October the First Is Too Late

by Fred Hoyle

Professor Hoyle's time travel science fiction adventure is a modern relative of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

Solar beams plays havoc with terrestrial time: England is in the '60's, but WWI is still raging in western Europe, Greece is in the golden age of Pericles, while the United States is some thousands of years in the future; and Russia and Asia are reduced to a glass-like plain, fused by the burnt-out sun of a far distant future.

The central themes are time and the meaning of consciousness. The heroes are a pianist-composer and his scientist friend. The dramatic highpoint of the book is a magnificent, almost idyllic section on the life and music of the future, in which one can almost hear the compositions of two rivals as they compete in improvisations.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Novels, Philosophy

281 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Professor Sir Fred Hoyle was one of the most distinguished, creative, and controversial scientists of the twentieth century. He was a Fellow of St John’s College (1939-1972, Honorary Fellow 1973-2001), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957, held the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy (1958-1972), established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge (now part of the Institute of Astronomy), and (in 1972) received a knighthood for his services to astronomy.

Hoyle was a keen mountain climber, an avid player of chess, a science fiction writer, a populariser of science, and the man who coined the phrase 'The Big Bang'.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am tempted to make a sarcastic remark or two based on this book's dreadful title, but, when you come down to it, it doesn't seem fair. Let's just say that the title isn't necessarily the worst part and leave it at that.

Luckily for him, Hoyle never quit the day job. Good call, Sir Fred.

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

180701: have you heard of a science-fiction literary exposition (an infodump) of this new technology or that new idea? well here is a book for whom it is the infodump- freed of tyranny of literary techniques that has developed through the ages- that is all lectures all the time. this book knows what you truly want to read, so i present, 'infodump: the novel'...'plausible impossibilities' is what matters, though i do not think this is what is meant to be dropped by beckett for example, you know, the usual comfort of devices of fiction, of characters, thought, plot, theme, of irony, surprise, emotional lives to fill out rounded characters...

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

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

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

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENGLISH: First science fiction novel using the quantum multiverse, a crazy theory devised in 1957 by Hugh Everett III. In this novel, Hoyle shows, like other scientists, that he does not know how to distinguish well between science and philosophy. He also shows not to have understood correctly the quantum multiverse theory, otherwise he wouldn't speak about "the original" and "the copies," terms that make no sense in that theory.

In any case, a good adventure story.

This second reading of the novel (the first was almost half a century ago) has suggested me a post for my blog on popular science: https://populscience.blogspot.com/202...

ESPAÑOL: Primera novela de ciencia-ficción que hizo uso del multiverso cuántico, una teoría delirante ideada en 1957 por Hugh Everett III. En esta novela, Hoyle muestra, como otros científicos, que no sabe distinguir bien entre ciencia y filosofía. También se ve que no ha entendido correctamente la teoría del multiverso cuántico, de lo contrario no hablaría de "original" y "copias", términos que no tienen sentido en esa teoría.

En cualquier caso, es una buena historia de aventuras.

Esta segunda lectura de la novela (la primera fue hace casi medio siglo) me ha sugerido un artículo para mi blog de divulgación científica: https://divulciencia.blogspot.com/202...

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 3 out of 5]

of that languid school of gentlemanly sf i tend to associate with midcentury english authors, in which the narrative moves through conversation and intimation.

case in point: arguably, this book exists as a queer means of registering hoyle’s hatred of schönbergian twelve-tone serialism just as much as it does to provide any cohesive sfnal thrills. why? who knows.

altogether, then, by no means unpleasant, but you’d better hope it catches you at the right time, say a quiet weekend morning rather than ten-page bursts on the “L” in and out of work.

[Florin Pitea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this back in the 1980s.

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time is an illusion, launchtime doubly so.

This is a classic sci-fi novel written in 1966 by the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle. Such books are an occasional digression from my usual literary type books.

