August Books 11) October the First is Too Late

[nwhyte]

11) October the First is Too Late, by Fred Hoyle

Comments

[qatsi]

The way you've described it, it could have provided ideas for The War Games, too. Unfortunately, Hoyle has a mixed reputation as a scientist, possibly due to his stereotypically proud and bloody-minded Yorkshire personality: credited with significant work on the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars, but tarred with his refusal to give up the Steady-State theory of the universe, when substantial evidence in favour of the Big Bang came to light. Suspecting his fiction would have the same drawbacks, I've never been tempted by it, though this does sound interesting.

[nwhyte]

I was converted to Hoyle as a personality (though not as a scientific thinker) by reading a very long and personal essay he wrote for one of the major astronomical journals back in the days when I was still interested in that kind of thing (probably during my summer at the RGO in 1988, though Hoyle's essay must have dated from long before that). His books are not great literature but are at leaast thought-provoking. Unfortunately I don't think his teaming up with his son Geoffrey resulted in better books being written - rather the reverse!

[autopope]

October the First is Too Late has, I'll note, spawned a number of imitators recently -- Eric Flint's highly successful 1632 franchise and S. M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time trilogy draw on the basic idea of temporally-displaced geographical areas, while Steve Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke (presumably in sharecropping mode) have a novel out that's an almost exact reprise of the same McGuffin. Indeed, on soc.history.what-if (the counterfactuals newsgroup) the whole subgenre has been given an acronym: ISOT (for Island in the sea of time), as in "what if we ISOT Japan, circa November 6th, 2004, back to November 6th, 1941? With Admiral Yamato's fleet already at sea?"

I've been tempted to do one myself, but it'd take a lot of research and the howls of outrage my proposed plot would produce are daunting. (Israel, at 8pm on October 5th, 1973 -- literally on the eve of the Yom Kippur War -- is suddenly and bewilderingly transposed into June 30th, 1940. And guess where that one's going?)

[nwhyte]

Very interesting - do you think Hoyle was actually the first to come up with this idea? Wouldn't surprise me.

[autopope]

I believe he was -- but I'm not certain. (I'll ask on rec.arts.sf.written.)

As an astrophysicist and cosmologist I'll note he was considered by many to have been unjustly denied a Nobel prize. He was wrong about some stuff, but when he was right, he was very right.