Project Pendulum

by Robert Silverberg

Twins become involved in an experiment in time travel.

Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Collections, Science Fiction Fantasy

210 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

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Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.

Reviews

[Greg Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great concept! Twins swinging back and forth through time like equal and opposite pendulums is probably not very scientifically sound, but Silverberg uses the idea to give quick yet rich glances at the possible future and past. Also, he makes several references to paradoxes throughout the book and shrugs each off with a "who cares, no one really knows how this stuff would really work anyways" kind of attitude, which was refreshing.

It was a real page turner. The only problem with this book is that it could easily be a series - each stop in time being one book. Instead, we just get a glimpse at each stop. This left me wanting more, but such can be said for some of the best books and songs - White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane comes to mind.

Silverberg has an easy-flow writing style that is quite enjoyable. I look forward to reading more of his works. I will definitely revisit this book again in the future.

[Bastien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classique, rapide. Pas transcendant mais une courte lecture plaisir.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of Silverberg's best, but an interesting time-travel story for younger readers. Some of the science and plot points were unconvincing, but it was a fast and fun light read.

[Big Enk · Rating 1 out of 5]

1/5

Ol' Silverberg has finally disappointed me, but I suppose we all have our off days. Project Pendulum came much later in his career after his hiatus and subsequent return, though at the time he was mostly writing fantasy novels. I can't even really call this a novel though, because as it is Project Pendulum is a simple one-dimensional skeleton of what could've been something much better.

The novum is a time travel device that takes two perfectly equal humans (twins in this case) and swings them both forward and back in time on "logarithmically increasing intervals, each one ten times as wide as the one before". One twin will exist 5 minutes in the future, the other 5 minutes in the past, followed by them switching places and now 50 minutes distant from the starting time. This goes on and on until one twin is in the cretaceous period, and the other in an incomprehensible future.

As far as time travel devices goes I really enjoyed this one. I can can see the implications of this being explored in an exciting way, despite the glaring logical issues that Silverberg ignores here. The problem is... this is all we get. The twins go off on their shared but separate adventure, popping in to different settings for mere moments, only to be whisked on unceremoniously. There are, quite literally, no stakes, no character depth, no plot, no texture at all. It's one of those books that comes off unintentionally like YA, which is always a bad place to end up.

Honestly, I have no idea why Silverberg thought this one idea was enough to publish on its own. I didn't hate this like I do most works I rate so lowly, but I just can't give what is essentially a crude initial sketch any more praise than I am. An inferior and minor work from one of the greats. Super skippable.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting take on time travel where the initial human trial is with two twins that are both alternating forward and backward multiplicatively. The the titular Pendulum swing is them building momentum and going farther back and then forward. They use twins because their trips are parallel just one is always in the future and one is always in the past and then they switch.

In other words, if twin A was 100 years in the future then twin B would be 100 years in the past. On their next jumps Twin B would be farther ahead in the future and Twin A would be farther back in the past.

I like it because it's simple enough for me to grasp and complicated enough to have that science fiction feel.

Only complaint is we get such small glimpses of each spot in time and it often left me wanting more. It is a very short novel (210 pages) and I wouldn't have minded a little more.

[Trampy69 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bardzo wolno i ciężko na początku ale się rozkręca z przebiegiem czasu. Taka fajna, lekka, krótka historyjka.

[ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Emilia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intrygująca opowieść z 1987 roku. Z matematyczno-fizycznym zacięciem. Ciekawa próba podejścia do paradoksów podróży w czasie.

Moją uwagę zwróciła, jak dla mnie nieco dziwna, relacja braci bliźniaków. To telepatyczne, niemal transcendentne powiązanie dusz - zrozumiałe jest chyba tylko dla rodzeństwa, które przyszło na świat w tym samym momencie...

W tej czasoprzestrzennej marszrucie lądujemy na chwilę w roku 2025 😜

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

quick and fun! loved it :)

[Teresa Cervera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very quick fun little classic time travel story

[Mario · Rating 1 out of 5]

A story would have been nice, and maybe a look into some of the implications of the technology being described? That doesn't seem to be a lot to ask for a scifi book, but you won't find either here.

