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Eschaton Sequence #1
The Other End of Time
Sent to investigate alien signals warning of the destruction of Earth by the malevolent Horch, a group of astronomers led by Dan Dannerman is taken prisoner by aliens with their own diabolical plans for Earth, but these aliens have underestimated the ingenuity of their human captives.
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First published October 1, 1996
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About the author
Frederik Pohl
1,151 books1,052 followersFrederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine IF winning the Hugo for IF three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
January 7, 2020
Questo romanzo mi è particolarmente caro, perché è stato il primo che ho letto di questo ottimo autore di science-fiction e poi perché lo vedevo ogni volta che entravo al supermarket e ce n'erano una cesta piena e nessuno se li filava. Poi mi decisi a comprarlo e lo divorai. Il fatto che la cesta restava piena mi poneva tante riflessioni, soprattutto pensavo che la gente non ama per niente la fantascienza ma soprattutto non legge. Peccato davvero, non sanno quello che si perdono.
l'avventura inizia quando le stazioni televisive di tutto il mondo captano uno strano messaggio di origine extraterrestre. Contemporaneamente, sullo Starlab, un osservatorio astronomico abbandonato, che orbita intorno alla Terra, viene rivelata un'inspiegabile emissione di energia. L'astronoma Pat Adcock, che è la proprietaria dello Starlab, si reca sulla vecchia stazione per scoprire le cause del fenomeno, ma in cuor suo è convinta che si tratti di tecnologia aliena, il cui possesso le farebbe guadagnare un mucchio di quattrini. Anche i suoi stretti collaboratori, tra cui la scienziata ultranovantenne Rosaleen Artzybachova, l'astronauta Jimmy Peng-tsy e l'agente segreto Dan Dannerman, sono a conoscenza del piano di Pat e partecipano alla spedizione. Ma il gruppetto, giunto sullo Starlab, viene catturato dall'alieno Pisolo (si ha il nome di un celebre nano) e, trasportato su un pianeta sconosciuto, è rinchiuso in una cella esagonale dalle pareti a specchio. Dopo qualche tempo, Pisolo spiega ai terrestri che il suo popolo è alla ricerca di razze intelligenti con cui allearsi nella guerra contro degli alieni molto crudeli: gli Orchi. La posta in gioco è l'egemonia su quell'avvenimento di cui parla la religione: la resurrezione dei corpi e l'immortalità. La differenza, rispetto alla tradizione religiosa, è che tale "punto omega" o, come lo chiama Pohl, eschaton è confermato dalla scienza.
Ecco ripresentarsi lo stile di Pohl: i motivi avventurosi e orrorifici vivono accanto a quelli sentimentali, psicologici e religiosi. Qua certamente prevale l'elemento horror: gli alieni sono ripugnanti, ma ripugnanti anche gli esperimenti che essi fanno coi terrestri (gli infilano delle microspie nel cervello senza anestesia, per non parlare di una vera e propria clonazione selvaggia senza morale alcuna). La loro detenzione è a dir poco degradante: ad esempio essi devono stare tutto il tempo nudi e fare i loro bisogni davanti a tutti gli altri, per terra. Il personaggio della storia dall'approfondimento psicologico più marcato è certamente quello di Pat: colei che comanda ma dalla quale esce tutta la sua femminilità.
Sulla religione: Pohl, abituato, come tanti contemporanei, a vedere il mondo attraverso il filtro della scienza (anzi, di certa scienza), non sembra accettare l'idea della presenza di Dio nel mondo, presenza che, se non andiamo errati, è alla base del libro di Frank J.Tipler, La fisica dell'immortalità (The Physics of Immortality, 1994), che lo stesso Pohl cita in appendice al suo romanzo.
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Riletto nel 2020: che dire, confermo quanto scritto qua sopra e aggiungo: bella storia di fantascienza con una trama molto frizzante (seppur da quando vengono imprigionati i protagonisti vivono praticamente in modo claustrofobico per buona parte della storia) e Dan sembra essere un Ian Solo più riflessivo ma grazie a lui i nostri riusciranno, in un certo qual modo, a fuggire via dalla prigionia che pare infinita.
l'avventura inizia quando le stazioni televisive di tutto il mondo captano uno strano messaggio di origine extraterrestre. Contemporaneamente, sullo Starlab, un osservatorio astronomico abbandonato, che orbita intorno alla Terra, viene rivelata un'inspiegabile emissione di energia. L'astronoma Pat Adcock, che è la proprietaria dello Starlab, si reca sulla vecchia stazione per scoprire le cause del fenomeno, ma in cuor suo è convinta che si tratti di tecnologia aliena, il cui possesso le farebbe guadagnare un mucchio di quattrini. Anche i suoi stretti collaboratori, tra cui la scienziata ultranovantenne Rosaleen Artzybachova, l'astronauta Jimmy Peng-tsy e l'agente segreto Dan Dannerman, sono a conoscenza del piano di Pat e partecipano alla spedizione. Ma il gruppetto, giunto sullo Starlab, viene catturato dall'alieno Pisolo (si ha il nome di un celebre nano) e, trasportato su un pianeta sconosciuto, è rinchiuso in una cella esagonale dalle pareti a specchio. Dopo qualche tempo, Pisolo spiega ai terrestri che il suo popolo è alla ricerca di razze intelligenti con cui allearsi nella guerra contro degli alieni molto crudeli: gli Orchi. La posta in gioco è l'egemonia su quell'avvenimento di cui parla la religione: la resurrezione dei corpi e l'immortalità. La differenza, rispetto alla tradizione religiosa, è che tale "punto omega" o, come lo chiama Pohl, eschaton è confermato dalla scienza.
Ecco ripresentarsi lo stile di Pohl: i motivi avventurosi e orrorifici vivono accanto a quelli sentimentali, psicologici e religiosi. Qua certamente prevale l'elemento horror: gli alieni sono ripugnanti, ma ripugnanti anche gli esperimenti che essi fanno coi terrestri (gli infilano delle microspie nel cervello senza anestesia, per non parlare di una vera e propria clonazione selvaggia senza morale alcuna). La loro detenzione è a dir poco degradante: ad esempio essi devono stare tutto il tempo nudi e fare i loro bisogni davanti a tutti gli altri, per terra. Il personaggio della storia dall'approfondimento psicologico più marcato è certamente quello di Pat: colei che comanda ma dalla quale esce tutta la sua femminilità.
Sulla religione: Pohl, abituato, come tanti contemporanei, a vedere il mondo attraverso il filtro della scienza (anzi, di certa scienza), non sembra accettare l'idea della presenza di Dio nel mondo, presenza che, se non andiamo errati, è alla base del libro di Frank J.Tipler, La fisica dell'immortalità (The Physics of Immortality, 1994), che lo stesso Pohl cita in appendice al suo romanzo.
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Riletto nel 2020: che dire, confermo quanto scritto qua sopra e aggiungo: bella storia di fantascienza con una trama molto frizzante (seppur da quando vengono imprigionati i protagonisti vivono praticamente in modo claustrofobico per buona parte della storia) e Dan sembra essere un Ian Solo più riflessivo ma grazie a lui i nostri riusciranno, in un certo qual modo, a fuggire via dalla prigionia che pare infinita.
July 31, 2016
This selection was a roaming the scifi aisle with my head tilted to read titles pick. Just titles. I liked this one. I don't think I've read any Pohl, couldn't claim if that's my choice or I've forgotten. This novel was published in 1996. A cryptic message has arrived on earth from not earth. Our five protagonists are introduced to us in the first paragraph by what kind of day they're having. A very cool beginning. Key players are Dan Dannerman, and his in-laws', uncle's neighbor's, former roommate's (when this is laid out in true lineage, I thought immediately of Dark Helmet in Spaceballs) cousin Dr. Patrice Dannerman Bly Metcalf Adcock, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., D.H.L. and Sc.D. (a literary litany that made me think "Danger, Linda Robinson!") Pat runs the Dannerman Observatory and has a keen interest in the space message, as will her cousin Dan as the plot thickens. A mad dash to get back out to an abandoned SpaceLab, complete with floating long-dead leftover astronaut, ensues. We've got money, politics, clandestine organizations; Florida as a pseudo country, complete with gold-braided military leader, and a horny Chinese-Indonesian-(catching a theme here?) astronaut who may or may not still have a job as a pilot. I liked Dr. Rosaleen Artzybachova (an instrument specialist) who is a spry and capable 90 year old. She had potential to be a redemptive character, but not so much. Should have suspected with her last name. I think a private snicker I'm not getting is in her name. There are aliens, machines, and the usual Terran misidentification of which are the bad aliens and which are the good. This is a good plot that lost its footing and subsequently-its mind- in Act 3. There is a religious backstory that may be Pohl's oeuvre. It got to be a little. Too much. Gender issues and plain dumb sex stuff throughout. So. meh. And then I read the "Author's Note" at the back. "One of the questions that confront a science-fiction reader is to decide how much of the science in a story is real." Ugh. Pedantic. "I don't personally make up much in my writing." Ugh. Patronizing. That explained sumpin' sumpin' as my grandmother would say.
May 10, 2008
As I was reading the first chapter I thought I might have to quit reading it altogether. I just could not get into the
story. I tuffed it out though. The story
became interesting.
Chapter after chapter the story developed slowly and I held out hope that it would turn into a sort of epic. Then I started to relise that I was much closer to the end than the beginning and nothing had really happend.
In the end it disappointed. It held so much promise and unless this book is part of a larger story arch than it has failed to deliver a compelling story.
July 13, 2015
review of
Frederik Pohl's The Other End of Time
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 12, 2015
Ok, I cd spend the rest of my life (assuming I die by the average age for a man on this planet: 65) reading & reviewing Frederik Pohl bks. That's how good he is, that's how prolific he is. I've read at least 15 of them so far, there're something like 79 more for me to read. But, of course, no matter how much I enjoy them I have better things to do. I'm only writing this review right now b/c I just finished reading the bk & I've got a long wait for some movie files to download. SO, why not review this & listen to Beethoven's "Fidelio"? That's less intimidating than making the French Foreign Legion costume I'm procrastinating on starting on.
Right. As is so often the case I'm going to avoid spoilers by paying attn to what might seem like quasi-ephemeral details that catch my attn (let go!). EG: In the "Before" chapter, the somewhat dubious hero has infiltrated "the terrorist Free Bavaria Bund, more commonly referred to as the Mad King Ludwigs." (p 7) I like that. I read a bio of Ludwig & was thinking of making a movie vaguely referencing his life. That didn't happen. The details are in the pudding - or something like that.
& then, a mere few paragraphs later, the reader is treated to a SETI reference (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): "It was a major historical event. It was definitely the very first time that the patient astronomers who tended the SETI telescopes, or for that matter anybody else, had received an authentic, guaranteed alien message from an extraterrestrial source." (p 8)
Now, imagine: it's centuries in the future &, alas, copies of The Other End of Time are nowhere to be found but my review is everywhere. Just try reconstructing its plot from the fragments I'm putting out here:
"["]I'm gonna get rid of this crappy little peashooter I been carrying and get me a real gun. An then I'm gonna take that gun and—"
"Dannerman stopped listening before she got to the ways in which she was going to take the city's police system on single-handed." - p 15
I earmarked that passage b/c it's a woman who's having the violent gun-toting fantasy but it's really peripheral to the story & to this review. But, as I wasn't exactly saying, the proof is in the devil - or something like that - by wch I mean that this next part really got me: ""I don't know about hiring you, though, Dan. It says here you got your doctorate at Harvard and your dissertation was called 'Between Two Worlds: Freud and Marx in the Plays of Elmer Rice.' Who the hell was he?"" (p 26) Elmer Rice just happens to be the author of Judgment Day (1934) about the burning of the Reichstag. To quote from my review of that:
"This particular play is important as a commentary on the political machinations invoking "patriotism" for the destruction of civil liberties. Given that it's inspired by the nazi rise to power thru civil-liberties-curtailing after the burning of the Reichstag (German Parliament) bldg in Germany in the early 1930s & that it was written when that subject was topical, it's educational to compare it to the parallel curtailing of civil liberties in the USA after the mayhem of September 11, 2001." - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...
The devil, too, is in the pudding. Let's hope Pohl's passing reference will get more people to read more by Rice. I intend to. The proof that's in the details is the state of inflation in Pohl's near future (2031 - 16 yrs after the writing of this review): "At the end of working hours, when all the employees were lining up at Janice DuPage's desk to collect their day's pay before inflation kocked another two or three per cent off it" (p 49) How many people really pay attn to inflation?
I've had a particular job since 1996. I started at something like $9.49 an hr (I was told I was hired at $10 an hr but that didn't happen) w/ a vague promise of a 3% 'cost-of-living' raise per annum. Let's say I started at the wage promised of $10 hrly, w/ the promised annual raises, I wd've made:
1997: $10.30
1998: $10.60.9
1999: $10.92.7
2000: $11.25.4
2001: $11.59.1
2002: $11.93.8
2003: $12.26.6
2004: $12.63.3
2005: $13.01.1
2006: $13.40.1
2007: $13.80.1
2008: $14.21.5
2009: $14.64.1
2010: $15.08
2011: $15.53.2
2012: $15.99.7
2013: $16.47.6
2014: $16.97
2015: $17.47.9
NOW, $10, in 1996, has now been inflated by 52.97%, that's an annual inflation of 2.26%, making it so that what I cd buy in 1996 for $10 wd now cost me $15.29. ( http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/... ). That means that I wd be slightly ahead of my 1996 wages by 2015, after 19 yrs of working at the un-named job. However, since my actual wage at this job as of 2015 is $14.07 hrly due to the initial wage lie & the subsequent unreliability of the not-really-annual cost-of-living raise, I'm actually making less than I was when I started 19 yrs before! How many other people are in a similar position?! Think about this:
"Especially in an economic crisis or a war, the pressure to inflate becomes overwhelming." [The US has been continuously at war for my entire lifetime] "Any alternative may seem politically disastrous. Whether it be the Roman emperors repeatedly debasing their coinage, the French revolutionary government printing a flood of assignats, John Law flooding France with debased money, or the Continental Congress issuing money until it was literally "not worth a Continental," the story is similar. A government in financial straits finds its easiest recourse is to issue more and more money until the money loses its value. The entire process is accompanied by a barrage of explanations, propaganda and new regulations which hide the true situation from the eyes of most people until they have lost all their savings. In World War I, Germany -- like other governments -- borrowed heavily to pay its war costs. This led to inflation, but not much more than in the U.S. during the same period. After the war there was a period of stability, but then the inflation resumed. By 1923, the wildest inflation in history was raging. Often prices doubled in a few hours. A wild stampede developed to buy goods and get rid of money. By late 1923 it took 200 billion marks buy a loaf of bread." - http://www.usagold.com/germannightmar...
Thus, according to the above-quoted source, what one cd buy w/ 1 German mark in July, 1914 required 726,000,000,000 marks by November, 1923!!!!! German artists used the paper money as collage material. The USA GOLD site goes on to claim that:
"The many parallels between 1924 Germany and present-day United States are cause for concern. Though the U.S. has not yet reached the depths to which Germany descended in that era, few can look at the constant depreciation of the dollar since the early 1970's and fail to be alarmed. It seems contemporary America differs from 1924 Germany only in the duration between cause and effect. While the German experience was compressed over a few short years, the effects of the American inflation have been more drawn out." They substantiate this claim w/ these statistics: "The largest annual contribution to the outstanding public debt during the Nixon years was $30.9 billion; Ford - $87.2 billion; Carter - $81.2 billion; Reagan - $302 billion; Bush(Sr.) - $432 billion; Clinton - $347 billion; GW Bush - $1,017 billion; Obama - $1,885 billion."
Now, USA GOLD is a business. They sell coins & bullion. Therefore, they have an obvious motive for this alarmism: they stand to make a profit from people believing their position. Nonetheless, they state their case well & German history provides a precedent for both their future & Pohl's.
The dubious hero, Dan, works for the NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) & his boss has blackmail material that she wants him to use for manipulating the people under his scrutiny. One of Pohl's touches is to have some of the blackmail material not be enuf: "Chesweiler, identified as a former member of the Man-Boy Love Association" can't be successfully blackmailed on that basis. Pohl's future is astonishingly different from now in that respect!
Another such touch is one re national formations: "the embassy of the United Koreas across the street. But then Florida was stretching a point to have an "embassy" at all, since it wasn't really an independent nation. At least not in name." (p 76) Can you imagine a future w/ North & South Korea reunited as one country? Can you imagine Florida as seceding from the USA? Maybe w/ Jeb Bush as president?
""So how do you like micrograv?" he asked amiably; then, glancing at Artzybachova and lowering his voice: "Tell you one thing, if my great-great had ever gone into orbit he would've had to write three or four new books. You don't know what screwing is until you try it weightless."" - p 111
I'm reminded of the AAA (The Asssociation of Autonomous Astronauts) from the 1990s. founded, in fact, before this bk was published. Of the 3 web-links I have handy for them, only the Oceania AAA one seems to work anymore: http://www.deepdisc.com/aaa/ . At any rate, their space program definitely involved sex in microgravity. One of my own modest contributions to the AAA can be read about in the September 4, 1998 entry, "Air Drop #2: Code Name: Alpha Alpha Alpha", here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOut... .
Most of my favorite SF writers are prescient in their ability to imagine an accurate vision of the future from the hints of their time-of-writing. "Oh, it was interesting enough, as a souvenir of the days when wars were actually fought between nations, instead of between legions of police on one side, and on the horde of criminals and a few squads of slippery terrorists." (p 112) The Other End of Time was published in 1996. Wars were already like that by then - but the post-9/11 wars have been framed even more so like that.
Of course, the problem is that the 'peacekeepers' are often the criminals & terrorists - so the sides aren't so clearly drawn. Look at the example of the 'peace keeper' sex slavers of 1999 Bosnia. Check out the film entitled The Whistleblower "inspired by the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who was recruited as a United Nations peacekeeper for DynCorp International in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999. While there, she discovered a sex trafficking ring serving (and facilitated by) DynCorp employees, with the UN's SFOR peacekeeping force turning a blind eye." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whi...
Do you ever get annoyed w/ the way people use words w/o an etymological clue? EG: people write "perks" b/c it's phonetically more common than the actual abbreviation "perqs" but also b/c they don't know what "perks" is a shortening of. As anyone reading my reviews knows, I'm all in favor of what I call "abbrevispeak" but I'm not in favor of ignorance. "She was also used to all the perquisites that went with being more or less rich." (p 137)
I falsely remember 1st reading about tachyons in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) wch I wd've read around when it was published. So much for my memory. According to Wikipedia:
"A tachyon /ˈtæki.ɒn/ or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always moves faster than light. The word comes from the Greek: ταχύ pronounced tachy /ˈtɑːxi/, meaning rapid. It was coined in 1967 by Gerald Feinberg. The complementary particle types are called luxon (always moving at the speed of light) and bradyon (always moving slower than light), which both exist. The possibility of particles moving faster than light was first proposed by Bilaniuk, Deshpande, and George Sudarshan in 1962, although the term they used for it was "meta-particle"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
I still have an edition of A Wrinkle in Time. Looking thru it again to see whether there was anything resembling tachyons in it I now realize that I was confusing "tachyons" w/ "tesseract", a very different ball of 8-cell 4 cube wax.
""Hold it!" Pat commanded. "What do you mean, 'transmitted'? Not even photons can exceed light speed."
"Dopey said patiently, "I did not use the word 'photons.' The transmissions are carried by a different particle, the name of which—" He hesitated, while his fingers moved rapidly in the muff. "—is 'tachyons' in your language."
""Oh, my God," Pat breathed, remembering her days in graduate school. "Tachyons! Yes, I've heard of tachyons. They were, what's his name, Gerald Feinberg's theory, right? Particles for which the speed of light was a limiting veolcity, yes, but a lower limiting velocity, so that they could travel only faster than light."" - p 169
"I don't personally make up much" [science] "in my writing. I do, however, quite often make use of scientific ideas that have been put forth by some actual scientist but fall a long way short of being consensual. For example, I did not make up the faster-than-light "tachyons" I have used in this sotry (and in others) in order to provide a mechanism for getting my characters around this very large universe in reasonable travel times. They were originally proposed by Dr. Gerry Feinberg and others thirty or more years ago. Tachyons may or may not exist." - p 347
In defense of my faulty tachyon memory I will say that the way tesseracts are used in A Wrinkle in Time was basically also to "provide a mechanism for getting" [the] "characters around this very large universe in reasonable travel times." I quote: ""Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions, and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it in Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points."" (p 78, A Wrinkle in Time)
I've noticed Pohl's penchant for using older forms of words before in my review of his Beyond the Blue Event Horizon ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... ):
"Then, on p 129 it's printed: "But the relationship had been of suppliant and monarch" in wch "suppliant" was presumably meant to read "supplicant". But was it? After all, a "suppliant" is "a person making a humble plea to someone in power or authority" & a "supplicant" is "a person who asks for something in a respectful way from a powerful person or God". SO, what's the difference? According to http://dictionary.reference.com/brows..., the etymology for "suppliant" is "1400-50; late Middle English < Middle French, present participle of supplier < Latin supplicāre to beseech, supplicate" & can be confused w/ "supplicant". The same source, http://dictionary.reference.com/brows..., provides an etymology for "supplicant" as: "1590-1600; < Latin supplicant- (stem of supplicāns), present participle of supplicāre to supplicate; see -ant; doublet of suppliant"."
SO, when I read: "the U.S. Calvary would come charging over the hill with bugles blowing and pennons flying" (p 231, The Other End of Time) I check my assumption "pennons" 'shd be' "pennants" & look up the word:
"A pennon was one of the principal three varieties of flags carried during the Middle Ages (the other two were the banner and the standard). Pennoncells and streamers or pendants are minor varieties of this style of flag. The pennon is a flag resembling the guidon in shape, but only half the size. It does not contain any coat of arms, but only crests, mottos and heraldic and ornamental devices." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennon
Although, I have to say that mixing a Middle Ages term w/ a 19th century American reference is almost like a tesserwaxian mixing of devil's pudding. Some people might even complain that it's a whipped metaphor.
Funny you shd mention L'Engle. She & C. S. Lewis were 2 Christian fantasy writers whose work I enjoyed as a pre-atheist child.
""So you killed them all?" Pat asked in horror.
"Dopey said earnestly, "It was not an evil act! Do you not understand? In effect, we merely transported them all, instantly, to their immortality at the eschaton."" - p 273
In other words, to heaven. Since it's against most religions to commit suicide, I've always wondered why Christians & Moslems don't do each other a favor & kill each other off? That way that can both go straight to Paradise in defense of their respective religions w/o braking their own rules other than petty little things like "Thou shalt not kill." Oops! That's right, that's what they're already doing! Why aren't they grateful to each other?
The idea of the eschaton as heavenly immortality is another of those scientific ideas that "fall a long way short of being consensual." That's fine w/ me. The only thing I prefer to be consensual is socio-political relations - wch includes sex, of course. The man who proposed the eschaton is:
"["]Frank Tipler. Tulane University. He wrote a book. I also remember that old what's-his-face told us it was a lot of crap, since the Hubble Constant showed that the universe wasn't ever going to collapse again anyway."" - p 336
"Tipler has authored books and papers on the Omega Point based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's religious ideas, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead."
[..]
"The Omega Point is a term Tipler uses to describe a cosmological state in the distant proper-time future of the universe that he maintains is required by the known physical laws. According to this cosmology, it is required for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a solitary-point cosmological singularity. This singularity is Tipler's Omega Point.[6] With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society far in the future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating all alternative universes of our universe from its start at the Big Bang.[7] Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties claimed for gods by most of the traditional religions." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J...
"The stimulus which led to the present story came from a paper by Dr. Frank Tipler, sent to me some years ago by Dr. Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. Tipler's paper, originally published in a journal devoted to religious questions, was quite tentative in tone. However, it appears that, having started thinking on the subject, Tipler began to feel that he was onto something really important. So in 1994 he published a book, The Physics of Immortality". - p 348, The Other End of Time
Now, I'm back 'full-circle' to my beloved Pittsburgh & the often excellent CMU that I live so near to & have occasionally guest-lectured at. Thank you, Mr. Pohl, for having written yet-another bk to get those tesserwax juices flowing in my devil's pudding.
Frederik Pohl's The Other End of Time
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 12, 2015
Ok, I cd spend the rest of my life (assuming I die by the average age for a man on this planet: 65) reading & reviewing Frederik Pohl bks. That's how good he is, that's how prolific he is. I've read at least 15 of them so far, there're something like 79 more for me to read. But, of course, no matter how much I enjoy them I have better things to do. I'm only writing this review right now b/c I just finished reading the bk & I've got a long wait for some movie files to download. SO, why not review this & listen to Beethoven's "Fidelio"? That's less intimidating than making the French Foreign Legion costume I'm procrastinating on starting on.
Right. As is so often the case I'm going to avoid spoilers by paying attn to what might seem like quasi-ephemeral details that catch my attn (let go!). EG: In the "Before" chapter, the somewhat dubious hero has infiltrated "the terrorist Free Bavaria Bund, more commonly referred to as the Mad King Ludwigs." (p 7) I like that. I read a bio of Ludwig & was thinking of making a movie vaguely referencing his life. That didn't happen. The details are in the pudding - or something like that.
& then, a mere few paragraphs later, the reader is treated to a SETI reference (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): "It was a major historical event. It was definitely the very first time that the patient astronomers who tended the SETI telescopes, or for that matter anybody else, had received an authentic, guaranteed alien message from an extraterrestrial source." (p 8)
Now, imagine: it's centuries in the future &, alas, copies of The Other End of Time are nowhere to be found but my review is everywhere. Just try reconstructing its plot from the fragments I'm putting out here:
"["]I'm gonna get rid of this crappy little peashooter I been carrying and get me a real gun. An then I'm gonna take that gun and—"
"Dannerman stopped listening before she got to the ways in which she was going to take the city's police system on single-handed." - p 15
I earmarked that passage b/c it's a woman who's having the violent gun-toting fantasy but it's really peripheral to the story & to this review. But, as I wasn't exactly saying, the proof is in the devil - or something like that - by wch I mean that this next part really got me: ""I don't know about hiring you, though, Dan. It says here you got your doctorate at Harvard and your dissertation was called 'Between Two Worlds: Freud and Marx in the Plays of Elmer Rice.' Who the hell was he?"" (p 26) Elmer Rice just happens to be the author of Judgment Day (1934) about the burning of the Reichstag. To quote from my review of that:
"This particular play is important as a commentary on the political machinations invoking "patriotism" for the destruction of civil liberties. Given that it's inspired by the nazi rise to power thru civil-liberties-curtailing after the burning of the Reichstag (German Parliament) bldg in Germany in the early 1930s & that it was written when that subject was topical, it's educational to compare it to the parallel curtailing of civil liberties in the USA after the mayhem of September 11, 2001." - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...
The devil, too, is in the pudding. Let's hope Pohl's passing reference will get more people to read more by Rice. I intend to. The proof that's in the details is the state of inflation in Pohl's near future (2031 - 16 yrs after the writing of this review): "At the end of working hours, when all the employees were lining up at Janice DuPage's desk to collect their day's pay before inflation kocked another two or three per cent off it" (p 49) How many people really pay attn to inflation?
I've had a particular job since 1996. I started at something like $9.49 an hr (I was told I was hired at $10 an hr but that didn't happen) w/ a vague promise of a 3% 'cost-of-living' raise per annum. Let's say I started at the wage promised of $10 hrly, w/ the promised annual raises, I wd've made:
1997: $10.30
1998: $10.60.9
1999: $10.92.7
2000: $11.25.4
2001: $11.59.1
2002: $11.93.8
2003: $12.26.6
2004: $12.63.3
2005: $13.01.1
2006: $13.40.1
2007: $13.80.1
2008: $14.21.5
2009: $14.64.1
2010: $15.08
2011: $15.53.2
2012: $15.99.7
2013: $16.47.6
2014: $16.97
2015: $17.47.9
NOW, $10, in 1996, has now been inflated by 52.97%, that's an annual inflation of 2.26%, making it so that what I cd buy in 1996 for $10 wd now cost me $15.29. ( http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/... ). That means that I wd be slightly ahead of my 1996 wages by 2015, after 19 yrs of working at the un-named job. However, since my actual wage at this job as of 2015 is $14.07 hrly due to the initial wage lie & the subsequent unreliability of the not-really-annual cost-of-living raise, I'm actually making less than I was when I started 19 yrs before! How many other people are in a similar position?! Think about this:
"Especially in an economic crisis or a war, the pressure to inflate becomes overwhelming." [The US has been continuously at war for my entire lifetime] "Any alternative may seem politically disastrous. Whether it be the Roman emperors repeatedly debasing their coinage, the French revolutionary government printing a flood of assignats, John Law flooding France with debased money, or the Continental Congress issuing money until it was literally "not worth a Continental," the story is similar. A government in financial straits finds its easiest recourse is to issue more and more money until the money loses its value. The entire process is accompanied by a barrage of explanations, propaganda and new regulations which hide the true situation from the eyes of most people until they have lost all their savings. In World War I, Germany -- like other governments -- borrowed heavily to pay its war costs. This led to inflation, but not much more than in the U.S. during the same period. After the war there was a period of stability, but then the inflation resumed. By 1923, the wildest inflation in history was raging. Often prices doubled in a few hours. A wild stampede developed to buy goods and get rid of money. By late 1923 it took 200 billion marks buy a loaf of bread." - http://www.usagold.com/germannightmar...
