The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

Apparently Tucker is predicting what if Vietnam continued and how the president and Congress are heading towards corruption.

Many pages are spent meeting his military buds on the team, the lovely Kathryn and how corrupt the government is, its current secrets and what’s going on in the Asian war theater. We spend pages on the Congressional Record and other statistics. And the political scene is vague as well. We don’t really know much about the rest of the team except in a superficial way. Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker is a sci fi adventure that unfortunately didn’t really get going until page 75 or so! The characterization was slow and yet created an intriguing narrator, Brian Chaney, an archeologist of sorts who is controversial (yeah, a controversial archeologist, go figure) who is brought in as part of a special team to travel through time.Įxcept for Brian and Kathryn (one of the people in charge of this time travel project), it’s hard to care for the rest. 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. These are the true strengths of the novel, for while the future he extrapolates seems a dated product of its times 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.

Here Tucker establishes time travel using a series of consistent rules that work very effectively, allowing him to focus on the plot and characters. As they do so, they witness a deteriorating world torn apart by racial and political strife thanks to weak and egotistical leaders. In it, a demographer and biblical scholar is recruited to join a government team surveying the future. Wilson Tucker’s novel ranks among the few in this category. 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. 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. Time travel ranks as the most difficult of science fiction genres.

The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker