October the First is Too Late   by Fred Hoyle

What a strange book! Starts out feeling like a boast about the life of an extraordinary professor, travelling about the planet on whims, swimming in theory of classical music (no maths here!), but ends like Orson Welles’ Time Machine, imagining a far future and even the ultimate destiny of humankind.

It is odd that Hoyle does not consider escape and expansion to the stars -- actually he does, but it is a brief dismissal; in fact Hoyle is very careful to try to cover all the open questions left by the book in brief dismissals: for example, he states that there is no comprehension of how the world can become, or exist, in fragmented time zones.

An ordinary man makes re-acquaintance with an old school mate, now an extraordinary professor, clearly in Hoyle’s own image. Time splits, but at first all they know is that the professor vanishes for a few hours. There is reference to some strange solar phenomenon, a beam which seems to be transmitting vast amounts of data. This artefact is strangely left dangling in a work which tries hard to explain all things. It then transpires that the world has fragmented into time zones, with only the UK staying contemporary to 1966, France going to 1917 (another aspect of the book which is left dangling), Egypt to 400 BCE, the Far East to a far future in which there is no life left on Earth, and Mexico which is at about 6000 CE.

Of course, it is the Mexicans who control the new, fragmented world, being the most advanced remnants of humanity. After various adventures, the protagonist finds himself among these people, where he meets his professor friend again, and they have to face a final ultimatum: live a nice but pointless life here in the far future, or go back to 1966 and the fragmented reality of that broken world. It makes no difference: they live two lives anyway, it's just the philosophical question of whether they are the original in the future and a copy left in the old time line, or vice-versa.

I’m sure Fred Hoyle for the most part was just having fun with impossible ideas. But the whole of this book feels mired by the incongruity of the fractured time-lines, and a complete lack of reference to historical causality. Fred makes out that all history is pre-determined, but at the same time the contemporary English negotiate with retrograded France and Germany to cease the Great War, so changes in the time-line must occur.

The writing is itself also curious. It oftentimes changes cadence mid-sentence: sometime we may be in the middle of a conversation in a Greek temple, then suddenly some months go past. It is clear that Fred tries to be rigorous in his expansion of the strange reality, while trying to imbue a human story into it. The writing is both precise and emotional, but both traits are terse.

A curious read, but the two avoided subjects of space travel and historical causality leave it feeling like there are too many voids in the story.