Reviews for The Year of the Quiet Sun

The average rating for The Year of the Quiet Sun based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-17 00:00:00 Leslee Gunter ‘Chaney fitted two keys into the twin locks and shoved. A bell rang somewhere behind him. The operations door rolled easily on rolamite tracks. He stepped outside into the chill of the future…’ The first real test of the Time Displacement Vehicle – and Chaney still uncertain why he had been chosen. best known for his scholarly work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, he was a most reluctant pioneer. Still, the planning had been meticulous: time, expense and technical resources had all been lavished on the programme. But none of it seemed quite adequate when he took his first step into the unknown.' Blurb from the 1978 Arrow paperback edition Historical researcher Brian Chaney has achieved notoriety by a recent book in which he has translated an earlier version of The Book of Revelations and describes it as merely ‘Midrash’, a word which translates as entertaining fiction, i.e. possibly the earliest known example of genre fiction that we have. He is then approached by a Miss Katrina Van Hise representing a secretive government agency with the offer of a job. The offer, it transpires, is merely a courtesy as the agency have bought out Chaney’s contract with his current employer and effectively seconded him. Chaney soon discovers that he and two others, Arthur Sirtus and the dourly religious Colonel Moresby are to be part of a time-travel project in which they will research the near future. One of Tucker’s favourite themes is time-travel, but his novels are no mere joyride into the past or future for the hell of it. In ‘The Lincoln Hunters’ Tucker obliquely examined America’s romanticised view of the Old West via a Time Agent who was visiting the past to make a record of Lincoln’s ‘lost speech’. Here, agents are sent to the year Nineteen Ninety-Nine and beyond, to discover a racial civil war in which Chicago is divided along racial lines both socially and in a physical sense by a wall. America has also initiated an escalating game of tit-for-tat nuclear attacks with China. The American Presidency is corrupt and has, so Chaney deduces, employed its knowledge of the future gained from the project to foil a coup from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and keep the President in power. Written in Nineteen Seventy, it is, in terms of some political developments, scarily prophetic. To modern ears the dialogue seems a little cheesy in places but this shouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading what is a powerful and serious novel with themes perhaps even more relevant now than they were when it was written.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-28 00:00:00 Johnathan Stlaurent At the moment, I've changed the thrust of my old SF reading to full novels, rather than short stories. As much fun as short stories are to dissect, they're time consuming, and I haven't really had time recently.. So with this, we go to a novel nominated for a Hugo in 1971, which isn't all that old, but still well before our current generation of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here. In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook