Crisis!

by James E. Gunn

Johnson is plagued by his absence of memory and the strange dreams of horrific futures that he somehow knows will become reality if he does not act. He was born in a hopeless future and is doomed to travel in the past and repair humanity's problems before they can happen. Unfortunately every time he returns to the abyss outside of time he loses all memory of what just occurred. The only information Johnson has of his existence is a one-page letter written to himself, reminding him of his duties. Over and over, he must follow his nightmares and repair the damages done by those in the past. Time is in a perpetual state of turmoil for Johnson, but he lives in a future free of damage. His duty is to erase all possibility of the predicted Crisis!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

American science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist. His work from the 1960s and 70s is considered his most significant fiction, and his Road to Science Fiction collections are considered his most important scholarly books. He won a Hugo Award for a non-fiction book in 1983 for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He was named the 2007 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.

He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.

Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.

In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.

His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 1 out of 5]

“May the future be kind.”

Disappointed. Well-intended, but sophomoric. An engaging premise, but Gunn didn’t deliver the goods. Glad this didn’t become a television series, as Gunn hoped. There’s enough twaddle on the tube as it is.

“I have a queer memory. [It] works. I remember the future, but I don’t remember the past.”

Supposed adventures of a prescient man from the future back in a parallel-universe present, trying to fix things before civilization goes off the rails in the future. For someone who remembers nothing, Johnson knows a lot. He don’t know who he is, but “I do have a commitment to …” Thinly disguised propaganda.

“It’s true that one person’s education is another’s propaganda, but we have facts to back our beliefs.” Doesn't everyone?

Written in the 1990s, Crisis! reflects exactly the condescending, if not derogatory attitude toward women that led to #MeToo.

“He was kind, as everyone must be kind who knows that the future holds bereavement, disappointment, disillusions, death.”

Johnson doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even know who he is. The whole “man from the future” business, not to mention why he keeps forgetting who he is, is illogical and not well developed. How does changing the future erase the past? Almost as illogical is how the rich and powerful welcome this stranger to their side to help change the world for the better. The better is usually a facile, feel-good solution which has little chance of working, let alone being adopted and changing things overnight.

“Better to have two people born on Earth with a chance for a future than eight or eighteen with no chance at all.” Genocide is okay.

Quibbles: Johnson always finds the right people, immediately. The Department of Defense does not do diplomacy. Walk around Manhattan one afternoon and happen to find the person you’re looking for. Two hours to walk to a “distant part of [Los Angeles]”? A space shuttle lands at Dulles?!

“Which would rather be? A crazy Don Quixote? Or a sane one?”

Don’t waste your time.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 3 out of 5]

review of
James Gunn's Crisis!
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 18-20, 2022



This is the 9th bk I've reviewed by James Gunn. He continues to be a person I respect for admittedly extra-writerly reasons: I emailed him & he replied, we had a polite & friendly exchange. That might not seem like much but, to me, it means quite alot. Recently I tried corresponding w/ someone who's now a famous & somewhat wealthy artist who I'd corresponded w/ on a friendly, trading basis in the 1980s. The artist now has someone to field contact attempts &, therefore, managed to avoid engaging w/ me except thru the algorithm-like agency of their gatekeeper.

Every once in a while I reach out to people of interest to me. Sometimes they're people I had some sort of friendly contact w/ at some time or another & I'm interested in exploring their personality & work anew now that they're older. My outreach is always polite & non-aggressive. If they don't want to communicate I accept that & move on. Nonetheless, the people I respect the most are the ones who're open to other people, whose lives seem free of what appears to be 100% careerism in the less friendly people. Gunn was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971-1972. I imagine that's the sort of thing that a sociable person might be. He died at age 97 on Dec 23, 2020. I see that he had a bk published by Tor in 2017. Having begun his career as a writer w/ a play in 1947 that gives him a stretch of 70 yrs! Not many achieve such longevity.

To quote from the back cover of Crisis!: "YOU HAVE JUST SAVED THE WORLD—AND YOU DON'T REMEMBER

"You are a man who was born in a future which has almost used up all hope: you were sent to this time and place to alter the events that created the future."

[..]

"But each time you intervene, you change the future from which you came. You now exist outside of time, and each change makes you forget."

An engaging enuf premise & certainly one that I cd enjoy seeing developed.

