The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

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.

I've had people question, every once in a while, why I read old science fiction. Why I sometimes put myself through things that make me cringe when it comes to how they portray women, or hamhandedly try to do something with race. I guess my answer is that because I still enjoy it. I don't think anyone should necessarily do this if they aren't getting any enjoyment out of it, but I still like reading old SF, seeing what was done well, seeing what wasn't, perhaps why, and enriching my overall concept of the field.

Besides, if someone isn't doing this, people are going to keep thinking they've just reinvented the wheel, much as how every generation seems to think they were the ones who invented sex. In other words, I'm a historian at heart, with a Ph.D. to show for it. (Not, you know, a Ph.D. in the history of science fiction, but a solid doctorate in historical research.)  Reading old and sometimes uncomfortable things, in search of why particular ideas took form at particular times, why people seized on this and not that, and what they did with it, that's all my bread and butter. I understand the present better by knowing the past, but more importantly, I understand the past better too, on its own terms and through my own.

Now that I've (somewhat defensively) gotten that out of the way, let's turn our attention to Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun. The first thing I have to say is that Tucker is not done any favours by whoever wrote the blurb on the back of the copy I picked up in my friendly local used bookshop. You know how blurbs are supposed to whet your appetite, and generally give you an idea of where the book starts and what the major thrust is going to be? 

Well, in this case, we reached the end of the blurb just as we reached the last page of the novel. I shit you not. The whole damn book took place before the blurb. When the blurb told me that this was about a main character jumping forward in time and finding the nuclear-wasted post-apocalyptic world of the U.S. in the early 20th-century, and that the main character decided to stay and see what the actions of his time had wrought in the world to come, I figured that that would be most of the book.

It was not. The last pages are him making that decision to stay. We never get to really see much of what his world had wrought. I guess that would be for a future book? (As far as I know, this is a stand-alone.)

Instead, we get a few jumps successively forward through the early 1980s, 2000, 2001, culminating in that last jump some time beyond that, where calendars may not be measuring anything anymore, and certainly not using the Gregorian Calendar.

This is, however, a pretty good book. Some things (*cough*handling of women*cough) are pretty bad, and I imagine a Black person might be able to tell me what Tucker got wrong about race, but there are also some interesting ideas - and perhaps most interesting to me, ideas that I've seen echoed in other science fiction of the 1970s and early 1980s, including a core concept I haven't seen much since.

I'm being oblique, so let me try not to be. At the core of this book is the idea that once the main character jumps forward a few different times, he ends up in a time period where a literal race war is just beginning, a second Civil War in the United States, along racial lines. In other words, Black men (sorry, there's no mention of Black women, which makes me sigh) are fighting back and with the help of the Chinese (!), they've got nuclear weapons to back up their guerilla tactics.

It's not this idea on its own that drew my attention, it's that it isn't the first time I've seen this posited. One of Spider Robinson's very early (and very hard to find) books, also is set against the potential start of a war between Black Americans (although there's at least one Black woman in that book) and whites. And another short story of Spider's that talks obliquely about the recent end of the second Civil War that insinuates heavily it was a war about race and racism.

Interestingly, it took me a very, very long time to figure out that the main character in The Year of the Quiet Sun was Black. I may have missed an early descriptor, but I don't think so. I think it's just not mentioned until quite far into the book, when he jumps forward into a world in which this civil war has started but not taken hold, and is regarded with suspicion in the primarily white Midwest city he jumps to. This is particularly interesting because it means that he integrates into a primarily military facility without encountering the slightest bit of racism, which...huh. And he competes for the affections of a white woman, and loses, but the book never ever brings his race into this. Which I suppose is refreshing, but also sort of smacks of the assumption that we could just decide not to see race, and that would make racism not happen, not have had an impact. In a world where you're positing things get so bad they lead to a civil war, does that seem likely?

Brian does experience some prejudice when he gets to the military installation, but it's because he's a historian who translated some explosive Middle Eastern pre-New Testament or early New Testament scrolls that call into question the ways in which myth and legend may have been incorporated into the eventual biblical canon.

It does make me sigh, however, that he's the brand of science fiction historian in which he's not only a biblical scholar and translator, but he's also a futurist, and also knows all about the history of the United States, and probably any other history you could possibly name. You know, because we're all generalists, instead of remarkably compartmentalized specialists. I just laughed when the book jumps from his translating scripture to writing remarkably accurate predictions of the future, wrong only because of a few unforeseen events. I wish I could do that!

The prediction that made me chuckle hardest was the idea of licensed nudists. It's hard to explain why, it's just the idea that a) nudity would be so common that nudists could roam the streets but b) they'd still have to have papers to prove it and c)...would have somewhere to carry those papers? (This prediction doesn't come true because of nuclear winter, but you know, best laid plans gang aft aglae.)

This was a solid, entertaining read, although the main female character was there to never travel in time other than at the usual one-minute-per-minute speed. She was really there to be wooed by two separate members of the time team, and doesn't so much choose one of them, as that one of them tries harder and that makes the difference - so while she's not a terrible female character, she's not one with any real kind of agency. And is frequently described in terms of how she looks in a swimsuit, which happens remarkably often for a book about a military installation devoted to going forward through time. You know how it is.

I would love to go through and talk about this book in more depth, and to trace some of the idea backwards and forwards. If I ever do start a science fiction podcast, I suspect I'd want to cover this book at some point.