The more I think about it, the more this book bothers me. The initial idea is perfectly sound (as far as ideas for sci-fi books go, that is), but the book contains nothing beyond that. I won't fault the author for the failed predictions between our world so far and the 2016 he uses as his starting point (although his predictions, even 30 years out, seem pretty bad and I'm not sure it's retrospect talking), but his visions of the future are boring and relatively unimaginative, and, I may have alluded to this before, there is no more story in the book than you experience in a trip to the supermarket. In fact, I'd say that there was quite a bit less.

Then there are the parts that just make no sense. The characters are jumping through time. At each jump, the characters are shifted randomly in space from their starting position. They expect this at the outset, mind you. So, clearly, the best starting position is Los Angeles, correct? Luckily, somehow, the characters managed to avoid ever shifting more than a few feet to the west, as they would have found themselves standing on the Pacific Ocean. The characters eventually land all over the placelike Europe, underground, and on the Moon(!), but never somewhere uninhabitable. Amazing, no?

I could go on, but it just isn't worth the effort. I certainly won't put more effort into a review than the author put into the book.

This book had two stars before I started this review and it lost one along the way. Someone probably fiddled with my timeline.

[Juan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It felt like half a book. Good concept, but hardly explored. I feel the book itself does not tell any story, just a description of unrelated events. I think it would had turned much better if the author explored the consequences of the actions of each brother on their return...
Anyway, it was an easy read, but there is no much than that.

[Anahelena]

I like that this is filed under children's Science Fiction. Probably going to re-read this bad boy in the future, kept jumping in and out of reading so the story ended up losing some of its momentum. Gotta love some gorgeous illustrations.

[Almustafa Couch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was impressed by this time travel book . The main plot seems to be a device set up has not been used on a creature such who can report back to them and so they receive a group of twins.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in time travel. This includes me.

[Guillaume · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intéressant, mais manquant un peu d'envergure

[Ralph Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and very entertaining and different time travel novel.

[asunder_doom · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick palate cleanser that was fun. Nothing too serious here but created some nice visuals of the past and future.

[Butch]

This was a fascinating story of time travel. A cool imagining of the far future.

[Mike W · Rating 3 out of 5]

it had some interesting moments but it was mostly forgettable

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

For mankind's very first time travel experiment, the identical twins Eric (a paleontologist) and Sean (a physicist) are sent on a sort of oscillating path through time, spending short periods in eras that are each exponentially farther into the future or past than the last; thus, when Eric is at a point 5 x 107 minutes into the future, Sean is at a point 5 x 107 minutes into the past; next, Sean will be 5 x 108 minutes into the past and Eric 5 x 108 minutes into the future; and so on. Why this bananas need for temporal symmetry? It's never properly explained, but there's a stab at it:

Sean had brought home a pile of theoretical papers about it. Explaining how the phase-linkage coupling of a minute black hole, identical to those that are found all over interstellar space, and its mathematical opposite, a "white hole," created an incredibly powerful force that ripped right through the fabric of space-time -- and how that force could be contained and controlled, like a bomb in a basket, so that it could be used as a transit tube for making two-way movements in time. (p136)

Children, do not use phrases like "phase-linkage coupling of a minute black hole" when the teacher's around. It will only cause misunderstanding and get you into trouble.

But there are other dumbnesses in what it pains me to say is a pretty dumb book. The reason identical twins have been chosen for the experiment is that the two "packages" involved must be of exactly the same mass, right down to the milligram, to maintain the symmetry; otherwise everything will go bang. The very obvious fact seems to have occurred to Silverberg, after setting this up, that it's just as difficult to get the weights of adult identical twins exactly the same as it would be for any other two adults, and there's a certain amount of panicky fudging over the issue. It's lucky one of them didn't have to take a pee during their temporal adventure -- very lucky indeed, as arch-boffin experimenter Dr Ludwig explains in that typically dispassionate way scientists have:

He looked ready to explode. "The past is fluid! The future is yet unborn! Anything can be changed! Anything! Who knows what will befall the entire history of the world, if anything happens to you? Who knows?" (p159)

So don't so much as sneeze, d'you hear, or you'll change your body mass and screw up the symmetry and everything will go kerfluie and then you'll be sorry. Even a fart could be risky.

Another thing that irritated me was that, as the twins go on bigger and bigger hops through time, their arrival points move laterally across the face of the planet, yet they always emerge standing on solid ground -- even if that solid ground is at the bottom of a mesa or in a subterranean maze of tunnels. What stops them from emerging into a new epoch in midair? Or in the middle of the ocean? It's obviously a logical dilemma faced by many other time travel novels, and most of the time we don't think about it; but here, because of the unexplained (and in plot terms surely unnecessary) geographical slippage in the twins' arrival sites, it becomes particularly glaring.