"If this were a better-than-average hotel, the bathroom would have an anteroom with an open closet facing a wet bar; on the bar would be a plastic tub, which would be filled with ice from a machine down the hall, and four plastic glasses sealed into polyethylene bags." - p 14

But, no, this is a bk & it has none of those things.

""Am I telling the truth? The only evidence you have is your apparently unique ability to forsee consequences—it comes like a vision, not of the future because the future can be changed, but of what will happen if events take their natural course, if someone does not act, if you do not intervene.

""But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget.["]" - p 15

There's a war about to happen. OUR HERO knows what to do to stop it.

". . . Listened to an older man, either forty-five or fifty, with eyes gray and deep. here to look for work but now returning to his home to die, if it came to that, where he had lived, talking about success and failure and how it didn't matter any more, and if he were younger he would join up and fight the bastards, as if it would be hand-to-hand combat, but maybe it didn't matter anyway, and the people who died in the city were just as important as the people who pushed buttons that shot weapons." - p 22

""If you could get out a few items here and there that make the enemy seem human—items about his daily life, his loving acts, his generosity, his sacrifices, his hopes and dreams and fears. . . ."

""I could get such items on the wire," she said, "but how could I get editors to print them or newscasters to broadcast them?"

""I'm not an expert on such matters," Johnson mused, "but I think I would assign them to someone very good, who would make the stories funny, dramatic, heartrending, witty—"

""You want us to use news as propaganda?"

""To use news as news. You don't have to invent the stories. They're happening. You aren't reporting them now. That's propaganda for war. Just find out about them and report them. Call it propaganda for peace, if you must, but it's really only complete reporting."" - p 27

OUR HERO's, Johnson's, idea about how to prevent a war - or at least part of it. Interesting. It works.

"Only one in three parole officers were in their office when he asked for them. Secretaries made excuses. "He'll be in later." "He's on a case." "She's on vacation." But some said sourly, "He's never in before noon" or "Stick around and we'll both be surprised."" - p 31

It seems that Gunn knows the ways of lawyers & parole officers somewhat realistically. Johnson continues to plug away at preventing the war.

""Almost as if we can't work ourselves up to destroying an enemy unless we first convince ourselves that he isn't human. That's why we have to call them 'gooks' or 'fascists' or 'commies.' "

""And the stories I was distributing that described the enemy's humorous, sentimental, good-hearted moments—they made us pause and think.["]" - p 43

But eventually when he next awakens, his task accomplished, he's a new amnesiac Johnson who finds a new purpose.

"Besides, the times were hard: like the curse of the witch who had not been invited to the christening, the Depression had lain like death across the land for five years, the unemployment rate was nearly eighteen percent, and the energy shortage was pressing continually harder on the arteries of civilization. A little kindness came cheap enough, but it was scarce all the same." - p 51

"Death Valley, CA (AP)—The four-year-old daughter of Ellen McCleary, managing engineer of the Death Valley Solar Power Project, was reported missing today." - p 52

Johnson's special knack being that he knows that if this four-year-old isn't allowed her promising future then energy problems in the world will get much worse. This particular dilemma gives the author a chance to discuss the energy crisis.

"The engineer nodded. By now he was treating Johnson like an equal instead of a prisoner. "That's true," he said, "but unlike oil, coal is dirty. It has to be dug, and that damages the miners—or the land if it's strip-mined. Sulfur has to be removed, in one way or another, to avoid sulfur dioxide pollution. And the coal will run out, too, in a century or so."" - p 60

He tries to find the girl.

"Los Angeles was a carnival of life, a sprawling, vivid city of contrasts between the rich and poor, between the extravagant and the impecunious, between mansions and slums.

"The smog was gone, removed not so much by the elimination of automobile exhaust fumes but by the elimination of the automobile. Except for the occasional antique gasoline-powered machines that rolled imperiously along the nearly deserted freeways, the principle method of transportation was the coal-fueled steam-powered bus. The smokestacks, too, had been stopped, either by smoke and fume scrubbers or by the Depression." - p 67

Johnson solves that crisis, forgets it all, & moves on to the next one.

""If government can't get a country out of a Depression, surely we should be grateful to someone who can. Even if he makes a profit at it."

