown, a small American city hiding a secret antiatomic laboratory, servering it from its surroundings; the sun is now red and drawn out, the moon is unrecognizable, the temperature is low. Various hypotheses are considered to explain all of this, and the most unlikely might well be the one closest to the truth. After the initial event has occurred, transmission of knowledge proceeds in a myriad of interesting ways: between scientific and non-scientific Middletownians at first, but then between strangers from the future - some apparently human, some not - and scientific Middletownians (who take on the role of their non-scientific peers because of their relative ignorance). Even though they generally remain on the good side, the 20th century humans' role is decently complex and shows a nuanced way of approaching the space opera subgenre of science-fiction: they frequently reverse roles with `the other' and even become an historical curiosity under the eye of an historian from the future. This novel's structure is careful, every step being taken with a studied internal cohesion and sense of pace. Its position on science remains ultimately optimistic, but it does acknowledge some of the dangers it could cause and offers an original kind of civilization shock.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stands up very well after all these years!, April 16, 2007
I read this book in my early teens in the 60's, and then lost it, and have hunted for it ever since. At last, a friend found it and sent it to me, and last night, I read it again and held my breath to see if it was as good a story as my younger self thought it was.
To my surprise, it really was. It's obviously very dated, and there's some sexism in there that made me grit my teeth. (Especially the bit about the main [male] character's frustration with the inability of the female mind to grasp scientific concepts! Grrr.) And then there was the people's unquestioning faith in science to solve every problem, so that all the scientists had to do when people were panicking was assure them that the science was reliable, so therefore everything would turn out okay. That made me smile a little fondly, at the good ol' days.
But apart from some of those things, the story really does stand up well. It was an excellent examination of what might have happened to people whose entire town had been thrust far into the future of an almost-expired earth. The story poignantly conveyed the loneliness of the arid world, and the deep loss felt by the people, yet it also portrayed their resilience and the power of the human spirit to adapt and bring good out of something terrible.
It definitely resembled the first Star Trek series, in the way it had such faith in that resilience and human spirit. In much the same way as many Trek episodes, you got that scene where the undaunted human being stood alone in front of a galatic council, reminding the star-flung descendants of his world that they owed all their high principles and peaceful lifestyle to the struggles -- and yes, wars -- that the people of his time went through. Very rah-rah humanity.
And yet, the book brought great sensitivity to the question of what it means to have roots. What would it really mean to a community to be wrenched out of the world they knew, with all its interconnections and its known history? And then to be told that what was left of their world was so uninhabitable that they'd even have to leave it, and move to another world altogether? Where is the breaking point, and how much of your own genealogy/history can you leave behind without becoming another type of being altogether?
What struck me as I considered this question was that it would have been harder in the fifties, when the book was written, than it is now. To this author and his characters, the thought of going to the stars induced panic, because the earth was what grounded people, and once they'd lost that foundation, they'd be totally lost. Yet now, after a generation or two of science fiction books and movies and television series, the idea of being a galactic citizen rather than solely an earthly citizen isn't the fearsome thing it used to be.
Or rather, it's not as fearsome for a large number of people. I suspect there are still a lot of people who would feel horror at the thought of stepping off the earth and having to broaden their world so much. It may just be psychologically impossible for some people. And that's one of the main points of the book.
So aside from a few of the things that date it, I'd say it's still an immensely relevant story.
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