Ok the basics: in Aug 1966 scientists have a problem with a rocket turning off course – it turns out the sun’s IR light is being modulated to transmit information. The narrator musician along with his friend John trek in the lake district and John gets lost for 8 hours – he returns with a missing birthmark. They then soon find themselves in a world where different regions on earth are actually in a real different era – the present, 1917 WW1, 1750s America etc co-exist – but are there any future eras? What do nations do to stop the wars? And what does it all mean?

I really like the idea and could imagine it being a good film. It contains some nice and actual quite realistic future predictions (though some might already have been present in 1966?) such as CDs, music synthesizers, magnetic trains, Velcro and long distant flights. It does illustrate the concept that the passage of time is an illusion and that everything co-happens as a series of non-linear outcomes. The most interesting thinking of Hoyle is he believes several hundred million bits a second (or a thousand trillion bits of information a year) is a massive amount looking like the information exchange in the brain/intelligence and can’t imagine what else – I wonder how many terabits of data downloads into a small town looking at uTube movies let alone the whole world (hmmm Skynet becoming self-aware rates?)

A good, fun, thought provoking book; a lot better than The Fifth Planet by Hoyle.

[Alex Shaps · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read sci-fi before so heavily focused on classical music or having such a cool take on time travel (if you can call it that?). Both of that in mind, i’m impressed with the books originality and readability. Very excited to re-read in a couple years.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual, this is not a particularly well-written science fiction novel. Still, the set-up, like that of Farmer's Riverworld, appears original enough to merit attention. I'm surprised that this idea of juxtaposing different times on the earth's surface hasn't spawned a series or hosts of imitators as it is so pregnant with possibility.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Noteworthy in as much as it is awful beyond belief.

[Ruskoley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Blah. Boring as snot. And, oddly, is about music - not time/space. Chapter 12 is interesting. Chapter 14 is dismal and despairing. Everything else is as bad as the reviews say.

[Loreley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more interesting than I expected

[Bron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well I have read this before, probably when it was quite new, ie late sixies, because I remember borrowing it from my hometown library. So, I haven't been back to it in all the intervening years until now. Having read a lot of sci fi in that time, I half expected it to feel dated, possibly not as interesting as newer sci fi. I was WRONG. It's fantastic. Given it's set in the sixties too, you mustn't expect to find any technology that's more advanced than we had then, not until you get near the end anyway. It proves you don't need high tech wizardry to create a meaningful sci fi story.
I did remember the general outline, in particular the visit to Ancient Greece, but I had completely forgotten the mind-boggling discussion about time and consciousness that occurs before that. The writing is lucid and readable. The story is seen through the eyes of Richard, a young musician and composer so there's music running all through the book. He's accompanied by his friend John Sinclair, a noted mathematician, who explains the science. They represent emotion and logic, and at the end, they have a choice to make that separates them forever.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining enough, but I'm not actually sure it resolved a lot of what was set up early in the book. But maybe I'm just dumb, who knows. 2.5.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spoiler alert:

Mankind’s inherent warlike tendencies, greed, and nationalistic bullshit lead to its eventual extinction after absolutely destroying Planet Earth.

Yep, we suck.

[Gary Peterson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fitting for a time-travel story, this novel was suggested to me by a reference in a 50-year-old comic book letter's page. I found a secondhand hardback on eBay and waded in. The novel immediately engaged me. I liked the characters and the narrator especially. The excursion the two friends--one a scientist and the other an accomplished composer--was vividly described. I could feel the rocks beneath my feet, smell the bacon, and taste the tea!

The science-fiction elements crept in naturally. Where did you vanish to for half a day with no memory? Where's that birthmark on your back? The trip to Hawaii with the narrator tagging along was an effective proxy for the reader: a non-scientist swept along and offered entry into a world of intrigue and possible cataclysm.

Was Los Angeles destroyed? Well, it ain't there anymore! But total annihilation isn't the only explanation. Somehow America has become "unstuck in time" (to use the apt phrase Vonnegut would later coin) and has reverted to a pastoral idyll circa mid-18th century. As the jetliner flew over America and the characters gaped through the cockpit windows, I thought, okay, Hoyle saw the "Odyssey of Flight 33" episode of Twilight Zone. That's cool. I liked that episode a lot myself and didn't begrudge Hoyle paying homage to it.

