Mon 11 Dec 2023
SF Diary Review: ROBERT SILVERBERG – The Time Hoppers.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[4] Comments
ROBERT SILVERBERG – The Time Hoppers. Doubleday & Co., hardcover, 1967. Avon S372, paperback, October 1968; cover art by Don Punchatz. Belmont Tower, paperback, 1974. Ace, paperback, 1982. Expansion of the story “Hopper,” which first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, October 1956, and was collected in Next Stop the Stars (Ace Double F-145, 1962).
Quellen, a minor bureaucrat in the Secretariat of Crime, found his own solution to the overcrowded conditions of the world in the year 2490: a secret illegal hideaway in Africa. But others have resorted to time travel as an answer to their problems, and Quellen is assigned the job of stopping the hoppers without disturbing the stability of the present time.
There are the usual paradoxes which are brought out, [and] the obvious course of action occurs soon enough, but there is more. Mankind is becoming dehumanized with the intolerable masses of people. Unspeakable crimes and customs are common, sore of a preliminary interlude before the world of Archexecutive Shale in “Pity about Earth” (Report 93), but here they are more forcefully realized. Time travel has this time become the background to an excellent picture of despair.
Rating: ****½
December 11th, 2023 at 10:32 pm
Sometime in the late 60s, Silverberg transformed himself from a rather run-of-the-mill SF writer into an author who not only was nominated for various awards of the field, but started winning them as well.
I apologize for that last paragraph, which, I see now, is not very useful in telling anyone reading it what I was trying to say.
(On the other hand, I had no idea that anyone would ever read this old review besides myself — and I haven’t either, not since I wrote it.)
But it’s obvious, isn’t it, that Silverberg was in the second phase of his career when he wrote the book? Given the rating I gave it at the time, it’s quite clear he was starting to take the standard tropes of the field and do something more with them.
December 11th, 2023 at 10:39 pm
For a review of the book by someone who did NOT like it, you need go no further than this:
https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2011/05/13/book-review-the-time-hoppers-robert-silverberg-1967/
December 11th, 2023 at 11:46 pm
I read this in 2020 and liked it a lot, so I’ll take your review over the one that did not like it. Silverberg in one of his essays says this novel was his best up to 1965.
December 12th, 2023 at 12:33 am
Walker, Glad to know that both you and Mr. Silverberg himself think so well of the book. I’d like to have the chance to read it again, but it’s not too likely to happen. (Too many other books to read, and the print in many of them is getting smaller all the time.)
I didn’t know the book was expanded from a short story published in 1956 until this evening. That makes it sort of a hybrid in Silverberg’s career, spanning in time the before and after point when he turned the corner and became a real writer.