"An H. G. Wells type time machine take this chilling story's anti-hero unto a nightmare only a few-years-from-now future, which many people will feel we have earned by our treatment of minorities. This highly entertaining realistic novel is a Hugo contender, I feel." -- A. E. Van Vogt. "The Year of the Quiet Sun is a story guaranteed to make you reluctant to open up tomorrow morning's paper, fearful that for once a story may be truly predictive. The hell of it is that it all could happen without half trying." --Clifford D. Simak. "ONe of the finest and most credible time travel books I have ever read. You should buy two copies of this one-- if you lend one to a friend you won't get it back." _- James White.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A rediscovered small gem,
By
This review is from: The Year of the Quiet Sun (The Gregg Press science fiction series) (Hardcover)
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.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
powerful and moving novel of the end of the world,
By artanis65 (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Year of the Quiet Sun (The Gregg Press science fiction series) (Hardcover)
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.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A forgotten gem of time travel and future history!,
By Paul Weiss (Dundas, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Year of the Quiet Sun (Collier Nucleus Fantasy & Science Fiction) (Paperback)
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
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