{"id":7308,"date":"2019-06-01T16:36:40","date_gmt":"2019-06-01T23:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=7308"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:39:22","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:39:22","slug":"oliver-the-winds-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2019\/06\/01\/oliver-the-winds-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver, THE WINDS OF TIME"},"content":{"rendered":"

This science fiction novel, from 1957, is by an author known for anthropologically informed works; https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chad_Oliver<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(The edition I read, the only edition I have, is a 1975 Avon Equinox trade paperback, one of its “SF Rediscovery” series that ran some 27 volumes. (http:\/\/www.isfdb.org\/cgi-bin\/pubseries.cgi?4<\/a>). Alas, I didn’t acquire all of them, but I do have at least half of them. Page references are to that edition.)<\/p>\n

The novel opens as a contemporary man, Weston Chase, is caught in a storm in the Colorado mountains and stumbles into a cave occupied by, as it turns out, an alien being, Arvon, who has hibernated in this cave, along with four associates, for thousands or millions of years.<\/p>\n

A huge chunk of the middle of the book is devoted to Arvon\u2019s tale. (In a recurring plot crutch of SF novels of this era, the aliens quickly learn English, rather than human characters learning the alien language or pretending that some kind of translation device exists.) Arvon tells about his ship, the Good Hope, that traveled through \u2018not-space\u2019 using a \u2018distortion field\u2019, from the planet Lortas, with a crew of nine. Their mission was to find other planets and other species whom they might connect with. Their own culture has peaked, and they need others to contact, to learn from and grow. But again and again, they\u2019ve found only three types of natives on other planets: primitives in the Stone Age; pre-industrial, war-like cultures; or technological cultures that have blown themselves up. He describes having landed on a planet of Alpha Centauri, and finding only a dead city, overwhelmed with sand.<\/p>\n

Their next try took them to Earth. But their field drive failed and their ship was wrecked. And so they used their \u2018sleeping technology\u2019 to wait thousands of years until, perhaps, a technological society might emerge on this planet. There are some vivid scenes depicting their encounter, in what is later called Asian, with local tribes, before the survivors\u2019 retreat into a cave\u2026<\/p>\n

And so in the present Weston Chase is faced with trying to help these aliens build a spaceship to return to their own planet, here in 1956 America. They head for Los Angeles, and..<\/p>\n

(spoilers follow)<\/p>\n

Chase, still nominally a captive, is cooperative, but the surviving aliens soon survey LA and decide their cause is hopeless; the technology doesn\u2019t exist to build the spaceship they need. They release Wes, who returns to his home to find his wife has given him up and taken up with another man. With nothing left of his old life, Wes gets an idea: using the aliens\u2019 sleep serum, he convinces them all to go back into sleep, himself included, and wait. He knows Earth won\u2019t blow itself up. And so thousands of years later they all awake, emerge, and see a gigantic spaceship flying overhead. They made it, he\u2019s still young, and still has time.<\/p>\n

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The overriding concern here is about whether an advanced industrial society will blow itself up or not. This was a grave concern in the 1950s, only a decade or so after Hiroshima, and though the Cold War has passed, that concern hasn\u2019t gone completely away. It\u2019s an obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox\u2014if planets and presumably life are so common, why haven\u2019t we met, or at least heard from or seen evidence of, other intelligent species? Well maybe because they all blow themselves up, within a time-scale that makes coexistence of intelligent species over billions of years unlikely. Indeed, some current thinkers aren\u2019t sanguine about humanity\u2019s future; Harari, e.g., thinks we might have only another 1000 years, and sooner than that the effect of climate change might curtail continued technological development by its survivors.<\/p>\n

As science fiction, this book is all too typical of the way aliens are depicted in most early science fiction, and in some varieties of \u2018space opera\u2019 to this day. They act and sound just like humans. The play similar roles: captain, navigator, novelist, anthropologist, etc. Their ship has a library, and even a bar, on board. SF has only rarely tried to imagine truly alien beings, but the standard of aliens as just like humans except for funny clothes or facial features has become entrenched in popular culture via Star Trek and Star Wars. Indeed, reading some of these 1950s SF novels, as I\u2019ve been, it\u2019s been startling to see how exactly the clich\u00e9s of that era inspired Trek and Wars in the \u201860s and \u201870s and have become unshakeable decades later.<\/p>\n

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Other interesting notes and quotes:<\/p>\n