The Chronocide Mission - Softcover

Lloyd Biggle, Jr. is one of the old-time masters of science fiction, with a long string of best-selling novels in the 1960s and 1970s. In more recent years, he moved to mysteries and suspense, creating several popular series, including a set of new adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He always managed to write a science fiction story or two every year, usually for Analog magazine. The Chronocide Mission is his first new science fiction novel in more than a decade.

Veteran Biggle (The Angry Espers) shows what kept the SF pulp magazines of the 1940s alive and kicking in this alluring tale of time travel. One spring day in 2001, 21-year-old student Vladislav Kuznetsov is whisked from college in Ohio into a postapocalyptic future some three centuries hence. The world has broken down into small, agricultural, caste-ridden and matriarchal states in constant conflict. Renamed Egarn, our hero spends a lifetime working on the one example of advanced technology to exist in this future, a lens created by an obscure 20th-century inventor that is a deadly weapon but also, by chance, a kind of time machine. Egarn decides to prevent centuries of war by sending two men back in time to kill the inventor and destroy his lens. In a parody of a crime spree that recalls Bonnie and Clyde, the pair, trained to drive only on an inert wooden model, struggle with a clutch-controlled car as they rob banks for folding cash they don't understand and steal ridiculous vaudevillian clothing from a department store window. The author is capable of pathos as well as humor. When the visitors from the future accidentally kill a woman, Biggle, a musicologist by training, inserts a touching song lyric of his own composition. Before long, as though they were commuting on subways between the centuries, warriors are hurtling back and forth in time. Fans of Golden Age SF are in for a fun ride.
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