The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

The military men don’t think Chaney has the right stuff, and Chaney seems to have made a bad initial impression with them.

The other two are military men, Air Force Major William Moresby and Navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur Saltus. The Year of the Quiet Sun is about Brian Chaney, an arrogant futurist and famous Biblical scholar, one of three men conscripted to be time travelers. Time travel takes a lot of power, but maybe not as much as the 1.21 gigawatts produced by the flux capacitor in the Back to the Future movies.Īnother appealing aspect of this time travel novel is how timid the time travelers are with their itineraries. A secret American governmental agency builds a TDV back in the 1970s, but travel in it is limited to the location of the building where it’s housed and to a timeline that always includes a functioning nuclear power plant attached to the building. The Year of the Quiet Sun is one of the most realistic time travel stories I’ve ever read, and our chrononauts don’t travel in a time machine, but a TDV (time displacement vehicle). I finally got around to reading it a couple weeks ago. I got on the trail of it again last year when it was nominated for our science fiction book club, but it didn’t get enough votes to be read by the group. I remember when The Year of the Quiet Sun came out, but I didn’t read it. Campbell award in 1976 for a “… a truly outstanding original novel that was not adequately recognized in the year of its publication.” It was also nominated for the Locus Poll Award, coming in 2nd place, and actually won a retrospective John W. The Year of the Quiet Sun was last printed in America as an anthology of three time travel novels in 1997. Three of the books, And Chaos Died, Fourth Mansions and The Steel Crocodile seemed to have been forgotten by the 1980s. I’ve linked each of these books to the ISFDB publication record so you can see how often they’ve been reprinted.

The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker (Hugo, Nebula).Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg (Hugo, Nebula).Everybody remembers that one, but what about the others? In 1971, the winner for both awards was Ringworld by Larry Niven. Most Hugo and Nebula award winners in the novel category are remembered, often in print, or at least frequently reprinted. One thing I like to do is dig up long forgotten Hugo and Nebula award novel nominees that didn’t win, and read them to see if they should have.