The Year of the Quiet Sun

by Wilson Tucker

Book Overview

Unavoidably, David Cheney becomes part of the future, in which a nuclear war has weakened both East and West, and in which America is torn by a race war. Yet among this desolate world, he discovers reasons for living.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0020298951
• ISBN13: 9780020298953
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Collier Books
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A highly imaginative story about the future of race relations

I read this startling, original and realistic-feeling novel in the early 1980's and was absolutely enthralled by it. The main reason for my excitement was that its subject matter was, and may still be, a curious rarity in science-fiction literature: a graphic investigation of the future of race relations in America. I just don't remember any other science-fiction novels that that dealt with black/white issues, and I've read lots of science-fiction. A few novels by other major SF writers such as Robert Silverberg's "Tower of Glass", or James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" approached the subject obliquely using characters and situations that treated the subject in a metaphorical, indirect way, but Mr. Tucker's "The Year of the Quiet Sun" jumps right into the middle of a futuristic race war in a fearless and blunt way that was quite challenging for me to consider. Also, this novel has one of the most unexpected surprise endings I've ever read in any literary genre. It's a face-slapper, a head-banger, a shattering stroke of inspiration, and it delivers a impact that deepens and transforms the meaning of everything that went on in the book up to that point. This is "serious" science-fiction imagined in a social context that thrusts it way above science-fiction stories that only speculate about technological issues. What a bold and provocative film this would make, especially in the era of Obama! "The Year of the Quiet Sun" (a sublime, beautiful, poetic title, don't you think?) is fine thing, a twilight thing; bleak, grim, yet dramatically compelling, and offering characters whose inner lives, passions, and conflicts are easily recognizable and worthy of your instant empathy. It'll stay with you, for sure.

An Award-Winning Classic

Written in 1970, this pessimistic time travel novel, a Hugo Award finalist, begins in 1978 when Brain Cheney is more or less drafted into a mysterious government project. Chaney is a Biblical scholar of sorts whose book debunking certain ancient scrolls has irritated many Christians around the country but he is also a professional demographer and has already produced one report for the government predicting how current trends will impact the near future. The government believes him to be perfect for this new project. Who better to send into the future in the new time machine invented by the Bureau of Weights and Measures than a man experienced in predicting that very future? Interestingly, Brian Cheney and the two military officers drafted into the project with him travel only as far as twenty years into the future, to the turn of the new century, because government officials are so concerned with what they see as a dark future for the United States that they hope to learn enough from the time travel to change that future. Today's readers, of course, have lived beyond the years visited by these time travelers so their adventurous trip into the future has become our past. As a result, The Year of the Quiet Sun reads as much like an alternate history novel at times as it does as a story of time travel. Cheney, the only civilian time-traveler of the team, has little regard for politicians and resents the way that the President and his staff order that the first trip into the future be only to 1980 so that the President can determine whether or not he will be re-elected. The three travelers, who can go into the future only one-at-a-time due to the limitations of their vehicle, get that information for him but they also return to 1978 with news of the tremendous unrest and violence that is already impacting the future of America's major cities, especially Chicago. It is when they are sent forward to 2000, and just beyond, to learn the effectiveness of the President's attempt to save the country that the novel really takes off. The second half of the book centers itself around realistic military skirmishes between government troops and the rebels who are intent on overthrowing the government with help from the Chinese, but it also details the evolving relationships of the three time- travelers and the head of their project, the beautiful Katherine with whom two of the men have become particularly smitten. Readers who may have found the pace of the book's first half to be a bit slow in its set-up of the second half action will find themselves well-rewarded for staying with the book to the end. Tucker's vision of the horrible future that could have resulted from the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s is a horrifying one. Tucker even saves a nice little surprise for his readers until near the end, one that more astute readers than me may figure out earlier, but one that made me laugh out loud at its cleverness.

A forgotten gem of time travel and future history!

Dateline 1978. The US Bureau of Standards has developed a Time Displacement Vehicle in the style of HG Wells' famous Time Machine. The president has issued top secret orders that a small group of three scientists be sent forward a scant 20 years to apprise the government of the day of the critical issues it would be facing in the decades to come. Clifford Simak praised the novel as being frighteningly possible. He suggested that he would now be frightened to open the morning's paper for fear that Tucker's powerful novel of a world turned very, very ugly would be truly predictive. Certainly today's readers will be breathing a sigh of relief that the world is not quite the place that Tucker suggested it could be but any thinking reader will acknowledge that it could have easily turned out in exactly the fashion a darkly, deeply pessimistic Tucker suggested. While paying due attention to the standard sci-fi difficulties of time travel paradoxes, "The Year of the Quiet Sun" is more by way of a post-apocalypse novel or perhaps an alternate future history novel that deals with rather scary stuff - atomic retaliation, the unseemly expropriation of science for short term political gains, and widespread atomic fallout combined with the results of racism literally run riot! While it is disheartening to read this kind of bleak futurism, it is perhaps marginally cheering to contemplate that courageous novels like this or John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me" may have been, at least in part, the reason that what we now see in the 21st century is different than Tucker imagined. Highly recommended. Paul Weiss

powerful and moving novel of the end of the world

In idle moments, I occasionally think how much fun it would be to travel to interesting times and places from our recent past - to New York in 1929, to London in 1940 or to San Francisco in 1967 - to walk around, read the paper, and look and talk to the people, just to see how they dressed and what they thought. The future, not so much. The future is scary. As Dr. Zaius said to the Charlton Heston character in the original "Planet of the Apes" from about the same era this book was written, "You may not like what you find." It's safe to say that the time travellers in this book don't like what they find. This book was written in 1970 or so, and most of the action takes place from 1978 to roughly 2000, but you can read it either as an alternative history or as a cautionary tale, because it seems like a pretty realistic way for the United States to come to an end. If you look at it as a alternative history, it's also somewhat amusing. Tucker writes that in 1980, the weak and ineffectual incumbent president defeats an actor, in what turns out to be one of the last elections. That's kind of the opposite way things turned out in our world. The book starts in 1978, a world in which the United States has been in constant warfare in Southeast Asia since 1965. There is unrest in the cities, and the economy is bad. The three time travellers jump forward two years to 1980, to find that things have started to unravel, and then separately to around the turn of the century, when it really hits the fan, to the aftermath, and finally to the Year of the Quiet Sun, when it's all over. Even the summers are colder. As another reviewer said, what makes this so effective is that you only see glimpses of the larger picture. You flash forward to when the country tears itself to pieces, then hear fragments of the larger story from one of the survivors. There's also some nifty foreshadowing and a feeling of doom pervades the novel. Also, if you're interested in such things, you can find a few ominous parallels of the 1978 America Tucker portrays with today's world, although I suppose you can always find parallels if you look hard enough. I gave it four stars because the first half of the book feels a little padded as Tucker sets the stage. But the last half of the book is nearly perfect; well written, frightening, and above all, grimly realistic. Highly recommended for fans of post-apocalyptic literature.