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2.0étoiles sur 5
SEXIST WAR OF THE FUTURE!, Jui 14 2003
Just as the first artwork by mankind were primitive paintings and stick figures on the walls of caves, Masters of Time is an example of the first primitive attempts at writing modern science fiction. This novel from the early 1940s was first published in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, and boy, can you tell. The book starts off promising enough in the aftermath of a suicide attempt by Norma Matheson. She was trying to kill herself out of regret for rejecting the marriage proposal of man named Jack Garson. The same Professor Jack Garson who, ten years later, is in town to deliver a series of lectures. As she struggles back onto shore from the river where she tried to drown herself, a mysterious man named Dr. Lell approaches her and offers her a job in a recruiting station for a war in Calonia (a war which is never explained). She accepts. Later on, she finds out the the recruiting is actually for a war in the far future of Earth and that her role is to dupe volunteers who come in. When she tries to escape from the situation, she finds that a machine used by Dr. Lell can control her mind, and even more, can control her age. He is a so-called "Master of Time". He offers her a deal. In return for her cooperation, he will make her young again. With no options, she writes a desperate letter to her ex-lover, Jack Garson, who shows up and is sent into the future to fight a war he does not even understand. How will the two survive the future? Norma will have to unlock the power of the universe within herself. I guess the plot is sorta interesting. The drag of the 1940s is all over this book though. For example, Dr. Kell does not accept women in his future war because they are not mentally suited. Yeah, right. Tell that to our own 21st century women military personnel. The whole thing that the Norma, a woman, has to lead these men into Dr. Kell's trap goes with the whole femme fatale crime noir of the 30s and 40s. Another negative of the book is the downright goofy jargon of the text. You hear things like "super duper ray guns", "the Glorious depersonalizing machine", and "three handsome Ganellians" etc. This book comes from an age when your science fiction didn't have to explain its science and so they just winged it all, more like fantasy really. It did have some good moments when it didn't rely on too much science. I was glad that Norma actually becomes the heroine in the end. The fact that in the future man's actions were partially controlled by superhuman machines called Observors and that some of these machines were called Tentacles, who are described much as the Sentinels in the latest Keanu Reeves actionfest, reminds one of the world of the Matrix. I was disappointed reading this after knowing the reputation of AE van Vogt. Perhaps he wrote better and worse novels than this one.
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