The book was bogging down and then ground to a halt when the narrator joined an exploratory party visiting Greece, which has conveniently reverted to its ancient halcyon days. When the explorers, led by a captain named Morgan (which convinced me Hoyle was writing this in a pub after a day's work as an astrophysicist and swiped the name from a rum bottle). These Ancient Greece chapters were a bore, to be frank, though a classics scholar may disagree. When the narrator dispatches some slaves to retrieve his piano from the motorboat I was almost apoplectic: What about the Prime Directive? And then I thought, wait, this guy brought a piano on the mission? And then I thought, okay, Hoyle also saw "The Seventh is Made Up of Phantoms," the Twilight Zone episode where 1960s-era soldiers travel back in time to the 1860's Battle of the Little Big Horn, which premise Hoyle lifted wholesale when having 1966's British military interceding in the 1917 Great War.

The Ancient Greece chapters broke my momentum and made finishing the book a chore. But I committed to finishing this novel by midnight on September 30 because--you guessed it--October the first would be too late! Even the plot twist following the ridiculous "epic musical battle" left me unfazed. In fact, I found the far-flung future reveal to be less interesting than the possibility posed early in the book of messages emanating from the sun.

I closed the book disappointed and glad to be done hours before my self-imposed deadline. It wasn't a terrible book; in fact, many parts were very enjoyable. But Hoyle larded too many chapters with pedantic lecturing and worse, excruciatingly detailed descriptions of composing and performing music. I've already placed it in my HPB-bound box of books I know I will never revisit. Recommended for classics scholars and musicians only.

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fred Hoyle was a great astronomer who wrote popular science books and science fiction on the side. The popular science books were very good. The science fiction is not.

Science fiction is supposed to be fiction. That means not only that it is not true, a story, but that it has characters that seem real, grab your interest, and act in ways that you identify with. They have lives you care about and face human problems.

Not here. The characters are wooden. They mostly don't have dialogue, they make speeches. The two main characters, a musician, Dick, and a physicist, John, are nearly perfect automatons. They do important things. They meet the prime minister because they are so important. Women are "girls" who exist as window dressing, when they are mentioned at all.

OK, so the strength of the book will be its creative plot and intriguing science, right? Well sort of. The basic idea, that different epochs of history exist on earth at the same time, is certainly creative and has potential. In England it's 1966. In Hawaii it a few weeks behind. In Europe it is 1917. In North America it is around the year 1800. In Greece it is 450 BC.

How can this be? It is never really explained. Strange rays or emanations came from the sun and effected it. But how? Why? Is some sort of "higher power" behind it? Never explained.

Early on the two main characters are hiking in Scotland. This part is actually pretty well written. One strangely disappears for a day. He comes back "different" somehow. Why? Never explained.

It seems that most of the book is taken up with the musical explanations (lectures) by the main character. I guess this is a new genre, "music fiction." MusFi.

The best part of the book is when an expedition sets out from present day (1966) England to make contact with Periclean Athens of 450 BC. That was well done. I liked the temple priestess and the musical contest. Interactions with the people of ancient Greece made sense.

But then magically we are transferred to the Mexican highlands 7000 years in the future. It turns out that's where the priestess is really from. Oh. Sure.

There is a lot of pontificating about the future of the human race, a sort of "future history" discussion. That is a theme used very well by Asimov, not so well here. A better writer would have gotten his points across by the actions of the characters and the plot development, not by a long series of speeches.

Another reviewer wrote "it [the story] makes as much sense in 2018 as it did in 1966." Yup. That I agree with.

[Clint Pearcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a decent book... stilted language, which is to be expected from the '60s. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was more familiar with world geography or piano music. Those featured so heavily in the story that I found myself wishing that the narrator would be less self-centered and focus on what was happening to the world or to other people.

My favorite part was "Think of the colossal amount of information that's probably being sent out, of the order of a hundred million bits a second. In a year, that's several thousand trillion bits. Something like a hundred million textbooks a year. What sort of traffic would you need to fill a channel like that?"

