From archive (archive)
From: ecl@mtgzy.att.com (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ
Subject: A TIME TO REMEMBER by Stanley Shapiro
Date: 19 Aug 88 14:26:13 GMT




		    A TIME TO REMEMBER by Stanley Shapiro
	       Signet, 1988 (1986c), ISBN 0-451-15484-3, $3.95.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper

     Stanley Shapiro is described as having received many "major writing
awards, including the Writers Guild of America Award, the Academy Award, the
Golden Globe Award and the Laurel Award."  The Academy Award was for his
script for PILLOW TALK and his other screen credits are for similar films.
So when a writer of "glossy comedies" (as film historian Leslie Halliwell
describes him) decides to write a serious time travel/alternate history
novel, how does he do?

     Frankly, not well.  Shapiro's science is designed to let the story
happen, not to make sense.  He postulates that people in the lab from which
the time traveler is sent back won't detect changes in the past until they
leave the lab (because it's shielded), but also that after they leave the
lab they will have BOTH sets of memories.  This would seem to make the
elaborate computer set-up described in the story unnecessary except as an
example of that recent cinematic trend, product placement.  (One wonders if
Apple paid for each mention of one of its products, judging from the way
trade names are used to excess.  For example, he says, "We then connected a
video camera to a MacVision computer, which in turn is connected to an Apple
Macintosh.  The camera photographs the newspaper's pages, then the MacVision
system digitizes the picture and puts it into MacPaint.  Two powerful
technologies are hooked up, video and the computer."  Is this an ad or
what?)  In addition, the whole book reads more like a script than a novel,
which I suppose shouldn't surprise me.

     The motivation isn't strong enough, and the plot predictable.  David
wants to go back to the Dallas of November 1963 and stop Kennedy's
assassination, hence preventing the Vietnam War and saving his brother
Christopher who died in it.  He botches it, creating an alternate branch in
which he does not achieve his goal.  His girlfriend Laura and Dr. Koopman
(the inventor of the time machine) detect this when they leave the lab and
so--you guessed it--Laura returns to Dallas one day earlier to bail David
out.  This is even more disastrous, and so....

     Silverberg did this in UP THE LINE with fewer characters (one, to be
precise, but he did have the advantage of a portable time machine).
Shapiro's alternate universes are not exactly original--he has your standard
fascist America, for example.  I did find it ironic (intentionally, perhaps,
on Shapiro's part) that in the fascist America among other things, "it was
unlawful to advocate atheism.  In keeping with religious beliefs,
homosexuality was  prohibited."  Is this an alternate history or just
Georgia?

     A TIME TO REMEMBER is not being marketed as science fiction.  To the
mainstream market, it may present some new ideas, but to the science fiction
audiences it is a very mundane offering indeed.  I would observe that as a
story idea for a film, it does have some promise and would probably be aimed
at a combination of the same crowd that made BACK TO THE FUTURE so popular
and those of us who grew up in the 1960s--there are great opportunities for
1960s' nostalgia here.

					Evelyn C. Leeper
					201-957-2070
				UUCP:	att!mtgzy!ecl or ecl@mtgzy.att.com
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					Copyright 1988 Evelyn C. Leeper