Zeno mentions a children’s book series that had some impact on him: Danny Dunn! Oh, man, I remember reading through every Danny Dunn book my library had when I was in first and second grade—but the excerpt Zeno includes tells me I shouldn’t try revisiting them, ever, lest my disappointment in their quality become even greater.
Other books I remember well from those kiddie days were the reference books of Herbert S. Zim (which also inspire unfortunate memories now), and of course, the usual suspects: Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Come to think of it, last time I looked at those author’s work I wasn’t much impressed, either.
Asimov and Clarke were right for their time and the readers’ ages. I tried to reread one of Asimov’s books not too long ago (in geologic terms) and couldn’t.
Pagoo, by Holling C. Holling. Great introduction to “natural history” for the ankle-gnawing set; unfortunately, our woeful little local library doesn’t own it.
I had a brief science fiction infatuation in jr. high school and vaguely remember reading some Asimov short stories; wasn’t there one about a murderer recently returned from the moon or some such? I threw that over quickly, anyway, and started obsessing over Theodore Sturgeon instead.
I wish I could’ve been influenced by Asimov. I might’ve enjoyed him better than when I read him as a growned-up.
It was mostly trashy Star Trek novelizations for me, and I’m going to feel both really out of place and really dumb if I’m the only one who says that.
I started with Tolkien and Donaldson in junior high and moved straight into Asimov and Clarke. Absolutely worshipped Clarke for a while… until I discovered Greg Bear and Greg Egan, not to mention Tiptree, LeGuin and a host of others.
If you’re tempted to revisit Asimov and Clarke, it’s best to stick with the short fiction. Their novels–particularly works written past 1984 or so–don’t hold up so well.
I loved Asimov when I was a teenager and have recently been reading a lot of the ones I missed when I was younger. I love him still, and think it’s the kind of thing that would make youngsters even today like science more, the age of a lot of the work notwithstanding.
Of course, Asimov was a bit simplistic in his scientific explanation, but his F&SF essays in particular are really top-notch, and often build on each other. I’ve never seen the concept of optical rotation in crystals explained better than the first five chapters in The Left Hand of the Electron.
Some of Asimov’s nonfiction is nice. I still like his blatant and good-natured egotism.
My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George. Haven’t reread it, so I don’t know how it would stand up to adult scrutiny.
On the other hand, who cares? It was unquestionably a seminal read for me at the time; I was, of course, a different person than I am now. It seems silly to assume I’m better able to judge its value now than I was then.
I’ll throw in Bridge to Terabithia, too; by Katherine Paterson.
Oh boy! Danny Dunn!
Yep, read them all, plus such other repositories of outdated scientific ideas as
Isaac Asimov’s “Lucky Starr” books. One unfortunate title: “Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus”!
Eleanor Cameron’s “Mushroom Planet” books. Let’s see, if I remember right, in one of the books the boys had to bring chickens to the Mushroom Planet [in their spaceship made out of aluminum, glue and gumption!] so the Mushroom Planet people could have eggs to cure their sulphur deficiency. I always thought that was a pretty clever solution.
And I also remember a book called “Angry Planet” or “Angry Red Planet” where the Martians looked like giant scallions or leeks..
Man, I loved those books.
..And suddenly I’m hungry.
Loved it. Will have to go back and read it sooner or later.
*cringes* ever since I was forced to read this at about 11 I’ve wondered what the point of writing it was. I’m sure my fondness for tomboys, in and out of books, didn’t help.
I’m not sure what I’d call a seminal influence. A seminal influence in what, exactly?
Does anyone remember James Blish and his flying cities? I thought they were really something about forty years ago. They contained the first mention of entropy I eve saw (and did not use it to deny evolution! :) ). I am afraid to look at them now, just as I will never go back to Heinlein’s future history stuff, even though there were some good nuggets in there, too.
Asimov wrote a lot of factual stuff, and also produced annotated versions of some classics, including the Bible. Those are all worth reading. He was immensely erudite, but he sure had a tin ear for dialog. I can no longer, as an adult, read his fiction without discomfort, but his fact stuff is still good.
