The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 15 November 2010
by Robert Silverberg
It is deep into the twenty-fifth century, and the world is a crowded dystopia of thirty billion people. The eastern half of North America is one giant city called Appalachia. The world government is in the hands of a microscopic elite class of leaders who rule from deep within an underground warren. Society is broken up into many layers of class, and one has to be near the top before one has much choice in where to live or with whom to live. Unemployment is rampant, and it is a mystery to this reader as to what holds this society together. But this novel isn't a sprawling analysis of an apocalyptic future. It is the story of one man, Joe Quellen, a class-seven bureaucrat in the police services who has a secret retreat in Africa, a luxury usually only allowed to the class-two group near the top. History of his time shows that during the two centuries beginning in 1979, time travelers from the 25th century were arriving by the thousands. The culture of that time (our time) came to accept the time travelers. Almost all of the travelers started their journey in the five years around the time of the novel. Quellen has been instructed to locate and halt the time travel operation, and to arrest whoever is responsible. But he also must consider the paradoxes one could introduce into the time stream. There is a record of most of the time-hoppers' arrival in the past, and if any of them should be prevented from going back, wiped out of the record, along with all of their descendents and their actions, there is no telling how the present might be altered, or destroyed altogether. Certainly, the leaders are worried about this, and find themselves preventing anyone from interfering with the time hoppers. But maybe that action in itself alters the timeline. There's no end to the paradoxes. This book is more mature than Silverberg's time-travel story Up the Line, and the world and its dilemmas more convincingly portrayed. But it is also a light book, relatively brief; not long on details of the time travel mechanism or the world in which Quellen lives. As in Up the Line, this is a male story. Most of the hoppers seem to be men who leave their women in this dystopia, and the women meekly stay behind. But, as entertainment, the story is often taut and intelligent.
Also by Silverberg: [Up the Line]