The story of political dissidents who’ve been exiled to the remote past (the Cambrian Period, which in the novel is two billion years ago rather than 550-some million, which Silverberg makes a weak attempt to justify in the introduction of this edition).

The story has two timelines: the characters’ current situation in the Cambrian, and their personal past lives, which took place in the 1980s to 2000s, called Up Front by the characters. I found the sections set in the 2000s to be tedious and silly, very much mired in the 1960s U.S. sociopolitical milieu that the novel was written in. We’re told that the Up Front government is repressive, fascist, evil, but we’re never shown it, or even told much of what they do that’s so evil. (They’ve cancelled elections, sure, but I’m coming round these days to the view that democracy is overrated anyway.)

“Who could object to syndicalist rule, after all? The country was thriving. Most people were working regularly again. Taxes were low. The interrupted flow of technological wonders was no longer interrupted, and each year produced its new marvel: weather conditioning, color telephone picture transmission, tridim video, organ transplants, instafax newspapers, and more. Why gripe? Had things ever been any better under the old system? There was even talk of the restoration of the two-party system by the year 2000. Free elections had come back into vogue in 1990, though of course the Council of Syndics exercised a right of veto over the choice of candidates.”

The activists Up Front also exhibit the sexism of 60s political activists:

“And then would come a week or two of monastic solitude, which was good for his soul, but as the laundry began to pile up and the linens started to need changing he’d realize that the monastic life has its disadvantages, and some other thrilled young revolutionary in her late teens would move into his apartment and dedicate herself to his earthly needs for a while.”

It was hard to understand or care about what motivated all the revolutionary fervor that landed them in exile. I could have done without all the backstory and would have preferred a focus on their current plight exiled in time. That in itself seemed like a gimmick (why not just lock them up, or send them to Antarctica or a desert island somewhere?), all just to lead us to the dénouement, which was for me the only really interesting part of the book. I understand this was an expansion of a short story. I suspect it would have been more successful if it had stayed that way.

I also had a problem with the mechanics of time travel in this novel. It seems like once Up Front had figured out more how time travel worked, they could have adjusted the period traveled, and simply gone back and rescued all the prisoners as soon as they’d arrived at Hawksbill Station. Or, you know, gone back and prevented Evil Government from coming into power to begin with. What good is time travel if you’re stuck with one yardstick, like a car that can only ever travel exactly 500 miles on any trip? Other than being the gimmick that permits the twist ending, that is? ( )

(...)

Writing in the political climate of his Cold War age he doesn’t make clear choices : the “syndicalist” new government isn’t left nor right. The counter-revolutionaries seem to be modeled on the Russians, at least in name – some characters are described as “Khrushchevist with trotskyite leanings”, and similar denominations – but what they want doesn’t seem to be much more than reinstalling democracy. So don’t expect deep economical or political analysis – it seems as if Silverberg just picked the default revolutionary thought available to him at the time, and only used them as labels to add a bit of color, because that would be easily recognizable for his readers, and feel ‘contemporary’ too.

While art and literature inherently don’t need to have political intentions, it is neigh impossible to escape ideological undercurrents. I think there is truth in Louis Althusser’s dictum “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”, and so that relationship unavoidably has an effect on writing too. As such, and especially given the subject matter of the book, it is a bit of a missed opportunity Silverberg didn’t try to communicate his political thoughts better, but I get it: he tried to write an entertaining book first – that house, you know. So a political manifest this not, even though it isn’t too bad as a short sociological sketch of a fictional case study.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )

Silverberg, Robert. Hawksbill Station. 1967. Berkley, 1978.
This short novel has a simple premise: an authoritarian society gets rid of its malcontents by shipping them a billion years into the past when trilobites were the dominant lifeform. Food and other bare necessities are routinely shipped back to them. Since the camps are separated by gender and time, there is no chance to breed really early humans. But the novel is not really about time travel. It is about what it means to be a revolutionary and the kind of society a group of radicals would create if left on their own. Hawksbill is competently told, but the plot development reminds me too much of a Twilight Zone episode. 3.5 stars. ( )

The compassionate government of the future (actually set around now, but this was written many years ago) doesn't execute political prisoners any longer. Instead, they use a time machine to send them one billion years in the past to the Cambrian Era.
The men sent here are led by Jim Barrett, a revolutionary who's been there the longest. There isn't much of anything for resources and the men are dependent on what the government sends them for the most part. The time machine is one-way; it can only send to the past so no one can return.
Mr. Silverbert alternates between what's happening at the prison (Hawksbill Station) and what happened in Barrett's life. A new man has arrived who arouses some suspicion among the prisoners.
I admit I didn't always understand the revolutionary sects and beliefs that are discussed in Barrett's reflections on his life, but I found some parallels to what actually happened during that time period.
It's an interesting read that presages the author's future writings. ( )

A decent enough story, I found the flashbacks to the political past pretty dull stuff. The story is predictable once is gets going, but the flashbacks get more interesting towards the end too. Not his best by a long shot, but he still has a way with interesting characters, and I found the premise fascinating. I'd like to read the short story it started out as, for comparison. ( )