A “tin ear for dialogue …” When I started to reread one of Asimov’s novels, I realized that it was told in the form of dialogue. There was very little in the way of description or even action. That’s certainly one way to tell a story, but on rereading I found his approach not very satisfying for science fiction.
“Does anyone remember James Blish and his flying cities? I thought they were really something about forty years ago. They contained the first mention of entropy I eve saw (and did not use it to deny evolution! :) ). I am afraid to look at them now, just as I will never go back to Heinlein’s future history stuff, even though there were some good nuggets in there, too.”
Yes, I do remember those. I had all 4 novels in one big paperback called “Cities In Flight”. It was a nifty concept: entire cities travelling through space doing contract work for one planet or another.. Spacefaring migrant workers. But I do cringe remembering the bit about NYC’s official motto “Mow Your Lawn, Lady?” being engraved on the granite walls of City Hall. Oh brother.
Hmmm. Shield-era Michael Chiklis would be good casting for the part of mayor of New York City…
Like a movie’s gonna be made of those books anytime soon!
Speaking of cities…Simak’s City stories, anyone? It’s hard to find anything by Simak anymore.
Other science fiction/fantasy that I think has held up well is Bradbury — but he had the advantage that the focus of his stories wasn’t nuts and bolts, but mood and character, universal stuff that doesn’t age. I think that’s also a reason for Sturgeon’s greater durability.
But face it — anything tainted with a whiff of Gernsback, and old Asimov and Clarke are carrying the weight of old school hard SF, stinks like a dead fish nowadays.
I too was bitten by the Star Trek bug at an early age and I’ve never quite shaken it. Aside from the hokum and fantastic kitsch, some episodes mean a lot more to me now. “Operation: Annihilate” for instance seems rather prescient. The “villian” has an effect on the human brain quite a bit like the parasite which causes ants to climb to the tips of grass blades in a quest to be consumed. An organism changing the behavior of another organism, causing it to behave, seemingly, erratically.
To quote from Sapolsky, a parasite that, “to complete its life cycle, generates an irresistible urge (in humans) to go to the zoo, scale a fence, and French-kiss” the meanest-looking polar bear. Seems insane until viewed through the lens of Evolution. I am an uber-nerd, apparently.
As for Sci-fi reading, I devoured James Blish Trek novelizations when I was very young and then Joe Haldeman and Vernor Vinge later. I haven’t read any sci-fi in 10 years or more. Non-fiction is too interesting. As Spock would say, “The creature is gone…however, I am quite blind.”
Agreed, Asimov’s stuff didn’t age well… but Heinlein’s did! (Planetary science notwithstanding….) On the other hand, Asimov’s Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (now sadly dated, of course) taught me a lot! I loved Danny Dunn — his Thinking Machine was already a bit out-of-date by the time I read it, but it did give a reasonable sense of what a computer was “about”. Also, DD, Invisible Boy had “virtual reality” long before it hit the headlines. (The earliest image of VR I can think of was in The Cities of Gold and Lead, from sometime in the 50s — was that Clarke?) Clarke started losing me with the Rama sequels, though. Cities in Flight was fantastic, and some of Blish’s other stuff was pretty good….
I loved My Side of the Mountain, but mostly as a coming-of-age tale, it really isn’t SF. Bridge To Terabitha is really another coming-of-age/leaving childhood story, hardly fantasy at all. Bradbury is the classic genre-buster, I even had Something Wicked This Way Comes in high-school English class! The Mushroom Planet was pretty cool at a younger age. (iirc, they already had the chicken, for reasons I can’t remember. The key point was realising that the Mushroom folk needed dietary sulfur, which could be had from eggs….)
