Cronos

Rating:
Summary: Three excellent stories which capture the wonder of Sci-Fi.
Review: I don't know what is it about modern science fiction, but I haven't read a fantasy or a science fiction book in a quite while which gave me this feeling of wonder. If you don't know what I mean, try reading the "Time Machine" by H.G. Wells.

Nevertheless, this book somehow managed to capture this long lost feeling - and not only once, but three times! Time Travel stories have always been a favorite of mine, so I was delighted to find a collection of three medium sizes time travel stories.


The first story, "Letters from Atlantis" tells about Roy, who is sent 20,000 years back in time. However, Roy does not travel physically - only his mind makes the journey. Upon getting to the past he finds himself inside the mind of the prince of Atlantis (which hasn't been destroyed yet) - and what he sees greatly surprises him... I'm not going to reveal any of the plot, just that it's a good story - even though it's my least favorite of the three.


The second story, "Project Pendulum", is definitely my favorite one. It tells about twin brothers who are sent to a journey through time. However, since matter has to be preserved, whenever one is in the future, the other must be exactly in an identical "amount of time" in the past (So, for example, when the first brother is 50 years in the future, the other brother is exactly 50 years in the past). The way their journey works, is that they increase their interval by 10. The first brother is being sent 5 minutes forward, when the second brother is sent 5 minutes backward, and then the first brother goes 50 minutes forward, and so on: 500 minutes, 5000 minutes, 50,000 minutes, etc. This interval goes to 90 million years in the future and in the past, which is when their journey ends. As you can imagine, since the brothers explore a myriad of timelines, every jump is a story of its own. Robert Silverberg really managed to do it well - he kept every jump interesting while still not repeaeting himself.


The third story, "The Time Hoppers", has a definite Asimovian feel to it. If you liked Isaac Asimov's "The End of Enternity" you will definitely love this story. The story tells about Quellen - a lowly crime investigator living in the 25th century. Appaerntly, the 25th century turns into quite a dystopia. Too many people and too few jobs cause most people to live unemployed and in quite bad conditions. Many have found that the best way to escape this is to jump into the past. However, the government isn't all too happy about this, so assigns Quellen to investigate how this is accomplished and put a stop to this.

Three different stories, all quite different, but all good - I recommend this book to all time travel lovers, and even if you're not really a fan of this sub-genre, you will still probably like these stories.

Rating:
Summary: Three Time Travel Novellas
Review: Robert Silverberg's "Cronos" is a collection of three short novels that capture his different visions of time travel. Silverberg is a master of science fiction, with an easy-to-read style that paints clear pictures of his worlds, without techno-clutter. Silverberg's work, as usual seems unremarkable when you start reading, but it's impossible to put down. Each of his three novellas chooses a different time-travel focus.

The first, "Letters From Atlantis," details Roy's journey back through time to ancient Atlantis. In this 109-page work, time travel is possible only through projection of the traveler's mind through time. Roy lands in the mind of an Atlantean prince, and through his eyes discovers the magic and secrets of Atlantis. The entire story is written via Roy's letters to his beloved, also travelling in the same time period. This technique does become a little tiresome, as the whole story is detailed through one voice. The ending is somewhat predictable, but the story is enjoyable nonetheless.

In Project Pendulum, a 135-page novella, twin brothers travel through time in a series of offsetting jumps. The first jump sends one brother 5 minute ahead in time, while sending the second 5 minutes backward. Each succeeding jump sends each brother in the opposite time direction in geometrically increasing leaps. Their ultimate destination - 95 million years into the future and into the past. Silverberg paces the novella wonderfully, and the reader feels the brothers' emotional whiplash at being sent from one time to the next. The story is a delight for anyone interested in the concept of time paradoxes.

The final novella, "The Time Hoppers," is the oldest, longest, and the best. Silverberg paints a suffocating 25th Century world as only he can do. It centers on time-hoppers traveling illegally back through time, and the struggling CrimeSec whose job it is to catch the people sending them back. Part time travel story, part detective story, it shows Silverberg's early promise as a writer.

A good addition to any sci fi library.

Rating:
Summary: Cronos
Review: Separately, they may be minor Silverberg yarns--but cleverly placed together, they become more than the sum of their parts. I award an extra "star"in my rating for the wonderful variety demonstrated by Silverberg as he plays with time three times.

The best book is the middle one: Project Pendulum. Identical twins take counterbalanced whirlwind trips through time--past and future--each hoping the other survives various unpredictable eras so as not to upset the experiment. The first few trips are not that far beyond the brothers' present, but then the distance--temporally speaking--between each intended destination along the timeline becomes farther and farther away from take-off point. We're talking thousands, and then millions, of years into the past or future; the challenge, then, for the author is to dazzle us with postulated future, or past scenarios, in a limited amount of pages (this novel moves very fast!). Generally, Silverberg is more than up to the task he has set for himself with this short but ambitious novel--only one far-distant peek at the future seems fairly routine, involving the time-traveller sitting down to dinner with family members presumed dead, but inexplicably gathered together. What is it--a dreamscape? a simulated reality culled from the fellow's memories? I was never unhappy that some of the quick future-scenes were not fully explained, but this one seemed overly sentimental and too easy a choice, given whatever limitless scenarios Silverberg could have designed. But I still furiously enjoyed the scope and awesomeness of Project Pendulum, and the tension only increases towards the end when one twin brother discovers that his counterpart--way up in the extreme future, while the first is at the opposite end of time, the incomprehensibly distant past--actually discovers that his bro is in deadly danger. Incredibly controlled and streamlined storytelling, and yet still successful in bombarding the imagination with a fascinating rush of delightfully freaky chronal concepts! Enjoy.

