The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 September 2006
by Poul Anderson
Time travel is probably not possible in any practical sense of the term. If time travelers exist, why haven't any come back to visit our time? Or, is our time, in the grand sweep of history, so incredibly boring that our century is entirely skipped? (In five or six centuries, maybe the moon landing will be remembered, if the conspiracy theorists don't get their way, and that will likely be all.) Perhaps time travelers live among us in perfect obscurity. Anyway, there are countless objections to the notion of individuals traveling through time to walk the streets of Jerusalem and witness, say, the crucifixion of Jesus. Most time-travel tales find some way to get around the contradictions. Some confront them head-on and others, like this book, blithely dismiss the absurdities.
For a reader of this sort of fiction, one must also allow these contradictions to slide if one wants to enjoy the potential of the story. Sometimes the story pays off. Many times, it doesn't. Here, in the 1950s, we meet Jack Havig, a young man who has a genetic mutation that allows him to move through time as one swims through water. A small number in the general population has this deformity, this talent, and they cruise through time for fun and profit. Jack quickly learns that a great apocalypse awaits civilization around the turn of the 21st century, more or less because of the kind of cultural decadence flourishing in the 1960s (the book was published in 1970). Anderson pauses here to blame the fall of civilization on a kind of complacency he perceived in the young revolutionaries of his time. (One might argue that complacency we see today comes from an entirely different quarter.) Anyway, young Jack wants to use his power to save civilization. He encounters along the way a group called the Eyrie that is led by a mid 19th-century time-traveling racist and starts to consider the broad sweeps of history and its outcomes. The cycles of history are not so easily manipulated. In the end, though, Jack has to act. The book is tied to some of Anderson's stories of the Maurai civilization, but we have no idea if he thinks of that anti-development culture a good thing or a bad one. This reader's inkling is that technological development, in Anderson's mind, along with a slightly libertarian politics, is more or less a good thing. Anderson's writing here is like much of its fast-paced pulpy genre. It is fairly clunky in its language in an attempt to seem erudite. The occasionaly baroque grammatical construction is like a little speed bump along the story line. Anderson has something to say about history and its heroes, though, and it makes for a curious read.