""Grateful?" Scott said. "Sure. And if it's only profit King is after, I guess the world can survive that. It survived Henry Ford, who paid his workers five dollars a day during a Depression when the standard was less than half that, and they made him a billionaire. But I've got a feeling there's something else behind this, and I'm going to find out what it is."" - p 93

""It would involve a radical change in our way of government at least for the duration of the crisis. A temporary delegation of authority to the executive. A temporary limitation on the authority of the courts."

"Johnson looked thoughtfully at King. "Wouldn't that be dangerous?"

""Yes," King agreed. He leaned back against the desk. "But not to act is dangerous, too. Maybe more dangerous. You have to trust the executive. His ability to operate the government like a well-run business. From the top. Making decisions. Delegating authority. Seeing his orders carried out or replacing the foolish and incompetent with people who will carry them out. There's precedent, you know. That's what we do in wartime. And we are in a kind of war. Maybe a condition more urgent than war."" - p 114

Problem or solution?

""What if someone had shot Mussolini in 1922 or Hitler in 1933?"

""You're the political scientist. Wouldn't conditions have produced someone else? Maybe somebody worse after the drama of the assassination?"" - p 118

Sleep. Forget. Start over. I'm reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971).

"The Los Angeles airport had been fortified. Barbed wire encircled the entire perimeter, and tank traps had been placed wherever it was possible for an automobile or a truck to approach a runway or a building. All incoming vehicles had to park far from the terminal, and the passengers were transported to their airlines in electric buses that passed through metal tunnels" - p 130

This is copyrighted 1986 but Gunn may as well be describing the post-9/11 world. This is the time of Islamic guerrilla warfare against the US. Gunn's solution, as presented thru one of his characters, seems more than a bit preposterous. Still, it's interesting.

""How would you like to live in a world orbiting the Earth?" Chrisman said.

""I be frightened," Mohammed said. "How I live? How I breathe?"

""Those things would be taken care of," Chrisman said. "You would be taught things. And there would be others there. Your sister. The rest of your people eventually. Anybody who wants to go."

""There be millions," Mohammed said. "You put all in space?"

""Those who want to go. The committed. The terrorists. The adventurous. Some will refuse. But think: the Palestinians protest because they say they have been cheated of their heritage and their future. If they go live in space habitats, the future will be theirs."" - pp 149-150

We move on to a new crisis: overpopulation.

""Children are a blessing and a joy. But not when there are more of them than a family can feed and care for and love. Then they are a reproach and a tragedy and a sin. And the human family has been having too many of them recently." The screen cleared and Sally Franklin dressed in a neat, pale-blue suit standing in front of a full-color reproduction of the Earth as seen from space. "World population was two and a half billion in 1950, three and two-thirds billion in 1970, nearly four and a half billion in 1980."" - pp 164-165

Now, according to an online World Population counter, the current human population is over 7.9 billion, very soon to be 8 billion ( https://www.worldometers.info/world-p... ). That means that the human population has more than tripled in my lifetime. Assuming that these statistics are to be trusted, it does seem likely that something will cause a dramatic population decrease in the near future. I think the machinations of people doing things 'for our own good', especially in the name of the medical industry, are going to be a primary cause. It'll be interesting to see what the population increase will be like once the children being tortured & thwarted by masks & vaccinations now come to a sexual age in the next decade or so.

"["]You refer to these programs as educational, which implies that there is general agreement about the facts of the situation. I have two questions about this: first, isn't this, in fact, propaganda for a particular viewpoint; and second, what do you propose to do about groups, particularly religious groups, that believe there is no overpopulation problem or that to practice contraception is a sin?"

"Franklin smiled sweetly at the reporter. "You always ask difficult questions, Mr. Minor. It is true that one person's education is another person's propaganda, but we have facts to back our beliefs.["]" - pp 171-172

Personally, I think that one person's facts are another person's lies or opinions skewed by unacknowledged subtexts.

""Does what you have said mean that you disapprove of the Indian solution of compulsory sterilization and the Chinese solution of surveillance and social pressure?"

""Different cultures may require different approaches," Franklin said. "I'm not sure that compulsory sterilization ever was an official policy in India, and if it were I'm not sure that it or what you call the Chinese solution provide any final answers. I know they wouldn't work in this country or in most countries with a tradition of individual freedom, and I'm pretty sure that the only answer in the long term is individual responsibility.["]" - pp 173-174

Ah.. "individual responsibility" is what I opt for - but the more the general tendency is to promote robopathic behavior thru mass media mind control the less the individual exists as a distinct thinking entity.

