Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 January 26 • Wednesday

October the First Is Too Late is an interesting story about a composer who, along with a college friend who's now a physicist, slips out of the Earth of 1966 into an Earth that’s a patchwork of different times.

England is still in 1966 but most of Europe is in 1917, fighting World War 1. Asia appears to be far enough into the future that there’s absolutely nothing but a vast plain in which everything has been melted into glass. Greece is in the year 425 BC.

Richard, the composer, ends up going to Greece with his piano in tow, impressing the locals with recitals of music from his past, their future. A musical theme runs through the book, with each chapter called things like “Andante con moto”, “Vivace” and so on.

The writing is unadorned and stolid. There’s an almost complete lack of action. Hoyle, who was himself an astrophysicist, has written a cerebral novel that’s more interested in ideas of consciousness and the dangers humanity poses to itself than in providing thrills and quickening pulses.

Early in the novel the physicist character says the following, perhaps speaking for Hoyle.

"Consider the usual science-fiction story. Let me anatomize the situation for you. Science-fiction is a medium that concerns, above all else, life forms other than ourselves. The real life forms of our planet belong of course to natural history, to zoology, so science-fiction purports to deal with life forms of the imagination. Yet what do we find when we read science-fiction? Nothing really but human beings. The brains of a creature of science-fiction are essentially human. You put such a brain inside a big lizard, and bang-wallop, you have a science-fiction story. Or if you can't be bothered with the lizard-like aspect of the story, you simply put the human brain in a human creature, and call it humanoid. To make the story go, the humanoid is usually set up as more intelligent than ourselves, with a better technology. Then the story turns on how the dear old magnificent human species manages to deal with the alien threat. It boils down to a new version of Indians and cowboys.

"Let me a bit more serious. If these rather simple-minded notions stopped at science-fiction it wouldn't be so bad. But as soon as we try to think quite seriously about intelligence outside the Earth that's exactly the way our concepts go."

October the First Is Too Late isn't especially exciting or startling but it is entertaining and suspenseful with a few excellent touches.

The first line is, "I had been invited to compose a piece for the Festival of Contemporary Music, Cologne, 1966".