Thus, according to the above-quoted source, what one cd buy w/ 1 German mark in July, 1914 required 726,000,000,000 marks by November, 1923!!!!! German artists used the paper money as collage material. The USA GOLD site goes on to claim that:
"The many parallels between 1924 Germany and present-day United States are cause for concern. Though the U.S. has not yet reached the depths to which Germany descended in that era, few can look at the constant depreciation of the dollar since the early 1970's and fail to be alarmed. It seems contemporary America differs from 1924 Germany only in the duration between cause and effect. While the German experience was compressed over a few short years, the effects of the American inflation have been more drawn out." They substantiate this claim w/ these statistics: "The largest annual contribution to the outstanding public debt during the Nixon years was $30.9 billion; Ford - $87.2 billion; Carter - $81.2 billion; Reagan - $302 billion; Bush(Sr.) - $432 billion; Clinton - $347 billion; GW Bush - $1,017 billion; Obama - $1,885 billion."
Now, USA GOLD is a business. They sell coins & bullion. Therefore, they have an obvious motive for this alarmism: they stand to make a profit from people believing their position. Nonetheless, they state their case well & German history provides a precedent for both their future & Pohl's.
The dubious hero, Dan, works for the NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) & his boss has blackmail material that she wants him to use for manipulating the people under his scrutiny. One of Pohl's touches is to have some of the blackmail material not be enuf: "Chesweiler, identified as a former member of the Man-Boy Love Association" can't be successfully blackmailed on that basis. Pohl's future is astonishingly different from now in that respect!
Another such touch is one re national formations: "the embassy of the United Koreas across the street. But then Florida was stretching a point to have an "embassy" at all, since it wasn't really an independent nation. At least not in name." (p 76) Can you imagine a future w/ North & South Korea reunited as one country? Can you imagine Florida as seceding from the USA? Maybe w/ Jeb Bush as president?
""So how do you like micrograv?" he asked amiably; then, glancing at Artzybachova and lowering his voice: "Tell you one thing, if my great-great had ever gone into orbit he would've had to write three or four new books. You don't know what screwing is until you try it weightless."" - p 111
I'm reminded of the AAA (The Asssociation of Autonomous Astronauts) from the 1990s. founded, in fact, before this bk was published. Of the 3 web-links I have handy for them, only the Oceania AAA one seems to work anymore: http://www.deepdisc.com/aaa/ . At any rate, their space program definitely involved sex in microgravity. One of my own modest contributions to the AAA can be read about in the September 4, 1998 entry, "Air Drop #2: Code Name: Alpha Alpha Alpha", here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOut... .
Most of my favorite SF writers are prescient in their ability to imagine an accurate vision of the future from the hints of their time-of-writing. "Oh, it was interesting enough, as a souvenir of the days when wars were actually fought between nations, instead of between legions of police on one side, and on the horde of criminals and a few squads of slippery terrorists." (p 112) The Other End of Time was published in 1996. Wars were already like that by then - but the post-9/11 wars have been framed even more so like that.
Of course, the problem is that the 'peacekeepers' are often the criminals & terrorists - so the sides aren't so clearly drawn. Look at the example of the 'peace keeper' sex slavers of 1999 Bosnia. Check out the film entitled The Whistleblower "inspired by the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who was recruited as a United Nations peacekeeper for DynCorp International in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999. While there, she discovered a sex trafficking ring serving (and facilitated by) DynCorp employees, with the UN's SFOR peacekeeping force turning a blind eye." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whi...
Do you ever get annoyed w/ the way people use words w/o an etymological clue? EG: people write "perks" b/c it's phonetically more common than the actual abbreviation "perqs" but also b/c they don't know what "perks" is a shortening of. As anyone reading my reviews knows, I'm all in favor of what I call "abbrevispeak" but I'm not in favor of ignorance. "She was also used to all the perquisites that went with being more or less rich." (p 137)
I falsely remember 1st reading about tachyons in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) wch I wd've read around when it was published. So much for my memory. According to Wikipedia:
"A tachyon /ˈtæki.ɒn/ or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always moves faster than light. The word comes from the Greek: ταχύ pronounced tachy /ˈtɑːxi/, meaning rapid. It was coined in 1967 by Gerald Feinberg. The complementary particle types are called luxon (always moving at the speed of light) and bradyon (always moving slower than light), which both exist. The possibility of particles moving faster than light was first proposed by Bilaniuk, Deshpande, and George Sudarshan in 1962, although the term they used for it was "meta-particle"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
I still have an edition of A Wrinkle in Time. Looking thru it again to see whether there was anything resembling tachyons in it I now realize that I was confusing "tachyons" w/ "tesseract", a very different ball of 8-cell 4 cube wax.
""Hold it!" Pat commanded. "What do you mean, 'transmitted'? Not even photons can exceed light speed."
"Dopey said patiently, "I did not use the word 'photons.' The transmissions are carried by a different particle, the name of which—" He hesitated, while his fingers moved rapidly in the muff. "—is 'tachyons' in your language."
""Oh, my God," Pat breathed, remembering her days in graduate school. "Tachyons! Yes, I've heard of tachyons. They were, what's his name, Gerald Feinberg's theory, right? Particles for which the speed of light was a limiting veolcity, yes, but a lower limiting velocity, so that they could travel only faster than light."" - p 169
"I don't personally make up much" [science] "in my writing. I do, however, quite often make use of scientific ideas that have been put forth by some actual scientist but fall a long way short of being consensual. For example, I did not make up the faster-than-light "tachyons" I have used in this sotry (and in others) in order to provide a mechanism for getting my characters around this very large universe in reasonable travel times. They were originally proposed by Dr. Gerry Feinberg and others thirty or more years ago. Tachyons may or may not exist." - p 347
In defense of my faulty tachyon memory I will say that the way tesseracts are used in A Wrinkle in Time was basically also to "provide a mechanism for getting" [the] "characters around this very large universe in reasonable travel times." I quote: ""Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions, and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it in Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points."" (p 78, A Wrinkle in Time)
I've noticed Pohl's penchant for using older forms of words before in my review of his Beyond the Blue Event Horizon ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... ):
"Then, on p 129 it's printed: "But the relationship had been of suppliant and monarch" in wch "suppliant" was presumably meant to read "supplicant". But was it? After all, a "suppliant" is "a person making a humble plea to someone in power or authority" & a "supplicant" is "a person who asks for something in a respectful way from a powerful person or God". SO, what's the difference? According to http://dictionary.reference.com/brows..., the etymology for "suppliant" is "1400-50; late Middle English < Middle French, present participle of supplier < Latin supplicāre to beseech, supplicate" & can be confused w/ "supplicant". The same source, http://dictionary.reference.com/brows..., provides an etymology for "supplicant" as: "1590-1600; < Latin supplicant- (stem of supplicāns), present participle of supplicāre to supplicate; see -ant; doublet of suppliant"."
