Experience October The First Is Too Late Author Fred Hoyle Exhibited In Leaflet

usual, this is not a particularly wellwritten science fiction novel, Still, the setup, like that of Farmer's Riverworld, appears original enough to merit attention, I'm surprised that this idea of juxtaposing different times on the earth's surface hasn't spawned a series or hosts of imitators as it is so pregnant with possibility.
Disappointing. I had heard of this book for decades and had had it in my personal library all that time.
I had great expectations of it, but found the characters thin and the storyline contrived, with no plausible explanation of anything that happened.
Have a feeling that maybe Hoyle isnt for me, still have a couple more of his books that I for sure want to read butbooks now into his and neither have grabbed me the same way Ballard did.
This was alright, but at times the language got so dense I couldnt really understand what was happening.
Character felt pretty flat. I first read this as a teenager in the earlys, I liked it then and I like it now, having just finished a rereading, Time gets scrambled on planet Earth, It's thes in Britain, WWin Europe, and the far future over most of the rest of the world.
Let the fun begin.

Needless to say, there is the usual handwringing about supposed limits to growth, This was typical of the era, and we haven't fully recovered from it yet, Nevermind that population falls as wealth grows, They didn't know that then, They also didn't know that we could colonize the Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon, They didn't contemplate mining the asteroids, nor understand how good we would get at doing more with less.
It doesn't matter. It's always fun to take a look at how the future looked in the past, This book is a good way to do that, Good idea bad execution

The basic idea multiple times coexisting is interesting, But, well,nothing much is done with it, I kept thinking how climate would be affected or how interactions in one might affect others or how the basic requirements of Continental drift would cause land masses to alter.
And usually Boyle would consider that too, But not this time. Point blank i expected hard science fiction and got a softer variety, Professor Hoyle's time travel science fiction adventure is a modern relative of The Time Machine by H.
G. Wells.

Solar beams plays havoc with terrestrial time: England is in the ''s, but WWI is still raging in western Europe, Greece is in the golden age of Pericles, while the United States is some thousands of years in the future and Russia and Asia are reduced to a glasslike plain, fused by the burntout sun of a far distant future.


The central themes are time and the meaning of consciousness, The heroes are a pianistcomposer and his scientist friend, The dramatic highpoint of the book is a magnificent, almost idyllic section on the life and music of the future, in which one can almost hear the compositions of two rivals as they compete in improvisations.
After a slow start, this had a really interesting setup, with potential for some timerelated fun, But Hoyle chose instead to use it as a warning to humanity, which while well done did not fit with the tone of the earlier part of the book.
Read and loved all his books aboutyears ago, Not entirely sure why. The premise is interesting but the characterization is pretty grim, It reads like a series of lectures on physics and musical composition,
The plot concerns a mysterious stream of data coming from the sun, Then different epochs of earths history appear simultaneously on earth, Of course our heroes go off to travel in them, Richard, a moderately successful composer, and his old university pal John Sinclair, a physicist, go for a camping holiday in the Scottish Highlands during which John inexplicably vanishes for thirteen hours, returning both mystified and very subtly altered.
He has to cut the vacation short because called back to London: a space experiment is returning anomalous results alarmingly anomalous, in fact.
The two men fly out to California and thence to Hawaii while they're in Hawaii, suddenly communications with the mainland go dead.
As they and their American friends mount expeditions to explore what's going on in the rest of the world, it's Sinclair who first pulls everything together.
Some entity, never identified beyond a deduction on pthat it's some form of higher consciousness, as ineffably far above us as we are above a nest of ants and for reasons unknown, has made of the inner Solar System a sort of gigantic time machine, and the earth, passing through its temporal beam, has been differentially jolted into different eras of the past and future: while the UK and Hawaii and presumably other regions are still in, Western Europe is still or once more being ravaged by the Great War and Greece is enjoying the glories and privations ofBC.
Most alarmingly, Russia and much of Asia are covered by a hard, impossibly smooth vitreous plain, which Sinclair deduces is an indication that they've been cast into the very far future, where the heat of a swollen sun has boiled away the atmosphere and melted and fused the earth's surface.
Here Hoyle's imagination runs into consistency problems: our heroes visit these regions and notice neither a redly bloated sun

in the sky nor a lack of atmosphere.
Perhaps the notion is that the air from elsewhere around the globe has rushed in to fill the vacuum, but this would lead us immediately to start considering other problematic "leakages" between the earth's different, coexisting temporal zones.


Richard is much drawn to Periclean Greece, and joins a small expedition that ventures there to live among the Athenian people.
The expedition is concerned not to inflict too severe a culture shock upon the Greeks, and thus introduce themselves there as "strangers from afar" and abjure most of the trappings of modern civilization although Richard does take with him his piano.
Because of the situation the novel portrays, there aren't any of the considerations to be taken into account concerning the alteration of the past the visitors thus strive to put an end to the Athenians' war with Sparta, a war which, they know, will if left unchecked bring both cities to their knees and leave the civilization of ancient Greece ripe for barbarian conquest.
They succeed in this through help given from an unexpected source: the Delphic Oracle,

Richard accepts a challenge from a beautiful priestess of Apollo: a musical contest between himself and her god.
A huge audience gathers to watch Richard perform on his piano the god, discreetly, performs out of sight.
As they trade party pieces, it becomes evident to Richard that Apollo or whoever is invisibly playing has created music quite unlike anything he's heard before, and certainly far more sophisticated than the offerings he's encountered so far during his Greek sojourn.
At the end of the contest, he and the priestess agree that the only fair outcome is to declare the contest a draw.
They celebrate this judgment in a manner not usually associated with the Supreme Court at least, we assume not and then Richard falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.
. .