The “Golden Age crew” from Asimov to Zelazny have been dying off over the last few years, but there are new folks as well — Bear (especially since he learned how to write endings), Egan (consistent mind-bender), Vinge (OK, he straddles two generations), Baxter (hey, *I* like him, even with the handwaving), and so on. In fantasy we’ve got Tad Williams, Mercedes Lackey, Terry Pratchett, Sharon Shinn, and many others. Andre Norton and Stephen Donaldson are still putting out new books, and Anne McCaffrey seems to be passing on the Pern franchise to her son….
I’d say it’s not so much that Clarke’s and Asimov’s work aged badly, but that you’re now looking for different things in texts. In that period of science fiction, science fiction was NOT literature, and if you go to it expecting literature, you’ll be greatly disappointed.
With Asimov in particular, the people are almost irrelevant: they’re tools for presenting philosophical concepts and hooks to hang the evolution of those concepts on, in rather the same way that furniture exists in literature. They’re just furniture that talks.
David Harmon, it grieves me to say that Andre Norton died a year or two ago – most of the stuff put out under her name in the past decade were “collaborations.” Lynn McConnchie is one of the better writers, the style is true to The Grand Lady’s.
Anything bylined with “Sherwood Smith” is garbage.
Right now the little SF I’m reading is old stuff from my library – Clarke, Asimov, Blish, The Admiral, Niven, Haldeman, Benford, Ellison, and Bova. The new stuff is all Tom Clancy in the 27th Century.
IMNSHO, Bradbury wrote crap.
FYI, I rank SMOF, jg. (ret)
James 2:24
For this English major, neither Asimov nor Heinlein was worth reading anytime past adolescence. Wooden characters, expository dialogue, and some just plain stupid ideas. As a budding feminist, I read in Stranger in a Strange Land that if a “girl” gets raped, it’s her own fault. Wonder why I didn’t take SF seriously? There were no new ideas – just invented technology.
The first two, certainly. I’d want more examples of the third.
But ultimately that’s not the point. Should I dismiss Le Guin because of the horrid science in her novels? Should I ignore her because of her penchant for the irrational and willfully mysterious?
Going to Le Guin’s works in search for hard science and future extrapolation is as pointless as going to Asimov for character development and timely societal critiques.
Just finished a very informative book called Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, by Julia Mickenberg. Evidently, many of the people who took up the writing of science-related books for children in the Fifties and early Sixties were Red Scare victims who had lost their day jobs. Danny Dunn’s authors were Jay Williams, a longtime Red journalist, and Hank Abrashkin, who had a history in education and in progressive children’s media. The big names in science nonfiction, presumably of a higher caliber than DD books, include Irving Adler, Millicent Selsam, and Sarah Riedman (all fired teachers) as well as many otherwise blacklisted authors. Mickenberg’s chapter on science books is marred by ideological confusion (she suggests that an illustration of a hen and a rooster producing an egg is “dialectical”) but describes some wonderful books and fascinating lives.
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You erudite weenies. For sheer horror, I’ll see your Danny Dunn and raise you Tom Swift Jr.:
Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway! Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar! Tom Swift and His Polar Ray Dynasphere!
If I were to read those today, I’m sure my eyes would explode. I remember loving them at the age of 10 or so, and yet still laughing at the writing (“Tom pitched to the floor unconscious!” “‘Tom, look out!’ Bud ejaculated.”) and even the cover art. The Repelatron Skyway book was about a highway that hovered high above the ground, well out of the way of any obstructing buildings or trees, and yet was still, according to the cover illo, as curvy as a mountain road. http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/skyway.html
RE: “It’s hard to find anything by Simak anymore.”
I was well into adulthood before I discovered that libraries actually DISPOSE of old books (by selling them to library patrons, but still) to make room for new ones. Somehow I thought “Zip Zip Goes to Venus” – the first SF book I ever laid my hands on – would always be there (so that, in some Bradburian fantasy future when I’m an infirm old fart, I could go back there and tenderly caress its cover, shedding grateful tears for the pleasurable path it started me on).
One more thing: Let me clue you all in on the quality of the books you’re criticizing. You sit in your present-day heads and smugly disdain Heinlein and Asimov, but the REASON they seem different today is because we were all a bunch of little airheads, as hopelessly dopey as a pack of golden retrievers.
