Book Review: 'Time Travelers' edited by Gardner Dozois
'Time Travelers: From Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine' (275 pp.) was edited by Gardner Dozois and published by Ace Books in March 1989. The cover art is by Colin Hay.
This anthology features stories, all published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine over the interval from 1976 to 1986, that deal with time travel.
This anthology is interesting in terms of providing a comparative showcase of older, established sci-fi writers, whose submissions to IASFM display the persistence of New Wave-era themes and prose styles; and newer writers, allied with the still-emerging genre of cyberpunk.
The editors of IASFM were more accommodating to submissions from established authors like Aldiss, Watson, Varley, and Silverberg. Obviously this policy was informed by the value of having 'name' authors advertised on the magazine cover.
My summary of the contents:
Air Raid, by John Varley (1976): travelers from the future teleport into airplanes, as part of a scheme to save the human race. This story later was expanded into Varley's 1983 novel 'Millennium.'
The Small Stones of Tu Fu, by Brian W. Aldiss (1978): a traveler from the future obtains comfort from the Zen musings of an elderly Chinese sage. An effort by Aldiss to write something 'profound', something New Wave. I found this story underwhelming.
Time and Hagakure, by Steven Utley (1977): a Japanese man is able to telepathically communicate with those living in the past. Can he change the fate of people dear to him ?
The Comedian, by Tim Sullivan (1982): Chris Reilly is doing bad things, because a hologram, sent from the future, is telling him to........There is a 'shock' ending.
Twilight Time, by Lewis Shiner (1984): Travis travels back in time to 1961, and his boyhood home of Globe, Arizona, where Ace Doubles, True, and 'Rip Hunter' comics beckon from the racks of the National News stand. His dreams of renewal and redemption are on the verge of fulfilment. There's just a slight problem: Travis's Globe didn't have a swath of vitrified dirt lying across the road into town........! This is the best entry in the anthology.
Sailing to Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg (1985): Charles Phillips has been transported from the USA of 1984 to the 50th century, where there are only 4 million people on the planet, and these people enjoy remarkable luxury and comfort due to advanced technologies. Is there a catch to the lives of splendor enjoyed by the lotus eaters of the 50th century ? Maybe.........
This novelette won the 1985 Nebula award. This shouldn't be all that surprising, since it's basically a reboot of Silverberg's novelette 'Born With the Dead', which won the Nebula in 1974.
'Sailing' is very much a piece from the New Wave era. It is resolute in exploring humanistic themes; a prose style so lyrical, as to be overwritten; the standard-issue Silverberg protagonist, which is a sensitive man afflicted (or blessed) simultaneously with amnesia and anomie; a meandering plot culminating in a revelation about one's sense of Self. 'Sailing' badly suffers when compared to the leaner, more taut storytelling of Shiner.
Ghost Lecturer, by Ian Watson (1984): the Roman poet Lucius Accius is brought forward in time as a promotion and marketing stunt by the scheming television producer Jim Roseberry. However, the way Lucius sees the world and the things in it is very different from the way we in the 20th century see things. So there will be consequences......
This is another of the weaker stories in the anthology. It's a New Wave piece from Watson that seeks to use sci-fi as a vehicle to say something Profound about the phenomenon of Perception. It may have been trendy had it seen print in 1973, but in 1984, it seems tepid and dated.
Hauntings, by Kim Antieau (1985): Kate enjoys living in an old farmhouse, even if late at night she hears people whispering in her ear.
Klein's Machine, by Andrew Weiner (1985): Phil Klein is a nice Jewish boy. Very smart, but psychologically troubled. He is found semi-comatose on a Greyhound bus, and eventually a shrink pries loose from Phil an incredible tale, one of travel into the far future. This story has a quirky sort of originality, but the ending has an ambiguous quality that left me unimpressed.
The Pure Product, by John Kessel (1986): people from the future are able to travel to our present, and do Bad Things with impunity. This story tries to say something Profound about free will and the nature of existence. It's too scattered to be very effective.
Aymara, by Lucius Shepard (1986): writer William Page Corson investigates a tale about a strange, ruined city deep in the Honduran jungle, and a time travel incident involving a woman from the future - named Aymara.
This novelette starts off on a promising note, but too-quickly devolves into a melodrama where the actions of the characters are told, not shown. The time travel component of the narrative has a perfunctory quality, as author Shepard is more concerned with documenting the travail of lost love.
The verdict ? 'Time Travelers' really only has one good story, that being the entry from Lewis Shiner. Too many of the other contributions settle for predictable, 'softer' storytelling outcomes, rather than trying to do more involved, hard-sf oriented treatments of the theme. The anthology gets a Two-Star Rating.