to awaken in the distant future, Sinclair has been brought here, too, and explains that, as he'd expected, at least one of the farfuture societies brought by the "time machine" into coexistence withBritain has been concealing its presence from the rest of the mixedera planet.
Richard's "priestess", Melea, was in fact an explorer from the future who'd come to investigate his anachronistic presence inBC Greece her pal Neria was meanwhile subverting the Delphic Oracle into a fit of pacifism.
Melea introduces Richard to various farfuture technological wonders, such as CDs that are conveniently only the size of dustbin lids.
More somberly, thethcentury visitors are shown a sort of movie of the history of the human species between their own time and the sparsely populated distant future of Melea and Neria.
They learn that, not once but countless times over the past millions of years, humanity has allowed itself to expand uncontrollably until a moment of precipitate and horrific collapse, with inordinate suffering in the wake of each catastrophe the small surviving relic has promised itself that this time they will learn from the past and it will be different, and yet of course.
. . The question Melea and her society want the two Englishmen to answer is, in effect: Is it worth it Of course, there isn't a real answer to that.


The tale is told in the same sort of Buchanesque mode that Hoyle adopted for Ossian's Ride the contrast between the bluffness of style and Richard's supposed sensitivity as a musician works surprisingly well, and it adapts well too to the occasional didactic passage.
These latter are always welcome components of Hoyle's novels here he gives us a few pages ppof happy speculations about the nature of time and consciousness.
One oddity is that the events of the first few pages seemed to me wildly reminiscent, albeit it in a different order, of parts of Ian McEwan'snovel Amsterdam I wonder if McEwan read October the First is Too Late decades ago as I did and like me forgot most of the incidental content, only for it to come bubbling up from his subconscious when he was writing Amsterdam There's quite obviously no question of plagiarism, deliberate or unconscious it's just an oddly similar pair of juxtapositions of events.
It's certainly pleasing to think that something of Sir Fred's hobby might still be swimming in literature's river.
ENGLISH: First science fiction novel using the quantum multiverse, a crazy theory devised inby Hugh Everett III.
In this novel, Hoyle shows, like other scientists, that he does not know how to distinguish well between science and philosophy.
He also shows not to have understood correctly the quantum multiverse theory, otherwise he wouldn't speak about "the original" and "the copies," terms that make no sense in that theory.


In any case, a good adventure story,

This second reading of the novel the first was almost half a century ago has suggested me a post for my blog on popular science: sitelink blogspot. com/

ESPAÑOL: Primera novela de cienciaficción que hizo uso del multiverso cuántico, una teoría delirante ideada enpor Hugh Everett III.
En esta novela, Hoyle muestra, como otros científicos, que no sabe distinguir bien entre ciencia y filosofía.
También se ve que no ha entendido correctamente la teoría del multiverso cuántico, de lo contrario no hablaría de "original" y "copias", términos que no tienen sentido en esa teoría.


En cualquier caso, es una buena historia de aventuras,

Esta segunda lectura de la novela la primera fue hace casi medio siglo me ha sugerido un artículo para mi blog de divulgación científica: sitelink blogspot. com/ Blah. Boring as snot. And, oddly, is about music not time/space, Chapteris interesting. Chapteris dismal and despairing, Everything else is as bad as the reviews say, I thought the ending was a proper copout on this one, I felt as if the work totally lost its way.
A shame, as it was quite poetic in places, Enjoyable and quick read from a very distinguished if somewhat very controversial astronomer, A bit stilted at times in the writing, and certainly in the characters, but considering when it was writtenvery much up to date with physics.
A classic of the what if sf school of thought that was very popular back then, I read this back in thes,: have you heard of a sciencefiction literary exposition an infodump of this new technology or that new idea well here is a book for whom it is the infodump freed of tyranny of literary techniques that has developed through the ages that is all lectures all the time.
this book knows what you truly want to read, so i present, 'infodump: the novel', . . 'plausible impossibilities' is what matters, though i do not think this is what is meant to be dropped by beckett for example, you know, the usual comfort of devices of fiction, of characters, thought, plot, theme, of irony, surprise, emotional lives to fill out rounded characters.
. .

read this because this is my birthdate so no great hopes though i did wonder for what i was too late

there are no rounded characters.
there is a tendency to identify protagonist with the author well go ahead here, even if he is split into two: one a physicist, one a musician.
both remarkable, admired, capable in a way for example philip k dick characters never are, . . and easily slotted in scenes with 'the prime minister', with 'the australian pilot', where men are men and women leave the room and leave presence or memory or even the colour of eyes, when something of import must be addressed, where all 'women' are 'girls' and attracted to our musician narrator no matter where or when because.
. . he can play chopin

so, here you have double the infodump fun: the radical theorist physics man to explain whatever physics can, and then the musician who can talk about the travails of musical composition and performance, music that i do not know in fact or prospect, that might be significant to someone who is both physicist and musician, by which point i was imagining this must be a satire, rather than just plodding, realistic, ordinary poetics for the realities of the worlds explored but why do i distrust infodumps do i really think an exciting, emotional, propulsive plot would speed this up who cares about the cardboard in the foreground and background: just chase after that rogue infodump!.