The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

The three men are originally intended to arrive at about the same time. President Meeks, a weak and self serving man, orders the first probe to be to 1980, to see if he will be re-elected. If the classification has worked, the only people ignorant of the H‑Bombs are the civilians: nuclear bombs have distinctive signatures and scientists the world over must have known and been compelled to keep quiet. Again, a book of its time: parallels are there with Korea and the bombing of Cambodia. The H‑Bomb strikes are classified: nobody in the US is supposed to know about them. They recruit Brian Chaney, a futurologist, among other things and two other men to use the Time Displacement Vehicle to explore the next thirty years.Įven by 1978, it’s clear that this TL has diverged from ours significantly: the war in South East Asia has continued and been escalated, the Chinese are involved and a small exchange of nuclear warheads has occurred: one kiloton nuke from the Chinese and two megaton nukes in retaliation. The Bureau of Standards has a time machine. The Year of the Quiet Sun is nominally set in the late 1970s. Customers want big, padded bus-crushers that make them feel they are getting value for their nine bucks. Probably no market for this kind of writing today.

Tucker has less than three hundred pages to make his points and he uses all of them.

Even the Silverberg I have in the stack which is his attempt to show he has literary chops, is only about 80, 000 words and while the introduction says it meanders, I bet it won’t be anything like the bloated monsters published today. I think the reason I can hammer through these books so quickly is that the language is lean and functional. Tucker, near as I can tell, stopped writing professionally a long time ago and it is a damn shame: The Year of the Quiet Sun has held up well in the last thirty years and even though the future it shows never happened, that doesn’t matter. I still bought a lot of Tucker’s books because in the 1970s one could not be too choosy as the current variety didn’t exist. I don’t think I much cared for this in the ’ 70s.

Minor peeve: it gives away a plot point not hinted at until page 129, I think and not made explicit until the end of the book. Bah. A note on the cover art of the edition I have : I think it is an early Whelan but there’s no credit and if there was a signature on the cover art, it’s been cropped.

The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker