Customer Reviews

The Year of the Quiet Sun (The Gregg Press science fiction series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book when it first came out, thirty years ago, and I'd forgotten most of the details. But I remembered enjoying it a great deal, so I set out to find it again, and Inter-Library Loan came through. (They usually do.) It's only 250 pages, a pretty fast read -- and now I know why it had stuck with me all these years.

Brian Chaney is an epigrapher in Hebrew and Aramaic documents, translator of a recently discovered scroll at Qumran which has upset a lot of people. He's also a demographer and futurist and has written a report for the government laying out probable trends for the near future. (The story begins in 1978, which was also the near future for Tucker, who feared the repressive trends he himself observed in the late Sixties.) Chaney gets drafted for a secret project run by the Bureau of Weights and Measures (a nice touch), which has managed to build a forward-traveling time machine. He and his two colleagues -- a no-nonsense Army major and a freewheeling Navy commander -- will journey to the end of the 20th century to see if those trends have panned out, to bring back information to allow the government of 1978 to lay its plans to deal with future problems. But the President, naturally, sets the target of the preliminary field trial at 1980; he wants to know whether he's going to be reelected. Oh, yes, the politicians will never hesitate to take over science for their own ends, and Tucker knows it. Then there's Katherine Van Hise, known as "Katrina," who is more or less the managing director of the project at the local level. Chaney is very attacted to her, and so is Commander Saltus. And so they make their jumps, singly and one at a time, to 1999 and to 2000 and to sometime in the 2020s (I think) . . . and nothing is as they thought it would be.

This is an intimate drama of Armageddon in Illinois, a reduction of global catastrophe to manageable proportions. The style is quiet and perfectly straightforward, the imagery is both subtle and apocalyptic. And the three time travelers -- and Katrina -- will turn out to be unexpected heroes.

Arthur Wilson Tucker, known throughout science fiction fandom as "Bob," was not a scientist like Asimov or Benford. He was, in fact, a motion picture projectionist from Illinois who wrote mysteries and science fiction stories and novels on the side, beginning in 1941. This book and 'The Lincoln Hunters' are certainly his best (and best known) work, but there was another whole side to him -- the raconteur and noted wit who hung out with the "ordinary" fans at WorldCons, and who held forth at hotel room parties on the benefits of bourbon ("Smoooooth!"), and who cheerfully distributed business cards with only his name on one side and the words "Natural Inseminations" on the reverse. (I still have my card from MidAmericon in 1976.) The fans loved him and he loved them. In fact, Bob Tucker was the first Fan Guest of Honor at a WorldCon (Torcon in 1948). And when the room parties burned themselves down to glowing coals in the small hours, you could find him on someone's balcony arguing literature and political theory and social dynamics as astutely as any Oxford don. He had a longtime interest in Near Eastern archaeology which is obvious in this book. I expect most younger sf fans have never heard of Tucker, and that's their loss.

In idle moments, I occasionally think how much fun it would be to travel to interesting times and places from our recent past - to New York in 1929, to London in 1940 or to San Francisco in 1967 - to walk around, read the paper, and look and talk to the people, just to see how they dressed and what they thought. The future, not so much. The future is scary. As Dr. Zaius said to the Charlton Heston character in the original "Planet of the Apes" from about the same era this book was written, "You may not like what you find."

It's safe to say that the time travellers in this book don't like what they find. This book was written in 1970 or so, and most of the action takes place from 1978 to roughly 2000, but you can read it either as an alternative history or as a cautionary tale, because it seems like a pretty realistic way for the United States to come to an end. If you look at it as a alternative history, it's also somewhat amusing. Tucker writes that in 1980, the weak and ineffectual incumbent president defeats an actor, in what turns out to be one of the last elections. That's kind of the opposite way things turned out in our world.

The book starts in 1978, a world in which the United States has been in constant warfare in Southeast Asia since 1965. There is unrest in the cities, and the economy is bad. The three time travellers jump forward two years to 1980, to find that things have started to unravel, and then separately to around the turn of the century, when it really hits the fan, to the aftermath, and finally to the Year of the Quiet Sun, when it's all over. Even the summers are colder.

As another reviewer said, what makes this so effective is that you only see glimpses of the larger picture. You flash forward to when the country tears itself to pieces, then hear fragments of the larger story from one of the survivors. There's also some nifty foreshadowing and a feeling of doom pervades the novel. Also, if you're interested in such things, you can find a few ominous parallels of the 1978 America Tucker portrays with today's world, although I suppose you can always find parallels if you look hard enough.

I gave it four stars because the first half of the book feels a little padded as Tucker sets the stage. But the last half of the book is nearly perfect; well written, frightening, and above all, grimly realistic. Highly recommended for fans of post-apocalyptic literature.

Dateline 1978. The US Bureau of Standards has developed a Time Displacement Vehicle in the style of HG Wells' famous Time Machine. 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. Clifford Simak praised the novel as being frighteningly possible. 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. 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.

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.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Year of the Quiet Sun is notable as the novel which won the first place Campbell Award in 1976. While not as well known as the Hugo or Nebula, the Campbell award is quite prestigious, and is chosen by a jury based on literary excellence, not just popularity.

Despite its award, Year of the Quiet Sun is not very well known. It is interesting and well-written, but it's particular plot hasn't aged well, and it contains things which may seem anachronistic or politically incorrect. A major thematic element is race, especially the divide between blacks and whites in America. When Tucker wrote this book, he projected the difficulties of his turbulent time into the future and predicted things would get worse. He describes race riots in Chicago of the late 1990s which result in the black parts of the city being barricaded and completely segregated racially. Black militants and white U.S. soldiers prevent either side from crossing over.

The picture portrayed of black militants, and their violent hatred of whites, is particularly ugly. This is in no way a racist book, but it confronts these issues head on and is certainly politically incorrect by today's standards.

Dating it perhaps past the point of continued popularity is the fact that the book is about time travel, but the time travelers only journey about twenty years into the future. Thus, they visit a time which is already past. The world war instigated by a Chinese-Indian-Arab alliance and the subsequent collapse of the United States has, of course, not happened, but one can still read this as alternative history.

The out-of-date events didn't really bother me, although the idea of time travelers from the 1970s boldly going forward to the year 2000 did strike me as amusing.

The main character is a civilian scholar and renowned demographer who has published a controversial book about the origins of the Bible's Book of Revelations. This creates some tension between him and the two military men who work with him on the government's time travel reconnaissance project.

The book contains a rather unusual time machine (it must be plugged into an electrical source), some military action, speculation about the near future (now past), a compelling romance, and lots of interesting discussion about society and world politics.

While I'm glad I read Year of the Quiet Sun and consider a worthwhile work of science fiction, this is not a book I would strongly recommend as a "must read." It may appeal to some readers for historical reasons or because of its specific topics. This is a very well-written book, which continually presents unexpected but logical surprises. Its time travel plot is very original, with twists and developments I haven't seen elsewhere. Nevertheless, there are many books available which are more important classics or simply more enjoyable for contemporary readers.

Written in 1970, this pessimistic time travel novel, a Hugo Award finalist, begins in 1978 when Brain Cheney is more or less drafted into a mysterious government project. Chaney is a Biblical scholar of sorts whose book debunking certain ancient scrolls has irritated many Christians around the country but he is also a professional demographer and has already produced one report for the government predicting how current trends will impact the near future. The government believes him to be perfect for this new project. Who better to send into the future in the new time machine invented by the Bureau of Weights and Measures than a man experienced in predicting that very future?

Interestingly, Brian Cheney and the two military officers drafted into the project with him travel only as far as twenty years into the future, to the turn of the new century, because government officials are so concerned with what they see as a dark future for the United States that they hope to learn enough from the time travel to change that future. Today's readers, of course, have lived beyond the years visited by these time travelers so their adventurous trip into the future has become our past. As a result, The Year of the Quiet Sun reads as much like an alternate history novel at times as it does as a story of time travel.

Cheney, the only civilian time-traveler of the team, has little regard for politicians and resents the way that the President and his staff order that the first trip into the future be only to 1980 so that the President can determine whether or not he will be re-elected. The three travelers, who can go into the future only one-at-a-time due to the limitations of their vehicle, get that information for him but they also return to 1978 with news of the tremendous unrest and violence that is already impacting the future of America's major cities, especially Chicago. It is when they are sent forward to 2000, and just beyond, to learn the effectiveness of the President's attempt to save the country that the novel really takes off.

The second half of the book centers itself around realistic military skirmishes between government troops and the rebels who are intent on overthrowing the government with help from the Chinese, but it also details the evolving relationships of the three time- travelers and the head of their project, the beautiful Katherine with whom two of the men have become particularly smitten. Readers who may have found the pace of the book's first half to be a bit slow in its set-up of the second half action will find themselves well-rewarded for staying with the book to the end. Tucker's vision of the horrible future that could have resulted from the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s is a horrifying one.

Tucker even saves a nice little surprise for his readers until near the end, one that more astute readers than me may figure out earlier, but one that made me laugh out loud at its cleverness.

Published in 1970, this gripping novel projects a near-future U.S. facing intense racial strife and a rapidly deteriorating international situation. A secret military project recruits historian and Biblical scholar Brian Chaney to join two officers in a survey of the near-future.

