Good time travel story by Anderson. Not hard science but good adventure. Poul is a good writer if you like SF slanted toward fantasy. ( )

8.5/10
Anderson deftly weaves science fiction with historical fiction and throws in a dose of philosophy as well. This slim book is thought-provoking in its themes while maintaining a air of adventure and even a taste of romance. My only quibble is a little too much telling and not quite enough showing, a style perhaps more typical of the time when this was written (1972). ( )

Honestly, I don't have much to say. I read it for the Time Travel Group here, hoping for a good old classic 'What If' story of ideas, and I guess that's what I got. Characters, superficial. Heart & soul, absent. Plot, workmanlike. Ideas interesting, somewhere halfway in between Simak's pastoral and Heinlein's militaristic. Ultimately, forgettable. *imo* ... maybe I've read too many books to appreciate this sub-genre any more. ( )

one of the few books I've read multiple times ( )

This review was also posted here - https://cavetothecross.com/blog/there-will-be-time/

Jack Havig has a genetic mutation that allows him to travel through time and finds out that an apocalypse will occur to the human race unless he does something about it. He meets up with other mutated people where he finds out the leader is a racist who wants a culled people in the second age of man. What can Jack do and is it worth doing anything?

What a jumbled mess of a story this is. With time travel the reader is either at the fixed point in time hearing about the tale or you follow the traveler on his journey. With the fixed point, which this story is, there’s bound to be a lot of jumping around because that’s what it’d feel like from your stationary spot. The jumping around here is in Poul Anderson coming into paragraphs with about two previous ones missing. Plot points are picked up and then dropped. Jack goes to the date of the crucifixion to meet other time travels so as to prevent the end of the world. No one bothers to look upon the scene of the most famous event in history; which would have been a really interesting perspective to show the “otherness” of time travelers but the reason for meeting up is really dropped. A change to the white ruler in the second age of man is brought about but the salvation from the apocalypse isn’t even discussed again.

There is some great understanding of Anderson to not just drop his time travel characters into the midst of the date where the traveler has to arrive. He understands how much information gathering would have to be accomplished. How slow it would take to amass any wealth and influence. However, the time length to carry this out is brushed over too quickly and it skips around from needing to find a way to carry out the Big Plan to I like this family to I’ve fallen in love. Again, with the time travel aspect to this story, one might think it was done on purpose but that seems to be an excuse one would give for poor story structure.

The story is attempted to be told from the meetings Jack has with his childhood doctor who is the only “normal person” who knows he’s a time traveler. This is really an interesting point of view to take. However, it is quickly dropped just to follow Jack’s perspective with a few asides to bring the doctor back into focus. This is like a found footage film that forgets it needs to have the perspective of found footage to maintain the storytelling element it started off with.

The timing of everything is also way off. I know, a book about time travel can hand wave this away. But the entirety of the book from Jack’s perspective still feels like a lifetime but it only shows his with a period of about 30 years under his belt. The amount of time Jack takes to fall in love is way too quick and without connection and is done to only provide a dramatic point or advance the plot for its sake. Emotion is tread on without the build up to pay it off in the end. The final 20 pages of the book feels like the final act of the book so it’s rushed.

The hop, skip, and jump around you expect from a time travel book is obtained from only the clunky writing of Anderson. Character development is nonexistent - why do characters that supposedly care about Byzantine rulers and the end of the world not care about the crucifixion? Why is there any attempt to care about the apocalypse when there’s rare to no connection with anyone in the world due to their mutated power? The big questions of God, life, time that the book brings up are only shrugged off without satisfaction while anything the characters care about suddenly become the only things worth knowing. Most of the connecting pieces to the story are missing. One would have to go back in time and add them in. Final Grade - D+ ( )

Interestingly, I agree with all of the other reviewers about the quality of this book/story. My take is that Anderson might have done much better if he bothered to take the time to flesh out the story, and the various options within the story, and made it longer. As it is, it's entertaining, but a wee bit less than satisfying. It's also fairly predictable. The tension/action is most manifest when Havig is playing time tag with his opponents...jumping forward and back, or backward and forward, in time to outwit the others. It is a challenge to keep track of "what's" going on--and sometimes even "why".

But it's a broadly simple story which only begins to bog down when the hero's scruples are challenged: Havig knows that armies commit atrocities, but can't accept that "his" army commits them. Which, of course, determines the arc of the story. All in all, it’s still a good read with enough questions that one can almost ignore Anderson’s answers.

And I'm now intrigued enough to get/read any of the other Maurai stories...if I happen to stumble across one; but not enough to go looking for them. ( )

There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson (1972)

As an infant Jack Havig learns that he can move through time at will, and later on an older version of himself warns him to hide that ability from other people. The story employs a traditional storytelling device by having it narrated through Havig’s childhood doctor, Robert Anderson, through whose eyes the reader gets to know the protagonist and watches him develop as a person.

The premise of the story encourages the reader to consider how life could or should be lived by an individual with such a gift. Of course, on the one hand time travel could be very useful in mapping out your personal future and avoiding danger. On the other hand, however, it could be highly unpredictable and hazardous too. And in what time and location could you hope to find other people with the same natural ability (assuming there are any), and why might you want to contact them? One obvious place (which has also been used by other writers of time-travel stories) might be First Century Jerusalem, especially around the supposed time of Jesus’ ministry and death.

