I have purchased this book and decided to read it because its premise reminded me strongly of “The Last Day of Creation” by Wolfgang Jeschke. There, as here, people are sent back through the aeons to Earth’s ancient past without any chance to return to the present time. A slight difference is that whereas in “The Last Day of Creation”, people are sent back only a couple of hundred thousand years, yes, the timing there is a little bit off, Wolfgang Jeschke wanted to have the Mediterranean Sea dry but also primates around that can be taught to fight in place of the time traveling humans, two events that did not happen at the same time in reality, here, people are traveling back about a billion years or so (even though the Cambrian is back around half a billion years). The one thing, however, which is completely different between the two stories is the reason why humans are sent back.
In “The Last Day of Creation”, American troops are sent back to divert all the oil from the Middle East up to Norway, so it can be pumped up and used by the west. However, once the troops land at their designated time spot, they realize that a) the Arabs are already there and even with more modern weapons, and b) there is no way of returning to the present, even though they were promised to be brought back at the end of their mission. And as the mission had thus become unfeasible, they had been fighting with guns against Russian planes, they decided to just bid their time, most of them relocating to the Bermuda's, where they would have been brought back had it been possible, but some staying to rescue those stragglers that were still arriving in the past. See, timing the arriving in the past is inherently difficult and people arrive over the course of fifty years. Not bad, considering the hundreds of thousands of years they have been sent back. What’s more, with people arriving from later time points in the present, it becomes clear how much their presence here in the past is affecting the present time, their future. Soon, the US occupy only the western part of the continent, the rest is made up of the Mexican Empire. And the later the people come from, the smaller the US have become. Soon, they reason, there will be no US. Then, the troops will stop arriving.
In this book, in contrast, people are sent back as political prisoners. Returning is impossible as well. And to avoid the fate of the first story, in order that the prisoners cannot affect the present time, they are sent back so far in the past that nothing lives on the dryland, and only trilobites and lower organisms in the sea. Also, men have been sent to another time period than women, thereby also inhibiting that a civilization might start at that time and affect the future. The men spend thus their exile at Hawksbill Station without much to do. Some people have found things to do. One guy studies the trilobites, another has learned to fish them for food and another one has specialized in medicine and is thus working as doctor. Most, however, have nothing to do, they languish until the reach a state of stupor or die. Barrett, our main protagonist, has made himself the leader of the station and organizes everything. Throughout the book, we are told in a parallel story how Barrett managed to get exiled to Hawksbill Station, recruited with18 to a meeting of the resistance against the Syndicalist regimen, rising though the ranks until with over 40, he was head of the western resistance cell, when finally, he got arrested. By this time, he didn’t care about Politics anymore and was just glad to have been caught. The story starts with a newcomer, who is quite young and who doesn’t really for the bill as revolutionary. Moreover, he doesn’t know his economics or his politics. What is he doing there?
It becomes quite quickly clear that Barrett’s political backstory will become important to the story’s conclusion. As such, the story progresses without many detours or any twists quite straightforward to its logical ending, which turned out, dare I say it, a little bit flat. Still, I really liked it, and could read the originally 166 pages long story in a few days. Moreover, as already mentioned, I really liked its setting. Now, I have to look for similar stories with that setting. I know that Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile has a similar setting from the fact that Wolfgang Jeschke mentioned in his introduction that he had been sued by Julian May. Nevertheless, as both Wolfgang Jeschke’s and Julian May’s first book had originally been published in 1981, it is hard to prove plagiarism, especially as books usually take years from idea to writing until they are finally published. Therefore, the claim was quite quickly dropped. This book was originally published in 1968 so it is at least feasible that either one was influenced by it.
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Reviews with images
An interesting look into the past.
I picked up a 1978 printing of the story at a local used book store. It was an interesting read into the fanaticism, politics, and revolutionary ideas of the late '60s set in a near-future setting, where political prisoners are dealt with by sending them millions of years into the past to the Late Cambrian period to survive as best as they can.
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PilgrimFatherReverso
Black To The Past's Future
Reviewed in France on January 28, 2018