So, there you have it: Gunn puts forth what he considered to be the major global problems of his time & proposes solutions that a single person can catalyze. That's quite ambitious & it was interesting to read. To the problems of war, energy, economic decay, terrorism (wch fits under war), & overpopulation I'd add the calculated destruction of human intelligence & the excessive power of the medical industry & religion.

[Morgan Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

An idea with potential, but hampered by a few things. The largest is probably that a protagonist who loses his memory every chapter is necessarily a bit of a cipher of a personality. And when the crises in question are planetary in scope, stories about small changes being made to prevent those crises wind up feeling a bit abstract. Combine the two, and what remains is a story that is interesting in concept but a bit dull in execution, and occasionally naive (I am unconvinced the Israel/Palestine crisis would be readily resolved with space habitats, and the argument that settlers in North America had too much to do to be violent feels rather distasteful to this Native American reader.) The potential is certainly there, however, and it's amusing to note that the basic concept, which Gunn intended for a TV series, bears a strong resemblance to "Quantum Leap" which came out a few years later.

[Melissa Brownlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories originally written with the intention of a television series but were published in various sci-fi magazine starting from 1977 in Analog.

From reading other reviews, I think that many people are under the mistaken impression that this was written by director and screenwriter James Gunn but it was actually written by James E(dwin) Gunn, who was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015.

I have requested an author change and hope it goes through quickly.

I purchased this book from the Dystopian Humble Bundle and find that even with the cinematic lens the author uses that his ideas are extremely prescient.

[Ajit Joshi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ordinary

It's not so exciting, but the premise is interesting. The tales are too fantastical to be worth reading. You can skip iy

[Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crisis! is a set of short stories which were originally intended to be television episodes. Generally speaking this isn't an issue, though I think a few of the stories could have benefitted from a little more time in the spotlight. In short, a time traveller from the future finds himself at various points in history where disasters have come to a head and damaged the future he comes from. His task is to solve the titular crisis and then he loses his memories and moves on to the next one.

The stories and crises vary in quality - some are thought provoking and intelligently resolved, some are thought provoking and solved in a somewhat clunky fashion, and just a few don't seem very deeply thought out. They're also limited by being set only in the US, and possibly due to the TV aspirations most of the issues are solved by the hero talking to key people and persuading them to take action, or having him stop bad things happening to those key people.

Looking back on it, they probably don't really deserve the 4 stars I was first going to give, but I found them easy to read and the episodic format was very compelling for me. I would actually have liked to read a much longer book with more episodes and a larger overall plot. There is some lip service paid to this, and the last story in the book addresses the protagonist's character and motivations a little more. Unfortunately I found this the weakest story of the lot, and perhaps Gunn's talent doesn't lie with writing compelling characters or dialog. They generally serve their purpose within the short episodes, but attempts to flesh them out often seem to slip into cliches or stereotypes.

Reluctantly I've dropped my rating to 3 stars. I think that taken as light entertainment with a great central premise and decent execution Crisis! is a good read. And to be fair, it must be very challenging to create not one but many real crises which can be solved within a short story by a man who has no special skills or powers other than being naturally trustworthy.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is made up of 5 short stories, which are connected by the same protagonist, Bill Johnson, and situation, but each could stand alone. One thing I noticed was that there is a six year gap between the writing of the first story and the other four, which gives it a different tone. All of the stories are about social and political problems in the late 70's and early 80's and Gunn's fantasy solutions . It really looks like Gunn's wishful thinking. Unfortunately, those problems are still with us now (2017) and some even worse. But that doesn't stop them from being good reads.

[Billycongo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was intended for a TV series. Each week our hero would save the world. I mean, Save the World! In the first story/episode he has only 6 days. Which is similar in some ways to that TV show '7 Days'. Only one day less! In the TV show, the event happens and they go back 7 days to fix it. In this book it's a possible future. The problem is that everything has been dumbed down. For the first episode he finds a hacker who can hack into not only the Pentagon, but also the Kremlin. Amazing! Glad that this did not make a TV show, though I do love the time travel.

[Denise (Zara) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright. The writing is bland and I wish the premise was developed a bit more. It seems unrealistic how people trust him so easily, so expanding that might help.