Galway@UTAH-20@sri-unix.UUCP (07/15/83)
From: William Galway <Galway@UTAH-20>
(Flaming and some spoiling here.)
I found it very interesting to read the glowing reviews of James
Hogan that recently appeared in SF-LOVERS. My own experience has
been rather different. Although I realize that different people
have different tastes, I thought I'd point out that I've been
VERY disappointed with Hogan, and talk about why. I'd prefer NOT
to see replies to this message if they simply say that your
tastes differ. I would be interested in hearing about works by
Hogan (if any) that don't suffer from the problems I describe
here.
I have a strong interest in "hard" science fiction, so I was
really looking forward to reading Hogan. The first book I read
was "Thrice Upon a Time", and I thought the book was so BAD that
I had to force myself to get through it.
I'm a little reluctant to review a book that I can't refer to,
but I quickly dumped my copy after reading it. Working from
memory, here's what I can come up with that was wrong with
"Thrice Upon a Time".
As a work of "hard science fiction" this book used the right
buzzwords--quantum black holes, the uncertainty principle, 3
degree Kelvin black body radiation from the big bang, stuff like
that. However, very little of the science was "hard" enough that
you could check it. When it could be checked it was wrong.
Well, actually I can only remember two mistakes, (but that's all
I can remember that was checkable). One of the mistakes occurs
when Hogan spends several pages in describing a very hairy
particle accelerator (used in a fusion reactor). Very early in
the description he mentions a distance that the particles travel,
how long it takes to travel the distance, and the fact that the
particles are traveling near the speed of light. If you bother
to check, light travels at a very different speed in Hogan's
universe than it does in ours.
The other mistake relates to how signals travel from future to
past using his magical "time machine" (which sends information,
not physical objects). Early in the book one of the characters
talks about how the information spreads out from a point at the
speed of light. My impression is that it looks like this figure:
.
^ . <-- wave front of signal
| .
| .
Space . Time Axis
Axis .<-- signal starts here Past ---> Future
.
.
.
.
.
So far, so good. BUT, Hogan makes the point that this all
happens at the speed of light with respect to the "fixed"
universe, and that the Earth is moving quite rapidly with respect
to this universe. (Presumably, as determined by our Doppler
shift with respect to the background big bang radiation.) This
was supposed to have some sort of influence on how far back in
time you could send a message, as I recall. It also shows a
complete disregard for the special theory of relativity. After
all, the speed of light is the same constant from any inertial
frame of reference!
This sort of stuff wouldn't bother me in something like Star
Wars, but grates terribly in so-called hard SF. (Although, I
must admit that Heinlein, one of my favorite authors, also does
poorly when it comes to understanding relativity.) At least as
frustrating as the bad science was the general fuzziness of his
"idea" of "time travel", and his lack of originality, and his
failure to give credit for the ideas. (The characters seem to
think that the idea of time lines is unique to them!) The way
time is supposed to work, as best as I can understand, is that
there are at least two time axes. A person's consciousness flows
along the "usual" time axis under normal circumstances, but sort
of jumps along the other axis when you "change the past".
Anyway, the concept seemed very sloppily conceived to me, but no
more so and not particularly differently from other works of
science fiction that I've read. (Two that come to mind are "The
Time Tunnel" (not the same as the TV series), by ????, and
"October the First is Too Late" (??) by Hoyle--I thought both of
these books were also pretty bad.)
What about the characterizations and quality of writing? I found
these disappointing too. One of the characters is Scottish.
Sometimes his "accent" is very thick. More often, he sounds just
like the other characters, the effect is almost comic. All the
characters talk a lot (too much), and they all sound alike (as a
general rule).
I'd say the high point of the book was the romantic interest:
will he get the girl of his dreams this time around??
Rather reluctantly, at the suggestion of a friend who loaned me
the book, I also read "The Two Faces of Tomorrow". I didn't have
to force myself to finish the book, it was OK by my standards,
but certainly not great. One of the things that bothered me
about this book (and the other) was that I felt like the setting
was the early 1960's despite the futuristic trappings. It
certainly seemed odd to hear characters saying, in effect, "Well,
if our super-duper-hyper computer network starts giving us
trouble we can always pull the plug". Pull the plug on a system
that's presumably responsible for traffic control, power load
balancing, medical diagnosis, airline reservations, banking
records, ballistic computations for space flights, ...? I'd
call "unplugging" a bit simplistic.
Well, enough. My personal decision is to pick up another Hogan
work sometime when I don't expect too much--probably the "Giants
of Ganymede" stuff. Maybe in the next two years or so.
-- Will Galway
Galway@UTAH-20
harpo!utah-cs!galway
-------tim@unc.UUCP (07/18/83)
It's a bit ridiculous to accuse someone of using bad science and
then go off into buzzword gibberish yourself. This has been done
twice with James Hogan books recently, once with someone asking if a
temporal loop was the time equivalent of a black hole, the other
talking blithely about special relativity in a totally inappropriate
context. If the science were real, then they'd be selling it, not
writing about it. Give the writers a break.
Long explanations of "how things work" in science fiction are a
pain anyway. If the science works today, it'll be obsolete soon; if
it doesn't, then you're just wasting our time with nonsense. Hogan
and Niven strike the balance here quite well, I think.
______________________________________
The overworked keyboard of Tim Maroney
duke!unc!tim (USENET)
tim.unc@udel-relay (ARPA)
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill