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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A rediscovered small gem, January 29, 2001
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
powerful and moving novel of the end of the world, December 31, 2005
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.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dated, but well-written and will appeal to certain readers, August 12, 2000
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.
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