The Time Hoppers--the last entry in Cronos--is perhaps a bit of a letdown after Project Pendulum. First of all, for a time-travel book, there's not much time-travel. This book is instead about future stratification of society, about a world gone to pot environmentally, socially, economically. Meet Quellen, asigned to find out who is transporting members of the desperate, downtrodden lower classes--mostly restless, unemployed men all too eager to leave their wives and kids--back into the past...to the golden years of 1979-2106 (!??!!). But Quellen has his own dirty secret which, if exposed, could bounce him back to Class Fourteen, or worse, after he's worked so hard to make Class Seven. An unscrupulous co-worker is already blackmailing him, but Quellen really finds himself in a pickle when the mastermind behind all the time-hopping also gets the goods on him...

The Time Hoppers is early Silverberg and seems like a warm-up for the fireworks displayed a few years later, in the author's time-travel masterpiece, Up The Line. This slightly earlier work gets mired in unexciting scenes, and cat-versus-mouse bureaucratic finagling. The time-travel framework cooked up, plus the possibility of dangerous paradoxes, is intriguing, but the actual plot is less than that.

That leaves the first--and most recent--Silverberg effort featured in Cronos (hmmm, cute, read the novels in order, and you travel back in time, Silverberg getting younger and younger...): Letters From Atlantis. A splendid opener, which avoids the predictable ending--ie. our time-traveller visiting Atlantis just when it's going under for the first and last time. We don't get that...or rather, we sorta do, but--well, we do and we don't. And I leave it to you to discover to whom the time-traveller visiting glorious Atlantis is writing letters, or how he does it since he has no actual body of his own (hint: if you want a nice time while transporting only your psyche back to Atlantis, pick the crown-prince to inhabit; just don't let him detect you inside his head!).

Two Four-Star novels placed with one Three-Star novel makes Eleven Stars as a rating. Not practical, so figure out the average rating for each, and then round up to Five Stars for variety. That's what I did.

Rating:
Summary: Cronos
Review: Separately, they may be minor Silverberg yarns--but cleverly placed together, they become more than the sum of their parts. I award an extra "star"in my rating for the wonderful variety demonstrated by Silverberg as he plays with time three times.

The best book is the middle one: Project Pendulum. Identical twins take counterbalanced whirlwind trips through time--past and future--each hoping the other survives various unpredictable eras so as not to upset the experiment. The first few trips are not that far beyond the brothers' present, but then the distance--temporally speaking--between each intended destination along the timeline becomes farther and farther away from take-off point. We're talking thousands, and then millions, of years into the past or future; the challenge, then, for the author is to dazzle us with postulated future, or past scenarios, in a limited amount of pages (this novel moves very fast!). Generally, Silverberg is more than up to the task he has set for himself with this short but ambitious novel--only one far-distant peek at the future seems fairly routine, involving the time-traveller sitting down to dinner with family members presumed dead, but inexplicably gathered together. What is it--a dreamscape? a simulated reality culled from the fellow's memories? I was never unhappy that some of the quick future-scenes were not fully explained, but this one seemed overly sentimental and too easy a choice, given whatever limitless scenarios Silverberg could have designed. But I still furiously enjoyed the scope and awesomeness of Project Pendulum, and the tension only increases towards the end when one twin brother discovers that his counterpart--way up in the extreme future, while the first is at the opposite end of time, the incomprehensibly distant past--actually discovers that his bro is in deadly danger. Incredibly controlled and streamlined storytelling, and yet still successful in bombarding the imagination with a fascinating rush of delightfully freaky chronal concepts! Enjoy.

The Time Hoppers--the last entry in Cronos--is perhaps a bit of a letdown after Project Pendulum. First of all, for a time-travel book, there's not much time-travel. This book is instead about future stratification of society, about a world gone to pot environmentally, socially, economically. Meet Quellen, asigned to find out who is transporting members of the desperate, downtrodden lower classes--mostly restless, unemployed men all too eager to leave their wives and kids--back into the past...to the golden years of 1979-2106 (!??!!). But Quellen has his own dirty secret which, if exposed, could bounce him back to Class Fourteen, or worse, after he's worked so hard to make Class Seven. An unscrupulous co-worker is already blackmailing him, but Quellen really finds himself in a pickle when the mastermind behind all the time-hopping also gets the goods on him...

The Time Hoppers is early Silverberg and seems like a warm-up for the fireworks displayed a few years later, in the author's time-travel masterpiece, Up The Line. This slightly earlier work gets mired in unexciting scenes, and cat-versus-mouse bureaucratic finagling. The time-travel framework cooked up, plus the possibility of dangerous paradoxes, is intriguing, but the actual plot is less than that.

That leaves the first--and most recent--Silverberg effort featured in Cronos (hmmm, cute, read the novels in order, and you travel back in time, Silverberg getting younger and younger...): Letters From Atlantis. A splendid opener, which avoids the predictable ending--ie. our time-traveller visiting Atlantis just when it's going under for the first and last time. We don't get that...or rather, we sorta do, but--well, we do and we don't. And I leave it to you to discover to whom the time-traveller visiting glorious Atlantis is writing letters, or how he does it since he has no actual body of his own (hint: if you want a nice time while transporting only your psyche back to Atlantis, pick the crown-prince to inhabit; just don't let him detect you inside his head!).

Two Four-Star novels placed with one Three-Star novel makes Eleven Stars as a rating. Not practical, so figure out the average rating for each, and then round up to Five Stars for variety. That's what I did.