100,000,000 bits is 12.5 Mb per second. As I type this, my speed on fairly poor wifi is 36 Mbps. According to this page, as of 2020 users were uploading 500 hours of videos every minute. It's a good thing Fred Hoyle didn't live quite long enough to see what the Internet has grown into, but I don't think he would have been at all surprised based on what he wrote in this book.

[Bruce Harpham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book while traveling in Atlantic Canada in June 2023. The title grabbed me immediately. Hoyle tells an intriguing story about the meaning of time here. The what if question explored: what if Earth fragmented into different time periods - the UK in 1966, France in 1917, America in 1750 and so forth?

The two lead characters - a scientist and a musician/composer - offered contrasting views trying to understand the crisis. While I typically enjoy scientist heros in my science fiction, I found myself drawn much more to the musician in this story. The travails of composing an original work, competing in a musical competition in ancient Athens and then in the future were all interesting.

The one weakness of the book was the cause and unfolding of the time disruption. This didn't quite make sense to me. I also found the chapter where the scientist states his views on the physics of time confusing. The character seems to be suggesting that linear time is an illusion. That's an intriguing idea but difficult to understand since it is so contrary to experience.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book shortly after it was published, in 1966, when I would have been a junior or senior in high school. I have reread it several times since, it has really stuck with me. There are many things I love about this book, the (serious, according to the author) theory of time it contains not being the least. To be clear, there are many things in this book with which I do not agree, including this theory of time, which, while I did not agree with it, opened my mind to alternative ways of thinking about time, an activity which became an important part of my life. Besides its theory of time, a few of the other things I loved about this book is its relatively slow pace and lovely sad mood and its interesting descriptions of male-female relationships (admittedly from a male perspective).

I feel like this book has aged well, that it makes as much sense in 2018 as it did in 1966. There is a lot to like here, I recommend this book.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent stuff, extending the ideas about time and consciousness mentioned in "Fifth Planet" and with an equally strange universe of twisting and merging timelines. There is a pessimistic view of how political and economic trends of the 60s will play out in the future, and post-imperial Britons are still fretting about finding a world role. However a big change from earlier work is that the narrator is now a musician and he shapes his story thematically, even though there is a still a science chap nearby to drop in the technical dope.

[Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

More fun as a time machine to 1966 fiction than as a satisfying novel in itself... the premise ought to have been fascinating, but instead the most enjoyable parts of the book were the long discussions of the protagonist's work as a composer.

[Scott Burtness · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently unearthed a few of my dad’s old sci-fi books. He was a fan of Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, and the like. As I was sifting through the books, I realized there was one I hadn’t read: October the First is Too Late by Sir Fred Hoyle.

It had been awhile since I’d read some classic science fiction, so I settled in for a very strange ride. Despite being written in 1966, the science in this story holds up. I found the tale to be captivating and was completely caught up in the world Hoyle created.

This is a time travel adventure, but… not really. Rather than being in one place and ‘travelling to’ a particular point in time, a whole bunch of different times just, you know, show up around the planet. Britain is fine, but in France, it’s 1917. Greece is 400 B.C., and China is far in the future. Time travel in this case simply means hopping in a plane and flying around the world. Weird, right?

The story follows two main characters, a composer and a physicist, as they try to unravel one hell of a strange mystery. How did all those different time periods suddenly appear concurrently, who (or what) did it, and why?

I couldn’t have asked for a better read for November. There are a lot of changes happening in my life. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking back at my past and scrying my future. Hoyle’s high-concept and heady tale about time and our perception of it both entertained and grounded me. Time isn’t the thing we need to worry about. It’s what we do now that matters.

