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| Cover art by John Betancourt |
| THE CHRONOCIDE MISSION Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, April 2002 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-58715-645-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-58715-645-8 | 307pp. | HC | $29.95 | |
Time-travel stories are tricky to write, and the trickiest of all is the type in which the object of the tale is to save a desired or hoped-for future by travelling into and altering the past. But Lloyd Biggle pulls off that feat here with his customary aplomb.
One other risky choice is to alter the language. Biggle has done that here. He does leave us a warning.1
"As a reminder of that fact, fabricated words (some will look like typos or misspellings!) are used for flavoring throughout to remind the reader that a different—or greatly modified—language is being spoken by people living in, or originating in, the future. (This of course will not be true of the present-day characters who appear in the final chapters of the book!)" – Page 5 |
Here's a taste of Biggle's prose:
His name was Vladislav Kuznetsov, and he had been a twenty-one-year-old student at Mount Harwell College in Mount Harwell, Ohio. On a Friday afternoon, March 24, 2001, he succumbed to a sudden attack of spring fever and cut his classes for a stroll in a public park near the campus. Even after fifty years and several hundred centuries, he remembered it as vividly as though it had happened an hour before. It was a warm, fresh day with a promise of spring—the first really pleasant day of the year after the usual vagaries of a midwest winter. He strolled leisurely through the park, thinking with shameless delight of the stuffy classrooms he was avoiding. Eventually he seated himself on a patch of greening grass with a convenient tree to lean against and enjoyed the soft breeze and the peaceful surroundings while he absently whittled on a twig he had picked up. He felt sleepy. Probably he dozed off. Then came a tremendous jerk, like having a chair pulled from under him at the same instant that a truck hit him, and he almost lost consciousness. He landed with a painful bump and skidded for a short distance along a very rough wood floor. For a moment he sat gazing about him dazedly. He had been abruptly translated from his seat on the ground in a pleasant park on a lovely spring day to a seat on a wood floor in a large, dim room with a thunderstorm raging outside. He had a distinct impression that the two scenes had been linked by an earthquake. He tried hard to focus his thoughts, staring first at a table where a candle burned brightly and then at an animal tied to one of the table's legs by a short leash. It was a hairy pig. He raised his eyes to the room's two small, water-streaked windows and saw nothing beyond but branches swaying in a strong wind . . . |
And I'm not sure, but this might be a handy way for a sloppy speller to cover himself. Of course, that's what book editors are for. It seems the editor who handled this book was asleep for part of the time.2 See the Errata page. (I should probably cut Dr. Biggle some slack. He died in September 2002, aged 79; and I knew he had been sick before then.)
The plot of the novel is a sort of reverse-terminator scenario in which a man is inadvertently snatched some 300 years into the future. There he finds a primitive world almost devoid of technology. He arrives in the barbarous Peerdom (kingdom) of Lant, whose ruler, the Peer, seeks to conquer the world and is well on the way. The world is almost devoid of technology; there was a great war, fought with weapons derived from the Honsun Len, that destroyed the civilization we know and altered Earth's surface tremendously. But variants of the Len survived, and they are used to enforce the cruelest slavery imaginable. Negroes brought from Africa did not revolt because they feared punishment. The slaves of Lant and the other peerdoms do not revolt because they cannot conceive of such a thing. Treatments with the Len have rendered them almost mindless.
The 20th-century man, whose name was Vladislav Kuznetsov, is fortunate to arrive in the workshop of the Med of Lant, the closest thing that world has to a scientist. He takes the name Egarn and in time achieves high rank. But always in his heart is the wish to return somehow to the past and prevent the invention of the Honsun Len. At length, he gets a chance to do that.
Some aspects of the plot are underdeveloped. For example, Deline is the villainess of the piece. She apparently was prince of Lant (the daughter of the Peer), faked her death, and turned up near the end of the book as prince of the neighboring Peerage of Midlow, still young, beautiful and vicious. How did she manage this when she had been lover to young Egarn when he first arrived, and he now is an old man? (I'll put it down as a lapse due to Biggle's age.)
Another puzzling thing is that people walk everywhere, unless they are nobles (peeragers) permitted to ride horses. The peerages are broad, with forests and mountains. It seems a lot of walking is required. Commerce must move slowly.
Dr. Lloyd Biggle, Jr (1923-2002) was never very prolific, but when he wrote he always put together a good yarn. Despite its grammatical errors and some apparent plot holes, this effort is no exception. I found it engrossing.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.