The somewhat idealistic Havig hopes that fellow time travelers can unite to create a bright future for mankind, and he discovers that an organization apparently engaged in such a mission is already in operation. Alas, abuse of power is a powerful temptation, and prejudices and hatreds brought from the ages in which the individual travelers were born are not easily overcome. When Jack’s secret idyll which he creates in ancient Byzantium (which is beautifully and poignantly described, as it is in Anderson’s book The Boat of a Million Years) is ruthlessly and mercilessly destroyed by other members of the organization, he resolves to establish his own to counter their nefarious disregard for basic human decency.

The book employs time travel as a means to show that societies and political entities naturally develop and disintegrate, and that it is impossible for them to endure forever. The intelligence and perspicacity of the author as a thoughtful observer of human nature is also powerfully manifested in this work.

There Will Be Time is relatively short at less than 180 pages, but there is so much packed into it that it may give the impression of being longer. That it is probably one of Poul Anderson’s better works is evidenced by the fact that it was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973.


Here are some passages which I particularly enjoyed:

The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”

“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact--while it lasts--that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.”

I’ve seen photographs which he took on different occasions, and can well imagine this scene. It was less gaudy than you may suppose, who live in an age of aniline dyes and fluorescents. Fabrics were subdued brown, gray, blue, cinnabar, and dusty.

“Give them their religion, make the priests cooperate, and you have them.”

I’ve seen what happens when you try to straitjacket man into an ideology.

Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely.

A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.

Nature never has been in perfect balance--there are many more extinct species than live--and primitive man was quite as destructive as modern. He simply took longer to use up his environment. Probably Stone Age hunters exterminated the giant mammals of the Pleistocene. Certainly farmers with sickles and digging sticks wore out what started as the Fertile Crescent.

But there are no happy endings. There are no endings of any kind. At most, we are given happy moments.

“…our freedom lies in the unknown.”

Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again.
( )

Middling attempt at a future history adventure with much social and philosophical musing, a la Heinlein. Although it's more literary than most SF of its time, its aim exceeds its grasp, and there's too little humor to offset the darkness. ( )

Pretty grim time travel novel. It finesses the question of whether a "time machine" is possible by assuming a very small number of humans are simply born with an unexplained ability to travel in time. One of them, Jake Havig, tells his story to a sympathetic non-traveler doctor. He finds he cannot change history significantly, but he does discover there are other time travelers, some of whom under a Sachem have formed an Eyrie which is trying to change history in an authoritarian racist direction by brutal methods. He eventually defeats them and forms a more decent group hoping to use time travel to reach the stars. Over the course of events, a lot of people die in unpleasant ways,
As in much of Anderson's fiction written in this period there are also some heavy-handed criticisms of the leftist hippie culture of the early 70s, notably a supposed handout Jake tried to use to persuade the hippies (or more probably those influenced by them) that they were wrong. ( )

Time travelling by personal will is the premise of this book. When Jack Havig travels into the future he realizes he must seek out other people like himself to try to prevent that future. ( )

One of those classic 'short' pulp novels - why not give it a shot?
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From 1972. Anderson makes a sincere effort to overcome how chauvinistically (gender and race) he was raised, his era, but doesn't quite make it. The book is ostensibly Time Travel, but is mostly ideas. By no means is is a romp. I kinda enjoyed it, kinda found it depressing. I do see some librarian here says this is a prequel to some sort of series; I'll investigate, but probably not follow through. ( )

Um tema interessante mas com uma escrita mortalmente aborrecida ( )

Substance: Time traveling man encounters moral quandaries and epistemological queries. Source of powers is inherent & mental/physical; other adepts exist; origin left to a question in the final chapters. Love and death, and the complexities of keeping up with where and when one exists, not all of which are consistently handled. Moderate 29th-century "liberal" world-view, balanced by libertarian action.
Style: Standard 1970s prose, nothing earth-shakingly brilliant or even wildly original. Servicable work. I didn't care for the artifices used in narrating the story, which became confusing. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2216159.html

I had read this as a teenager, and was very interested to find out how it stood up on rereading. It remains rather good - the protagonist is a mid-century American kid with the innate gift of time-travel, which he controls rather better than the husband in The Time-Traveller's Wife. There's a lot of politics here, as a white supremacist time-traveller tries to set up a racist principality at the end of time; can he be stopped, given that time appears to be immutably set in its tracks?

This was also the book from which I learned about the Fourth Crusade; somehow I simply hadn't heard of it before, and Anderson's portrayal of the brutal rupture of Christendom was a vivid historical eye-opener. All the good bits were as good as I remembered, and the bits I didn't remember were not bad at all. ( )

An interesting time travel novel from Poul Anderson, which plops a 20th century American into a future culture, based on a remnant who survived a holocaust. The Mauroi put much more emphasis on the evironment and much less on industrialization than did our own culture, but this is by no means an all good vs. all bad cultural contrast. Interesting, if not one of Anderson's most memorable. ( )

An entertaining time travel story. About 40 pages in I didn't have high hopes for this, but it really opens up and becomes more interesting as it goes along. ( )

An interesting book built on the premise that certain individuals can will themselves to anypoint in time. Its an interesting study of what various people would do with such an absolute power. One man travels the world, falls in love, and eventually has to decide whose side he's on. It's up to him to fix the distant future. ( )

Although it has been YEARS since I read this book, it is one of the few I remember vivdly. One of my absolute favorites, and one I highly reccomend to anyone that enjoys stories of time travel, or anyone that has ever wondered about paradox. ( )

time travel, influencing a dangerous future for the good

NIL