[Salam Tims · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel from my youth, I first read it in college, and a book from my youth also--I still have the Science Fiction Book Club edition from the same era, one of the few books that have survived successive purges of my personal library over the years. On an impulse, while waiting to pick up a new novel on hold at the library, I picked it up to reread. I'm glad I did. It's a story about people and societies displaced in time, not exactly time travel but in that sci-fi vein. For me, reading it again was also a kind of time travel, as it awakened memories of reading it and my life and times in that distant era, half a century past. The book, unlike some I'd loved in my youth and not so much in my maturity, stands the test of time (that word again). Fred Hoyle was a distinguished astrophysicist, the first to recognize that we (and everything) are made of star stuff, elements forged in stellar nuclear reactions, and dispersed in nova and supernova explosions. His parents were both musicians. His scientific background makes his science fiction truly "science" fiction. Science and music both permeate and inform this novel of a work that's a patchwork of cultures and places from different eras in which the protagonist is a composer and pianist. One scene, in particular, a contest between piano and lyre in a temple of Apollo in the golden age of Athens stayed with me over the years and decades and prompted me to read again. Somewhat to my surprise, it's still available on Amazon. I recommend it if you like subtle nuanced science fiction.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually don't remember which used bookstore I found this at but given its first date of publication, I apparently missed it when it first came out and I was devouring my local library's science fiction shelves. However, I was by then also reading a lot of serious history and focused on my stable of classic SciFi authors so may not have even looked at it. This comes to mind because this is very much in the hard science genre that I was really into in those days (just discovering Tolkein then). I actually learned more from from science fiction authors than my science classes because I would sometimes do a bit of additional research to try and understand the concepts, ideas, and theories their work reflected. In this instance Hoyle is exploring some then and possibly still now unproven hypotheses about the nature of time, space, and everything. I really needed to focus on the book as I read to extract enough to understand him - and I enjoyed doing so as it took me back to those first years exploring the universe through fiction. The impact of the science here also generated some interesting geopolitical and even moral questions as his 1966 Britain copes with what is happening around it due to the information provided by the experiences and knowledge of the main characters. I may not go on the hunt for more Fred Hoyle works BUT I will definitely look more closely at any that I encounter!

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thots while reading:
Kind of funny conundrum that is presented on page 90. When most people talk about 'time travel', they talk about a man-meeting-his-grandfather kind of situation. In this book, a man instead meets his mother. The son is from the 1960s and the mom is from 1917 and pregnant; so the son gets to meet his mom while he is a baby in his mother's womb. An amusing twist of the normal events, as it were.

The story strongly reminds me of Eric Flint's 1632 series and the one-off Time Spike series, in which portions of one time are broken off and blended with other time periods. Time Spike features more blended periods than the 1632 series, but both still remind me of this book. I wonder if Eric Flint got his idea from Hoyle's book.

"Soon I was to realize that to be able to speak clearly, with persuasion and reason, was equivalent to power in this city" (90). Not sure why, but this struck me as an interesting statement, and having a lot more truth to it than people may or may not realize.

"Joseph's Coat" (124) - nice reference to Joseph's coat of many colors in the Bible.
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This was an enjoyable book that I found myself liking more than I thought I might while reading it. A relatively 'fast' read for me, I still had no problems putting it down when it was time to work or do chores around the house. It was an interesting mix of time travel, alternate realities, the blending of time periods, and discussing what constitutes a 'copied person' versus an 'original person' at the end. The ending was not quite 'bitter-sweet' despite having a blend of both the bitter and the sweet. I would probably not rate it quite as high as three stars, but maybe 2.8 to 2.9, so rounded up it would be three stars. It would definitely be at least 2.5 stars, if not higher.

The discussion about what constitutes a copy versus the 'original' version of a person and realities forking off at 'decision' points to create alternate version of life was fascinating, and it reminded me of the What if...? stories written by Marvel Comics back in the 1970s and 1980s. I thought it was sad how it ended, what with the other timelines disappearing into oblivion after Richard and John made their choices on where they would end up. It seemed to me that the 'alternate' branching timelines should have been able to remain in existence, regardless of the choices either men made. I realize the different timelines could still actually remain; it might be more correct to say that the individuals inhabiting the 'forked time streams' are no longer aware of other alternate branches co-existing at the same time.