The future scenarios imagined in this novel are long out of date, but the fundamental ideas of the story go much deeper than that, and it remains compelling even if you know the ending. The real surprises have more to do with characters and their relationships than with specifics about how things might have looked in the early 70s. I just finished reading this for the third time (in 2010) and it remains every bit as compelling as it was in 1971, when I stayed up all night reading it in one sitting. Strong, subtle science fiction that showcases the best SF of the period.

If you like time travel stories, and enjoy a piece that's detailed, believable, realistic, and above all, features strong, three-dimensional characters, I highly recommend this Campbell award winning, long out of print novel.

I read this startling, original and realistic-feeling novel in the early 1980's and was absolutely enthralled by it. The main reason for my excitement was that its subject matter was, and may still be, a curious rarity in science-fiction literature: a graphic investigation of the future of race relations in America. I just don't remember any other science-fiction novels that that dealt with black/white issues, and I've read lots of science-fiction. A few novels by other major SF writers such as Robert Silverberg's "Tower of Glass", or James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" approached the subject obliquely using characters and situations that treated the subject in a metaphorical, indirect way, but Mr. Tucker's "The Year of the Quiet Sun" jumps right into the middle of a futuristic race war in a fearless and blunt way that was quite challenging for me to consider. Also, this novel has one of the most unexpected surprise endings I've ever read in any literary genre. It's a face-slapper, a head-banger, a shattering stroke of inspiration, and it delivers a impact that deepens and transforms the meaning of everything that went on in the book up to that point. This is "serious" science-fiction imagined in a social context that thrusts it way above science-fiction stories that only speculate about technological issues. What a bold and provocative film this would make, especially in the era of Obama! "The Year of the Quiet Sun" (a sublime, beautiful, poetic title, don't you think?) is fine thing, a twilight thing; bleak, grim, yet dramatically compelling, and offering characters whose inner lives, passions, and conflicts are easily recognizable and worthy of your instant empathy. It'll stay with you, for sure.

Time travel ranks as the most difficult of science fiction genres. Though there are numerous stories featuring characters voyaging into the past to change history or venturing into the future to see what will become of humanity, most break down on various points of logic. As a result, in spite of the numerous novels, short stories, movies, and television series which incorporate time travel into the plot, there are only a few in which it is done well enough to deserve to be remembered.

Wilson Tucker's novel ranks among the few in this category. In it, a demographer and biblical scholar is recruited to join a government team surveying the future. As they do so, they witness a deteriorating world torn apart by racial and political strife thanks to weak and egotistical leaders. Here Tucker establishes time travel using a series of consistent rules that work very effectively, allowing him to focus on the plot and characters. These are the true strengths of the novel, for while the future he extrapolates seems laughably implausible thanks to the luxury of hindsight, it is just the background for a poignant inquiry into the fate of society as seen through the lives of five very different people. This results in a thoughtful tale that is a must-read for any fan of science fiction, one that demonstrates how best to tell a time travel story that works.

An involving story that cuts no intellectual corners, but is still quite easy to read. Ultimately, I believe this story deals with man's understanding of history as a mechanism; as a river of people rolling through the backdrop of the universe, with a structure and rules that man can attempt to understand and influence (perhaps vainly). The characters are understandable and easy to identify with, and they spend most of their time doing what people spend most of their time doing: flirting with the idea of love.

This tale of a super-secret time travel project in America of the near future (1978; the book was written in 1970) is a pleasant enough description of how the nuts and bolts of such a project might work. But the plot is merely an excuse for a hellfire and brimstone sermon of the abyss that America and the world are about to drop into. When they jump forward to the year 2000 and beyond, the time travelers discover that the Vietnam war (?!) has escalated into a land war with China, which has led in turn to race wars in America and nuclear holocaust all over the globe. There is supposed to be a parallel with the ancient apocalyptic scroll which one of the travelers has just translated, but the connection is nonexistent except as a boogeyman waved by the author. The characters are paper-thin types who have no interesting roles to perform (a gun-mad, astrology-struck army officer, a beautiful but efficient female supervisor, a timid scholar of Aramaic). Worst of all, the time travel gimmick goes for nought, as there is no perceptible effect of the terrifying reports that they bring back upon the suicidal actions of the U.S. President and the top military leaders. (A single line on page 240 says merely that after reading the reports, the President "seemed unable to control himself and unable to do anything right.") The book is a jeremiad by the author, predicting (in 1970) the imminent collapse of his whole society, without any attempt to use the fiction as a logical argument for such. Tucker has used time travel to much better fictional purposes in ^The Lincoln Hunters^ and other books; here, he wastes it.