| Author: | Fred Hoyle |
| Copyright: | 1966 |
| Date Reviewed: | 3/19/85 |
| Rating: | 5.0 |
Synopsis: The story is told in the first person singular by a musician named Dick. On his way back from a concert, Dick runs into a friend he hasn't seen in six years. The friend is John Sinclair, a Nobel laureate in paralysis. The two decide to go on a hike like they used to. During the hike, John gets lost for several hours. When he returns, he has no memory of the intervening hours and a birthmark on his back has disappeared. After this strange event, John travels to America with Dick and attends many meetings and social parties to try and determine the cause of the lost hours. Somehow they seem to be tied to some strange radiation readings coming from a rocket. The two men make it to Hawaii when the world comes apart.
Everything is normal in Hawaii but suddenly there is no signal from America although they can reach England by radio. A plane trip over America shows that it has been deserted. The two men travel to England where they find that Europe is still in the middle of World War I. It seems that whole sections of Earth have become lost in time. An air expedition is set up and Dick discovers that all of the USSR is a great glass plane and that Greece has reverted back to 500 B.C. A further expedition is mounted to ancient Greece, this one by ship. Once there, Dick enters a musical contest with a goddess whom he later goes to bed with. He awakes to find himself in a house 10,000 years in the future, where John is waiting. The inhabitants have come to realize that soon the world will stabilize again. The future will be the true reality and the past a ghost of reality. Dick stays in the future and John elects to go back to his past.
Review: "October the First is Too Late" is a very poor novel; there aren't many that I look forward to finishing. I'm sure that I would have liked it better if I were more interested in the theories of classical music. Fully half the book was spent on describing these theories and practices. This may make for a good musical story, but it also makes for a poor science fiction story.
I might forgive the musical tangent if the plot was interesting and coherent but it wasn't. For example, we never find out why John was singled out nor why the other scientists should be the least interested in Dick. He has nothing to offer in the way of an explanation for the phenomena. He seems to be present only as a plot device. When the world gets confused, it seems to take people several days to find out. If the real world of international commerce stopped, we'd know about it immediately.
The final answer, chapter 14, gives us nothing. The future people tell us that the world was tampered with and will go back to the way it was but they don't say how, they just that they know. I can't accept this. "October the First is Too Late" has very little too offer the science fiction fan. I thought the same was true of the last Hoyle novel I read, "The Black Cloud".