SO, when I read: "the U.S. Calvary would come charging over the hill with bugles blowing and pennons flying" (p 231, The Other End of Time) I check my assumption "pennons" 'shd be' "pennants" & look up the word:
"A pennon was one of the principal three varieties of flags carried during the Middle Ages (the other two were the banner and the standard). Pennoncells and streamers or pendants are minor varieties of this style of flag. The pennon is a flag resembling the guidon in shape, but only half the size. It does not contain any coat of arms, but only crests, mottos and heraldic and ornamental devices." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennon
Although, I have to say that mixing a Middle Ages term w/ a 19th century American reference is almost like a tesserwaxian mixing of devil's pudding. Some people might even complain that it's a whipped metaphor.
Funny you shd mention L'Engle. She & C. S. Lewis were 2 Christian fantasy writers whose work I enjoyed as a pre-atheist child.
""So you killed them all?" Pat asked in horror.
"Dopey said earnestly, "It was not an evil act! Do you not understand? In effect, we merely transported them all, instantly, to their immortality at the eschaton."" - p 273
In other words, to heaven. Since it's against most religions to commit suicide, I've always wondered why Christians & Moslems don't do each other a favor & kill each other off? That way that can both go straight to Paradise in defense of their respective religions w/o braking their own rules other than petty little things like "Thou shalt not kill." Oops! That's right, that's what they're already doing! Why aren't they grateful to each other?
The idea of the eschaton as heavenly immortality is another of those scientific ideas that "fall a long way short of being consensual." That's fine w/ me. The only thing I prefer to be consensual is socio-political relations - wch includes sex, of course. The man who proposed the eschaton is:
"["]Frank Tipler. Tulane University. He wrote a book. I also remember that old what's-his-face told us it was a lot of crap, since the Hubble Constant showed that the universe wasn't ever going to collapse again anyway."" - p 336
"Tipler has authored books and papers on the Omega Point based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's religious ideas, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead."
[..]
"The Omega Point is a term Tipler uses to describe a cosmological state in the distant proper-time future of the universe that he maintains is required by the known physical laws. According to this cosmology, it is required for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a solitary-point cosmological singularity. This singularity is Tipler's Omega Point.[6] With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society far in the future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating all alternative universes of our universe from its start at the Big Bang.[7] Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties claimed for gods by most of the traditional religions." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J...
"The stimulus which led to the present story came from a paper by Dr. Frank Tipler, sent to me some years ago by Dr. Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. Tipler's paper, originally published in a journal devoted to religious questions, was quite tentative in tone. However, it appears that, having started thinking on the subject, Tipler began to feel that he was onto something really important. So in 1994 he published a book, The Physics of Immortality". - p 348, The Other End of Time
Now, I'm back 'full-circle' to my beloved Pittsburgh & the often excellent CMU that I live so near to & have occasionally guest-lectured at. Thank you, Mr. Pohl, for having written yet-another bk to get those tesserwax juices flowing in my devil's pudding.
November 27, 2024
Vintage Pohl - wry, dark, beautifully-written
My 1997 review:
There's something strange going on at the derelict "Starlab"space station - aka the "Starcophagus" - and Dr. Patrice Adcock is going up to find out what's happening. Her party is kidnapped by reps of the "Beloved Leaders" and fired off as tachyon images to a distant starbase.
It seems the Beloved are fighting a war with the Horch and want to enlist humanity on their side. The plot thickens when the Horch smuggle in disturbing images of whole worlds destroyed by Beloved forces - dismissed by the Beloved with "we merely transported them to their immortality at the eschaton." The Beloved run off a couple more copies of Dr. Pat for "breeding purposes". She finds she rather likes being a triplet -- but the extra copy situation turns darker, with unsettling echoes of earlier uses of this old and disturbing SF idea.
This is vintage Pohl - wry, dark, beautifully-written. I've seen some unflattering reviews of this book, but this is first-rate work, not to be missed if you're a Pohl fan.
Note that I tried the nest 2 books in the trilogy, but didn't are for them. 2 star books, sigh. So read this one and STOP, is my advice.
My 1997 review:
There's something strange going on at the derelict "Starlab"space station - aka the "Starcophagus" - and Dr. Patrice Adcock is going up to find out what's happening. Her party is kidnapped by reps of the "Beloved Leaders" and fired off as tachyon images to a distant starbase.
It seems the Beloved are fighting a war with the Horch and want to enlist humanity on their side. The plot thickens when the Horch smuggle in disturbing images of whole worlds destroyed by Beloved forces - dismissed by the Beloved with "we merely transported them to their immortality at the eschaton." The Beloved run off a couple more copies of Dr. Pat for "breeding purposes". She finds she rather likes being a triplet -- but the extra copy situation turns darker, with unsettling echoes of earlier uses of this old and disturbing SF idea.
This is vintage Pohl - wry, dark, beautifully-written. I've seen some unflattering reviews of this book, but this is first-rate work, not to be missed if you're a Pohl fan.
Note that I tried the nest 2 books in the trilogy, but didn't are for them. 2 star books, sigh. So read this one and STOP, is my advice.
January 1, 2010
Not very thought provoking, aside from the annoyingly unrealistic paradox of what to do when you meet with your exact duplicate (not a clone, but a quantum-accurate copy of yourself). The plot worryingly revolves around a real astrophysical "heaven" where, after the big crunch, all living things are reborn and share eternal life together. Awful and unimaginative.
October 11, 2017
Unfortunately this Frederik Pohl book was less about science, particularly hard science, and more about relationships. In fact, I would put this into the soap opera rather than space opera category. That said, Pohl's writing is excellent and he does put a new spin on Tachyon particles. Good escapist read.
August 14, 2016
An odd view of aliens invading Earth. Pohl has great character development and a terrific vocabulary. I had to look up three words because I had never seen them before. Cool beans. It was a pretty decent ride but an unsatisfying ending.
July 8, 2008
This is a really good Sci fi trilogy.
June 6, 2017
Very nice space thriller. Start is a little bit slower, but then aliens, special technologies are brought into story with a cliffhanger ending.
October 16, 2018
I can see why Asimov liked Pohl so well. Pure science fiction, you feel like, just maybe this could happen. Good story, leads you right into the next adventure.
September 1, 2024
Ear read 2023 (about 15.25hrs)
8.5/10 An interesting first contact story with dan the everyman and co. and co. and co…
8.5/10 An interesting first contact story with dan the everyman and co. and co. and co…
July 2, 2023
Since I’m not a speed reader, when I finish a 343 page book in under a week it means that this is the kind of captivating story that really keeps the pages turning. I also didn’t watch any Netflix for a week! I’m glad I gave Pohl another shot after the disappointing (for me) Gateway. He’s still not a favorite but at least I have a less negative opinion.
