The Time Masters by Wilson Tucker
A 1953 Novel, Revised and Reissued for The Science Fiction Book Club
Oct 12, 2008
Wilson Tucker's The Time Masters (186pp, ISBN978-0447752908) opens with the crew of a spaceship scattered like dandelion seeds as their ship crashes.
Wilson Tucker
Wilson 'Bob' Tucker made his debut in 1941 in Super Science Magazine, and published his first novel ten years later. For the next twenty years or so he was known primarily as a fan writer, winning the Hugo for best in that Category on three occasions.
In 1970 Ace Books published --as part of their legendary Specials imprint, The Year of the Quiet Sun. It would become a Hugo and Nebula runner-up and win the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and be acclaimed as one of the finest novels of the 1970s.
In the wake of the success of The Year of the Quiet Sun, the Science Fiction Book Club reissued The Time Masters
Originally published in 1953, but revised (to include references --for example-- to the Apollo Space Programme) for the Book Club edition, The Time Masters is an altogether quieter and more old-fashioned novel than The Year of the Quiet Sun.
After the plot-blowing prologue, the main novel opens with two government agents discussing a man who seems to have sprung into existence at about the same time as the USA began working toward the first nuclear reactor.
Gilbert Nash is their subject, and is an enigma. His income as a Private Investigator is minimal, and most of his income is derived from gambling. When Nash is visited by a scientist working on an atomic-powered deep space probe, the agents' suspicions bloom.
The scientist is on leave following a nervous breakdown, and is convinced that his wife somehow knows of the top-secret project that he has been working on for years, despite his never having breathed a word. Moreover, he is convinced that she has left him now that the project is all but complete, and has read his mind.
Castaway
The reader will not need to be a rocket-scientist themselves to realize that the woman is a survivor of the crashed spaceship, cast away on a savage prehistoric world, almost impossibly long-lived, and with telepathic abilities that are manifested through intercourse (kissing for limited contact, sex for deep mind-reading ability). There are clear parallels to the Cold War paranoia about Reds Under the Beds, and in many others ways, The Time Masters is very much a product of its time.
The casual sexism and the smoking are two obvious examples, but the era manifests itself in other ways. The book is short, and in line with other SF books of the period, characters swallow improbable premises with minimal incredulity. Sumeria is used as a variation on Atlantis, which was popular at the time as a repository of 'lost' ancient knowledge (in turn this was passed down from Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World, and would later be picked up by von Daniken). It's assumed that aliens will be humanoid in appearance -- humanoid enough to pass unnoticed amongst the natives.
The Time Masters
This should not be taken as mockery, however. Tucker's prose is lean, his rationale for the alien's longevity is as well-worked out as any premise in SF, and his characters are sympathetic in a low-key way. The author can't be blamed for the title, with it's wholly inaccurate invocation of time travel (it actually refers to the alien's longevity and their psionic abilities, including seeing a subject's future).
Should the dedicated reader stumble across this lost little novel, they're in for a treat, once they switch off their sense of disbelief.
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