“The Lords of Time” by Wilson Tucker: when science fiction pursued epic immortality
The first Italian edition dates back to 1 April 1973, published in the Urania series by Mondadori . Actually the story is from 1954 and I'm not sure if anyone had already translated it at that time. The story is soon told, Gilbert Nash (wonderful anagram which stands for Gilgamesh), falls to Earth in an unspecified period in prehistory. With him fall other occupants of a spaceship on a mission, coming from a distant planet. These aliens, with human features but with a more olive complexion and various extrasensory abilities, lost on a planet not their own, separated by detachment and unable to communicate with each other, will find themselves living in various eras, but above all they will find themselves the gods of an underdeveloped human race that, in every corner of the world, will be helped to progress; the purpose will be anything but a spirit of benevolence, or solidarity; each of the survivors will need to reproduce the appropriate technology to reconstruct a semblance of a spaceship and return to their planet.
The only ones who will resist the various eras, however, will be the two protagonists, Gilbert Nash, in fact (in search, like his anagram, not only of eternal life but of the way to return to his space-time in which to enjoy his eternity) and a disturbing Carolyn who, having found refuge in 1950s America, marries a scientist who is working on a secret project for NASA, a spaceship capable of exceeding the limit of the speed of light (which uses heavy water) . She will first try to help him (without her knowledge) to succeed, then she will kill him. The novel starts from this murder, with Nash realizing that something else is hidden behind this crime and will set out on the trail of the other last survivor of their cosmic accident.
The novel is a masterpiece not so much and not only because there is hardly any action and the language sinks into the psychology of the characters in a perfect way, but above all for the intelligent and highly plausible thematic it proposes. Humanity accompanied in the course of its evolution by alien presences that had everything except a beneficial and, if anything, opportunistic intent in giving help and knowledge; aliens transformed by humans, for their knowledge and skills, into gods to be worshiped (in the novel Carolyn would also have been one of the Egyptian gods worshiped by that civilization).
Tucker sets it all in the gray and post-war America of the 1950s, that of the Cold War, of spies, of shadowing, of nuclear plants under control, of paranoia from theft of indispensable data and essential scientific knowledge. The locations are anonymous towns such as Oak Ridge and Knoxville. The atmosphere is gloomy, the settings spartan, the dialogues bright and full of the desire to dig deep. The Lords of time are the gods who, for our time in which we are allowed to live, seem immortal (after all the epic of Gilgamesh, in the preface, lists all the kings who ruled before him, highlighting the duration millennial of their kingdoms; who were they? How long did they live?). But even those gods are not immortal. Only on their planet do they have a chance to be. Here, on Earth, their time will also end.
Nash, unlike Carolyn, aware that he can no longer change his fate as a mortal, accepts it and resigns himself to living on Earth for over millennia. He passes ages upon ages, he knows that it will not last but from human eyes he must always hide, because sooner or later he can be discovered. Carolyn will not give up. This splendid novel is consummated in this long-distance duel, which someone should take the trouble to reprint. But perhaps, in these neo-medieval (human) times, neo-obscurantists, scientists, and dark ones, we are asking too much.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/recensioni/i-signori-del-tempo-di-wilson-tucker-quando-la-fantascienza-inseguiva-limmortalita-epica/ on Sat, 05 Sep 2020 03:52:00 +0000.