The writing style here is straightforward, certainly not aspiring to literary greatness, but it doesn’t get in the way of itself. I am slightly irritated with writers who reference current technology when they are writing about events well into the future. In Gateway it was cassette tapes; in this book it is fax machines. This can really date a book, so I advise all writers to avoid references to present-day technology.
The main character, Dan Dannerman, was, for me, more likable than what we had in Gateway, but some of the secondary characters not so. There is one Chinese astronaut who is perpetually horny and even propositions our main character to join him in a two man and one woman tryst. This just doesn’t vibe with how I envision a trained and disciplined astronaut would behave. And it persists often enough to detract from the narrative arc. There are also characters who use derogatory ethnic and racial slurs that I don’t care for. Bigoted attitudes usually mean you haven’t learned enough about a different culture to appreciate the good. The last time I actually heard anybody use this kind of language was back in the mid-70s, and even then it was not uttered in polite company. At least the chauvinistic attitudes have mellowed since he wrote Gateway.
So, there is enough action in the first two thirds of the book to keep the reader engaged, but it is in the last third where things become more interesting. We get into a relatively esoteric discussion of Omega Point Cosmological Eschatology. Yeah, that’s a real a thing (see Wikipedia to start your journey down the rabbit hole!). It’s an attempt to unify both religious concepts and scientific theory to describe Heaven and the eternal afterlife. When this first came up I thought, “Uh-oh,” because every time writers try to take us to God it always ends in disappointment. Remember the Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier , where Spock’s half-brother stole a Federation ship to go and find God? Anyway, Pohl wisely averts the search for the ultimate and instead
There are a few humorous touches that I enjoyed, such as
The final section takes on a fairly urgent pace as the action unfolds, and the original ending seems satisfactory enough to me. But then there is one more page in a different font that begins “Later . . . much later, and a very long distance away” - i.e. in a Galaxy far, far away. And that turned the satisfying ending into a ‘what the heck’ bit of bafflement. And thus opening the door for two more books in this series. But I for one had enough of Dan-Dan and , so I will not be following up.
The writing style here is straightforward, certainly not aspiring to literary greatness, but it doesn’t get in the way of itself. I am slightly irritated with writers who reference current technology when they are writing about events well into the future. In Gateway it was cassette tapes; in this book it is fax machines. This can really date a book, so I advise all writers to avoid references to present-day technology.
The main character, Dan Dannerman, was, for me, more likable than what we had in Gateway, but some of the secondary characters not so. There is one Chinese astronaut who is perpetually horny and even propositions our main character to join him in a two man and one woman tryst. This just doesn’t vibe with how I envision a trained and disciplined astronaut would behave. And it persists often enough to detract from the narrative arc. There are also characters who use derogatory ethnic and racial slurs that I don’t care for. Bigoted attitudes usually mean you haven’t learned enough about a different culture to appreciate the good. The last time I actually heard anybody use this kind of language was back in the mid-70s, and even then it was not uttered in polite company. At least the chauvinistic attitudes have mellowed since he wrote Gateway.
So, there is enough action in the first two thirds of the book to keep the reader engaged, but it is in the last third where things become more interesting. We get into a relatively esoteric discussion of Omega Point Cosmological Eschatology. Yeah, that’s a real a thing (see Wikipedia to start your journey down the rabbit hole!). It’s an attempt to unify both religious concepts and scientific theory to describe Heaven and the eternal afterlife. When this first came up I thought, “Uh-oh,” because every time writers try to take us to God it always ends in disappointment. Remember the Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier , where Spock’s half-brother stole a Federation ship to go and find God? Anyway, Pohl wisely averts the search for the ultimate and instead
There are a few humorous touches that I enjoyed, such as
The final section takes on a fairly urgent pace as the action unfolds, and the original ending seems satisfactory enough to me. But then there is one more page in a different font that begins “Later . . . much later, and a very long distance away” - i.e. in a Galaxy far, far away. And that turned the satisfying ending into a ‘what the heck’ bit of bafflement. And thus opening the door for two more books in this series. But I for one had enough of Dan-Dan and , so I will not be following up.
November 27, 2024
During his long career, Frederik Pohl held most of the jobs in the science fiction world: author, editor, publisher, big-time fan, and literary agent. Nobody knew the requirements of the genre better than he did, so we should not be surprised that The Other End of Time (1997) has most of the elements that attract science fiction readers. It gives us speculative hard science and technology: matter transmission, tachyons, and time dilation. Pohl also raises ethical issues about using a matter transmitter to create several copies of the same individual, devaluing the original person.
Some of the ideas, of course, are now dated: have you played chess by fax lately?
You can also count on Pohl for social commentary that edges on dystopian satire. Here is a deft piece of world-building that tells you all you need to know about a possible future of American politics: “Major General Martin Delasquez had just been given his second star by the high governor of the sovereign state of Florida.” And this was before the hanging-chad election of 2000.
Pohl knows a story needs a hook. Here, aliens have visited a derelict space station and left some technology that sends greedy governments scrambling for their piece of the action. His lead character, Dan Dannerman, is a covert government agent who majored in English and was attracted to the stage. So, he's not your usual science nerd, but he can ask the nerds the plausible questions readers want answered and has enough action-hero cred to get by.
The Other End of Time is a better book than its current user-ratings suggest. It was not nominated for a Hugo in 1997. That year's winner was Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, followed closely by Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory in the Vorkosigan series. Pohl’s work clearly falls short of these, but it could have held its own against other nominees that year, like Robert Sawyer’s Starplex.
Some of the ideas, of course, are now dated: have you played chess by fax lately?
You can also count on Pohl for social commentary that edges on dystopian satire. Here is a deft piece of world-building that tells you all you need to know about a possible future of American politics: “Major General Martin Delasquez had just been given his second star by the high governor of the sovereign state of Florida.” And this was before the hanging-chad election of 2000.
Pohl knows a story needs a hook. Here, aliens have visited a derelict space station and left some technology that sends greedy governments scrambling for their piece of the action. His lead character, Dan Dannerman, is a covert government agent who majored in English and was attracted to the stage. So, he's not your usual science nerd, but he can ask the nerds the plausible questions readers want answered and has enough action-hero cred to get by.
The Other End of Time is a better book than its current user-ratings suggest. It was not nominated for a Hugo in 1997. That year's winner was Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, followed closely by Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory in the Vorkosigan series. Pohl’s work clearly falls short of these, but it could have held its own against other nominees that year, like Robert Sawyer’s Starplex.
December 3, 2023
Lu en anglais
Un genre d'agent secret, Daniel Dannerman, se voit assigner une nouvelle mission. Il s'agit d'infiltrer l'observatoire spatial dirigé par sa cousine. La terre a reçu un curieux message de la part d'extraterrestre et le Starlab, en orbite, émet des ondes inexplicables. Il va falloir enquêter sur place et Dannerman va se trouver impliqué dans tout cette histoire.
Un début prometteur avec un message cataclysmique, des extraterrestres dans l'espace proche et des révélations intrigantes. Et une façon assez originale de voyager dans l'espace. C'est sans compter les deux factions extraterrestres ennemies.
