Timescape (1980, USA) was number 27 in the original SF Masterworks series published by Millennium/Gollancz between 1999 and 2007. It won the Nebula Award, BSFA Award and Ditmar Award in 1981. Which gives some indication of the regard in which the novel is held, if not now, at least shortly after it was published and some twenty years ago. It is that rare thing, a techno-thriller that is more science fiction than it is thriller, and from a writer located firmly within the sf genre.
I first read the book sometime in the 1980s — and, to be honest, I can’t even remember which edition I read, or when and where I might have read it. I just knew I had read it. Which likely tells you something about its story. It was clearly so memorable, I can’t place my reading of it.
The concept underlying the plot, however, is memorable enough — an experiment in the future sends messages to the past using tachyons, in order to prevent climate crash. Well, not quite “climate crash”, as climate change was the purview of cranks in 1980, but certainly some form of ecological crisis. Unfortunately, the future of the novel is 1998, some 25 years ago, and Benford’s vision of that year has not aged well.
The past of the story, on the other hand, is 1962, and is likely semi-autobiographical to some extent. Benford was 39 when Timescape was published, so in 1962 he would have been a student — and in 1965 he earned a MSc from the University of San Diego, where the 1962 narrative takes place.
In a nutshell, the Earth of 1998 is in trouble. There’s a poisonous algae bloom off the coast of Brazil, which threatens to affect all the world’s oceans. The global economy is in freefall, and most countries have roving bands of homeless. There’s probably other things too, but Benford is scant with the details. Using tachyons, which are particles that travel faster-than-light, a lab at Cambridge University, in the UK, has begun sending messages back to 1962…
Where a physicist at the University of La Jolla (soon to be renamed the University of San Diego) has found his experiment in magnetic resonance ruined by “noise”. But the “noise” appears to be Morse code…
It sounds so good when reduced to a couple of lines. But so much of this novel relies on the execution. And there, it, well, it fails badly.
Benford’s sister-in-law, a Brit, shares the copyright with him, for her help in “maintaining a consistent British idiom” in the scenes set in 1998. If that were true, Benford seems to have ignored her advice. The UK-set scenes are… close. But not right. To a British reader, they get too much wrong. Not just John Renfrew’s random Yorkshire-isms, but also the mis-use of UK swear-words such as “sod” and “sodding”. Nor does Benford seem to know how English pubs work — or perhaps he assumed they would have changed by 1998; they didn’t.
Not that the narrative set in the 1998 UK is a particularly good piece of futurism anyway (eighteen years ahead of when the book was published, don’t forget). Renfrew’s wife is more like some sort of 1950s housewife, Renfrew’s boss is a misogynistic pick-up artist who would not be acceptable in any decade after 1970, and the whole collapse of the UK, or what little of it is revealed, does not read as remotely plausible. There’s a handful of female scientists, but most of the women in the book have little or no agency.
The narrative set in 1962 had, I assume, the benefit of Benford’s own lived experience. But the main character, Gordon Bernstein, a New York Jew, is just… well, it doesn’t add anything, other than allow Benford to indulge in a number of Jewish stereotypes. He lives with a younger woman, who’s presented as a product of her generation in California. She smokes dope, she’s “liberated”. But she supports Goldwater, she’s anti-Kennedy. She seems too unlikely not to be based on a real young woman Benford knew at the time. It’s tempting to think the hash Bernstein makes of their relationship is also drawn from Benford’s life.
The basic premise of Timescape is padded out with scientific explanations of the two experiments, the consequences of the scientific data from the future received in 1962, the scientific establishment’s hard-to-fathom refusal to accept Bernstein is receiving a message from somewhere — the Morse code deciphers into a recognisably coherent message in English — and the domestic arrangements of the lead scientists in each time. It makes for a… surprisingly dull mix.
The central premise is a fascinating idea, but this novel is not a good use of it. And yet Timescape is highly regarded, within science fiction if not without. However, it’s not alone in that. All too often, science fiction fans revere a book for its cool central idea, irrespective of the appalling execution. Some describe sf as the “literature of ideas”, but that doesn’t mean it gets a free pass on all the other aspects of literature, such as plotting, characterisation, and actual fucking prose that doesn’t read like it was written by a very early prototype of ChatGPT.
Benford tries harder than most when it comes to that last, and he occasionally pulls it off. But Timescape cannot escape the weight of its world-building. In most sf novels, it’s the world-building which lifts the book above its peers — think Dune (1965, USA), for example — but the opposite happens here. It seems counter-intuitive that a narrative set in 1962, twenty years before the book was published, should have aged badly, never mind a narrative set twenty years after the book’s publication and now twenty-five years in the past…
The SF Masterworks series was not a serious attempt to gather together the best novels published in science fiction, assuming such a thing were possible in the first place. It was limited by what books it could obtain the rights to, the original editorial director in charge was a huge Philip K Dick fan, and far too few people question the so-called “canon” of science fiction classics, especially the preponderance of white males in that “canon”.
Even so, I don’t think Timescape makes the cut. It doesn’t deserve to be a SF Masterwork. It wasn’t a very good novel in 1980 — at least two other Nebula nominees were better, as was pretty much every other novel on the BSFA Award shortlist.
It’s not a very good novel now.