And Eric meets aliens. They are a particularly daring imaginative creation:

They were cone-shaped beings eight or nine feet high, with brilliant orange eyes the size of platters and rubbery blue bodies. Clusters of scarlet tentacles dangled like nests of snakes from their shoulders. They walked in an odd gliding, lurching way on suction pads that make a peculiar slurping sound as they clamped down and pulled free again. (pp195-6)

It's difficult not to find oneself musing that, if the employment situation becomes grim in the aliens biz, this lot could always get jobs with The Muppet Show.

Silverberg has always been one of science fiction's more intelligent practitioners. It's difficult to conceive why he should be writing such stuff. Maybe it was a flat-fee commission and his heart wasn't in it. Or something.

[Adam Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cozy little sci-fi story but not in the Wyndham way, it’s a thin premise but an inspired one and as far as I know Silverberg can’t write anything that’s not well above average.

[A.E. Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this in 1989, and to come back to it now, and read about 2016, and 2006, and so on, is...quite wonderfully bizarre. It's a quick and easy read, this, almost a short story, and more than anything, it's an absolute triumph of structure. It tells the tale of Californian twins Eric and Sean, who sign up for an experiment during which they'll be flung forward and backward in time. The glimpses of past and future are perfectly, expertly drawn, and the momentum of the story is fantastic. This really affected me, reading it as a child, for the scope of concepts and the amount of science. I remember trying to work out the numbers to no avail on paper, and I think this is probably where my fascination for time travel came from. I lost this book for years, because I couldn't then remember author or title, but came upon it again in a second hand shop, and I'm so glad I did, and gladder still that it's even better than I originally understood it to be. Highly recommended.

[Althea Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've enjoyed many of Silverberg's works, but this short book is more of a single idea than a finished story. In a CalTech time travel experiment, twin brothers are recruited for a time-travel experiment. Equally 'weighted' by their identicality, the time-travel gadget will send them swinging through time like pendulums, in an ever-increasing arc throughout history, each stopping briefly but separately at the same spots.
OK, it's not even much of an idea (the logical holes are obvious, as with most time-travel fiction.)
But there's no story. They do the experiment, it happens.
That's it. No plot, no tension, not even much character generation. No disasters occur, no revelations about the past or future are gleaned. So why read this book?

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the formative books from my eleventh year, I recently re-read Project Pendulum and was pleasantly surprised--impressed even--at how well the book has held up after 21 years of maturity.

Quite possibly the best YA novel, in about 120 pages Mr. Silverberg deals with global warming, time travel paradoxes, identity (the protagonists are twins, a delightful twist), the far past, a truly spectacular future, true love and about 190 million years of time travel. Very impressive.

In the time you've taken to read this review you could have already knocked out the first chapter. Why haven't you?

[Merrill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twin brothers, one a physicist and the other a paleontologist, become the first humans to participate in a time travel experiment. As one goes forward in time, the other goes backward the same distance. Then the pendulum swings and they switch places, but go a little further each time in increasing distances until they reach "time ultimate." Great story, but it felt half finished. When they reach time ultimate, they supposedly start back to time zero in reverse, but we don't get to read that story unfortunately. Classic.

[Adrik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ruim demais... E olha q eu adoro Silverberg.
Parece história escrita por criança, cheia de furos absurdos, como a história dos gêmeos idênticos "pq tem de ser iguais até o ultimo miligrama".
PQP, q merda.
A história do pêndulo é uma bobagem só.
Os saltos pelo tempo se deslocam espacialmente sem controle dos cientistas, mas sempre convenientemente aterrissam em terra firme.
Como cada pedacinho de tempo ocupa umas 2 ou 3 páginas, suas caracterizações são ultra esquemáticas e bem bobas.
Detestei.

[Douglas S · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very very unique book filled with snipets of time travel stops along the way. Your mind should enjoy painting colorful pictures as you take a trip through time in this page flipping, faster than light, literary experiment!

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice fast paced read that requires a lot of attention but can be finished in a very short time. Unique concept and when it was over I kept wanting to hear about the brother's return trip as well.

[Rey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too choppy to be a great narrative, keeping me at arm's length. Wanted to engage with it further, but never delved into anything very deeply, and chopped when I wanted to flow.