Mais le roman se traine; on tourne autour du sujet principal. Puis on arrive à la fin qui est plutôt insatisfaisante et prétexte à des suites. Malheur de malheur !
Mon opinion est assez mitigée. Il y a quelques idées intéressantes, mais peu développées.
Comme j'ai assez aimé, malgré tout, je lui donne la note de passage.
Un genre d'agent secret, Daniel Dannerman, se voit assigner une nouvelle mission. Il s'agit d'infiltrer l'observatoire spatial dirigé par sa cousine. La terre a reçu un curieux message de la part d'extraterrestre et le Starlab, en orbite, émet des ondes inexplicables. Il va falloir enquêter sur place et Dannerman va se trouver impliqué dans tout cette histoire.
Un début prometteur avec un message cataclysmique, des extraterrestres dans l'espace proche et des révélations intrigantes. Et une façon assez originale de voyager dans l'espace. C'est sans compter les deux factions extraterrestres ennemies.
Mais le roman se traine; on tourne autour du sujet principal. Puis on arrive à la fin qui est plutôt insatisfaisante et prétexte à des suites. Malheur de malheur !
Mon opinion est assez mitigée. Il y a quelques idées intéressantes, mais peu développées.
Comme j'ai assez aimé, malgré tout, je lui donne la note de passage.
September 30, 2025
Dan Dannerman works undercover for the NBI and is assigned to investigate the goings-on at an
astronomical facility where a secret signal has been found coming from an abandoned space telescope. When the director of the facility, Pat Adcock, who is a relative of Dan's, sets out to visit the telescope Dan finagles his way aboard and they find that aliens have planted something on it. The aliens have used tachyon transmitters to copy organisms on board and eventually copy the human team in an attempt to stop the annihilation of Earth by a second inimical race of aliens. But it becomes unclear just which set of aliens is actually intent on destruction and sending all humans into the Eschaton, a sort of end-of-Universe Heaven, where all organism live again and forever……Frederik Pohl has pulled a lot of rabbits out of hats here and while the story is readable, it is far too busy and
cliffhangery.
astronomical facility where a secret signal has been found coming from an abandoned space telescope. When the director of the facility, Pat Adcock, who is a relative of Dan's, sets out to visit the telescope Dan finagles his way aboard and they find that aliens have planted something on it. The aliens have used tachyon transmitters to copy organisms on board and eventually copy the human team in an attempt to stop the annihilation of Earth by a second inimical race of aliens. But it becomes unclear just which set of aliens is actually intent on destruction and sending all humans into the Eschaton, a sort of end-of-Universe Heaven, where all organism live again and forever……Frederik Pohl has pulled a lot of rabbits out of hats here and while the story is readable, it is far too busy and
cliffhangery.
July 15, 2019
The story starts off with such grandiose promise to take you on an inter planetary cruise and then falls well short of becoming interesting. The whole premise behind the story was that the author wanted the wider audience to get introduced to this "eschaton" thing and somehow wove a rather shticky story that never stuck really.
You feel disappointed even halfway thru it. Could not understand why Dan had to be an undercover agent only to sneak off on a spaceship. It could have been anyone.
The whole premise of the story is so thin that you dont feel convinced enough.
I would say you could simply see for the definition of eschaton and pass on as reading this book doesnt add any other thing.
You feel disappointed even halfway thru it. Could not understand why Dan had to be an undercover agent only to sneak off on a spaceship. It could have been anyone.
The whole premise of the story is so thin that you dont feel convinced enough.
I would say you could simply see for the definition of eschaton and pass on as reading this book doesnt add any other thing.
July 10, 2023
Shelved unfinished, which I practically never do. Wading through the significant gender issues for the first chunk, I tossed this book against the wall after the overly forced tough-as-nails female director said "ch*nk" twice in two pages, and we discover that tired decrepit cousin Pat who's been married twice and can't focus very well because she doesn't currently have a boyfriend isn't, in fact, used up and half-dead as her descriptions led you to believe, but is actually in her early thirties. Add the tiresome sexual fixation of Dan Dannerman for the aforementioned cousin Pat, please, sincerely, spare me.
June 15, 2019
You know a book is a disappointment when the best thing you can say about it is that the title was more intriguing than anything that happened in the book. This book felt like it was written in the 1950s or 60s. It has an interesting premise, but the narrative is poorly paced, the characterizations are uninteresting and the ending seemed rushed. This volume is the first part of a trilogy but I doubt I will read the final two books. All I can say is that I am happy I didn't pay more than a quarter for this when I purchased it at my local library sale.
April 12, 2020
Pohl brings up some interesting Sci-Fi concepts and wraps them up in a story that is reminiscent of The Hardy Boys or Flash Gordon; it is long on adventure and interactions between the characters rather than driven by plot elements. If it was a movie it would be more drama than action, and it would be PG13 (very tame in spite of some intense elements in the story). Fun, light-hearted in tone, and entertaining, this first book in the Horch series leaves me in the mood for more.
May 14, 2024
A group of humans arrive at an abandoned spaceship and find themselves in the midst of a battle between two alien super powers.
As usual with SF books, we get to think about how small our world is compared to the size of the universe and the time it exists.
Add some politics and other earthly issues and it seems as if compared to these advanced civilizations, earth is kind of screwed.
Generally, I liked the book even though it is a bit outdated. I will go on to the next in the series.
As usual with SF books, we get to think about how small our world is compared to the size of the universe and the time it exists.
Add some politics and other earthly issues and it seems as if compared to these advanced civilizations, earth is kind of screwed.
Generally, I liked the book even though it is a bit outdated. I will go on to the next in the series.
March 27, 2023
There is a lot of drama and intrigue here and it's honestly really boring until things actually start happening. The sci Fi stuff is done in a way only Pohl could and even the slightly creepy and sexist stuff doesn't take away from the story. I really wanted more of the cooky sci Fi stuff but then it ends in a massive cliffhanger.
July 27, 2025
20 year gap between Gateway and this series, and his treatment of gender norms has improved - but it still reads as though it is almost written 30 years ago (which it is).
Great base ideas and concept.
Great base ideas and concept.
July 30, 2017
A "later in career" book by a Grandmaster. Good but not as good as in his prime.
August 20, 2017
Fun ideas, yet slow and unsure whether any characters developed. Background information is filled in at a nice pace.
July 1, 2021
Too many loose ends
November 6, 2022
I'm ambivalent about this book. I liked it but it seemed like there was not a lot of substance to it. Let's see how the sequels turn out.
May 28, 2024
An actual scf-fi novel. Written okay but petered out towards the end.
August 27, 2021
This book has one interesting conceit relating to "first contact" issues, although it does not become apparent until very late in the story and is not explored thoroughly enough. However, I cannot recommend this as the characters themselves are forgettable and there is an inexplicable amount of casual racism for a book released in the 90s.
December 4, 2024
I genuinely don't think I've ever struggled so much to finish a science fiction book in my life.
I'm shocked as well, since I genuinely adore both Gateway and The Space Merchants! I honestly can't imagine what Pohl was thinking or how he could have written this; for any fans of his, my honest advice is to avoid this and just re-read one of his other work instead.
I'm shocked as well, since I genuinely adore both Gateway and The Space Merchants! I honestly can't imagine what Pohl was thinking or how he could have written this; for any fans of his, my honest advice is to avoid this and just re-read one of his other work instead.
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