It must have been 'a thing' back in the 1950s and 1960s to have the title of the book in the story somewhere. Gordon Dickson's book Naked to the Stars "lifts" its title directly from the "hero" mentally ruminating about the best way for mankind to survive branching out into a potentially hostile universe, and he decided the best way was for man to travel 'naked to the stars' as he moved throughout the Universe. That way, he'd try for peaceful options of co-existence before bringing in the military option and annihilating his [her] opponent[s]. In this book, the protagonist is discussing a scenario in which a group of individuals wish to travel to the 'Ancient Greek' sector of the changed world. He is discussing dates in a past tense and how if they had left on a particular date, it would have been 'too late' for them to have reached Greece before Ancient Greece was 'cut off' from the rest of the world. Anyway; the protagonist says that if they had left a day later, they would have found out that October the First is too late [hence, the title of the book. How clever!].

The character development is not necessarily the best in the book. It is a short book, and is a fast read. The characters were okay, I suppose. I liked the protagonist [hero] in this book far more than I did the "hero" of Naked to the Stars. There is one thing that I do wish: I do wish that John Sinclair had chosen to remain in the 'future society' with Richard. I think that, more than anything else, was the 'saddest' part of the book for me. He elected to return to England in 1966 and was forever lost in oblivion, never to see his best friend ever again. I also found myself wishing that the different time periods could have remained connected together like they were in the story; I think it would have made for some interesting 'future' stories as the inhabitants from the different time periods interacted with each other and learned to co-exist.

It focuses a lot on music throughout the course of the book. A lot. So much so that I thought the music would have more impact or influence upon the book. To be honest, I thought what with the amount of music discussed in the book in conjunction with the astral phenomenon mentioned that it would somehow tie in to the ancient theory of 'the music in the spheres' and modern man would find out that the ancients were more correct than had been realized or believed. Most of the music described has to do with pianos and piano-playing, but there are other instruments mentioned throughout the book. It was just crazy how, what with all of the music mentioned in the book, with the almost-exclusive focus on music, playing music, writing music, and listening to music, that music had very little to do with what was happening globally around the world.

I will reiterate - I did like the twist of a man meeting his grandfather by having a son meet his mother while his mother was still pregnant with the son, and the son was in his fifties. It was a humorous play on a 'famous' time paradox.

It was not an 'exciting' book, by any means. It had an enormous amount of dialogue in it, and very little action. At the same time, it was a fun-while-kinda-boring book to read, and I did enjoy reading it. I liked it far more than I have other books I have recently read from the same time period. It was worth the read, but I would not expect very much from it, to be honest. High expectations could ruin it for a person. It is more of an alternative way to look at things, in my opinion.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard, a moderately successful composer, and his old university pal John Sinclair, a physicist, go for a camping holiday in the Scottish Highlands during which John inexplicably vanishes for thirteen hours, returning both mystified and very subtly altered. He has to cut the vacation short because called back to London: a space experiment is returning anomalous results -- alarmingly anomalous, in fact. The two men fly out to California and thence to Hawaii; while they're in Hawaii, suddenly communications with the mainland go dead. As they and their American friends mount expeditions to explore what's going on in the rest of the world, it's Sinclair who first pulls everything together. Some entity, never identified (beyond a deduction on p198 that it's some form of higher consciousness, as ineffably far above us as we are above a nest of ants) and for reasons unknown, has made of the inner Solar System a sort of gigantic time machine, and the earth, passing through its temporal beam, has been differentially jolted into different eras of the past and future: while the UK and Hawaii (and presumably other regions) are still in 1966, Western Europe is still -- or once more -- being ravaged by the Great War and Greece is enjoying the glories and privations of 425BC. Most alarmingly, Russia and much of Asia are covered by a hard, impossibly smooth vitreous plain, which Sinclair deduces is an indication that they've been cast into the very far future, where the heat of a swollen sun has boiled away the atmosphere and melted and fused the earth's surface. (Here Hoyle's imagination runs into consistency problems: our heroes visit these regions and notice neither a redly bloated sun in the sky nor a lack of atmosphere. Perhaps the notion is that the air from elsewhere around the globe has rushed in to fill the vacuum, but this would lead us immediately to start considering other problematic "leakages" between the earth's different, coexisting temporal zones.)

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

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

. . . to awaken in the distant future. Sinclair has been brought here, too, and explains that, as he'd expected, at least one of the far-future societies brought by the "time machine" into coexistence with 1966 Britain has been concealing its presence from the rest of the mixed-era planet. Richard's "priestess", Melea, was in fact an explorer from the future who'd come to investigate his anachronistic presence in 425BC Greece; her pal Neria was meanwhile subverting the Delphic Oracle into a fit of pacifism. Melea introduces Richard to various far-future technological wonders, such as CDs that are conveniently only the size of dustbin lids. More somberly, the 20th-century visitors are shown a sort of movie of the history of the human species between their own time and the sparsely populated distant future of Melea and Neria. They learn that, not once but countless times over the past millions of years, humanity has allowed itself to expand uncontrollably until a moment of precipitate and horrific collapse, with inordinate suffering; in the wake of each catastrophe the small surviving relic has promised itself that this time they will learn from the past and it will be different, and yet of course . . . The question Melea and her society want the two Englishmen to answer is, in effect: Is it worth it? Of course, there isn't a real answer to that.

The tale is told in the same sort of Buchanesque mode that Hoyle adopted for Ossian's Ride; the contrast between the bluffness of style and Richard's supposed sensitivity as a musician works surprisingly well, and it adapts well too to the occasional didactic passage. These latter are always welcome components of Hoyle's novels; here he gives us a few pages (pp75-7) of happy speculations about the nature of time and consciousness. One oddity is that the events of the first few pages seemed to me wildly reminiscent, albeit it in a different order, of parts of Ian McEwan's 1998 novel Amsterdam; I wonder if McEwan read October the First is Too Late decades ago (as I did) and (like me) forgot most of the incidental content, only for it to come bubbling up from his subconscious when he was writing Amsterdam? There's quite obviously no question of plagiarism, deliberate or unconscious; it's just an oddly similar pair of juxtapositions of events. It's certainly pleasing to think that something of Sir Fred's hobby might still be swimming in literature's river.

[Perry Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read this as a teenager in the early 70s. I liked it then and I like it now, having just finished a re-reading. Time gets scrambled on planet Earth. It's the 60s in Britain, WW1 in Europe, and the far future over most of the rest of the world. Let the fun begin.

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

[Julien Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fred Hoyle is a decent science fiction writer but he's certainly more astute in the science than he is in the fiction.
October the first is too late is another good example of his work and also shows his love if classical music as the main protagonist displays, bring a composer and pianist.
The premise is the discovery of a signal being transmitted from the region of the sun. This (Hoyle leads us to believe) causes havoc with time across the globe, where regions are plunged into the past while others are springboarded into the future.
The idea is a good one and Hoyle poses some intesting dilemmas but it ultimately falls a bit short. In the hands of a more seasoned writer who knows where things would have led.

[Andy Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not a sci-fi enthusiast but a good story can be found in any genre. Fred Hoyle was an eminent astronomer/physicist so I expected this novel to be a one-off vanity project. I’m pleased to report that I was wrong. The story is a bit hard to follow without a stronger grounding in physics but I actually really enjoyed the writing. For me, good writing can carry even the most mundane plot. This was not mundane stuff. Fantasy, for sure, but yet another creative projection of where mankind is headed if we don’t pull our heads out. The bleak path described is apparently what Hoyle truly believed to be the most likely one. Yikes. Now I’m intrigued to read another of Hoyle’s many novels.

[SpentCello · Rating 3 out of 5]

The music in this book was handled surprisingly well. I was expecting a bunch of overblown rubbish about poignant major thirds modulating through the dominant fifth before cascading by a tense semitone. But it actually made sense for the most part and described a musician's experience rather accurately. However, the uninspired stereotype of musicians being sex magnets ruined it a little, and Dick is really just a bit too much of a well... dick. Comparing it to The Time Machine is also a bit generous, but it was a fun variation on a theme of time travel.