I’ve kept audio tape journals and idea books since I was in my 20s. A few years back, I tried to listen to a couple of the earliest ones, and I couldn’t bear to get through a single whole tape. I was stunned at how SILLY I was, and yet how witlessly serious.
I’m betting the rest of you were like that too.
Finally, most of the SF of my era was written by pimply-faced nerdy young men, so it’s hardly fair to accuse them of not being sensitive to women’s issues. I’ll bet a lot of them got started writing mainly because they couldn’t get laid.
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Don’t knock Arthur C C ….
He has a very long list of accurate predictions.
The famous geocentric orbit space-station/satellite, is just the best-known.
The one I miss is Charles Sheffield, who died of a brain tumour about 3 years back.
There doesn’t seem to be as much “hard” SF as there used to be …….
Well, speaking of “seminal influences”… *hugs offspring lovingly* :D
I just reread David Starr Space Ranger and in the foreword Asimov apologizes that the depiction of the surface conditions of Mars is less than accurate as the story was written before we knew what we know.
I never read David Dunn, but I did grow up reading Tom Swift Jr (we only had 2 of the original Tom Swift Sr series) and the Hardy Boys collection. I can’t wait to reread them when my wife and I have kids.
I don’t know if I would call them seminal influences, but my early readings were my mother’s copy of the Bobbsey Twins. Shortly followed by C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. By the age of seven I was reading the Hardy Boys, and it was about that time I picked up a copy of Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed.
That last book made a lasting impression on me. I remembered it for a long time, knowing that it was part of a trilogy, but unable to find it. (At the time I had forgotten the title.) It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I found the other two books.
My father had collected a large number of The Year’s Best SF:19XX volumes, as well as Judith Merrill’s The Best of F and SF annuals. By the age of ten I had plowed through most of those. I still think those were some of the best anthologies ever published because Merrill didn’t restrict herself to authors identified as SF. I think I read my first Thurber story in one of those anthologies (even though it seems highly unlikely), and there was even the occasional cartoon. However, her anthologies introduced me to Asimov, Blish, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Simak, Ellison, Heinlien, etc.
I really think that those anthologies prepared me well for my future love of Thurber, Saki, Poe, Doyle, O. Henry, and even Hammett.
BTW, PZ, I also had an early love of Simak. Not so much for his City series of short stories, but for his more mystical works like A Choice of Gods, or Time is the Simplest Thing. I also had a love for Frederic Brown, I still do.
I’m reading The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, The First Thousand Days. I would never have thought I would enjoy a diary so much, but it gives an immediacy to the early years of F.D.R.’s administration that is fascinating.
Cheers,
-Flex
Caledonian: Good point about individual styles, but I still say Heinlein and early Clarke aged a heck of a lot better than Asimov. Let alone someone like LeGuin, whose early works are still damn readable, arguably because she was much more focused on human than scientific questions. The Left Hand of Darkness is still a classic! Likewise for Zelazny…. Heck, even Niven’s early work aged better than Asimov’s!
I remember Tom Swift — I also read a few of the “Senior” series as well as more of the “Junior”, but haven’t even touched the modern series (I wanted to call it “III”, but iirc, “Junior” was actually TS3.) I’d call those “adventure” rather than “SF”, closer in spirit to the Hardy Boys and the like.
Oh, and Clarke didn’t *predict* the geosynchronous communications satellite, he *invented* the concept, and later wished he’d thought to patent it. Robert Forward (now there’s a hard-science concept guy) did the same with his tidal canceller from Dragon’s Egg (turns out a “change of materials” made it useful for cancelling microtides in Earth orbit). Later Forward did patent the “statite” — a comm platform held in a non-orbital position by a solar sail. Reputedly Heinlein likewise screwed the patent for the later inventor of the waterbed.
Buffalo Gal: I do not remember anything like that from Stranger, but it’s worth remembering that (1) the voice of the characters is not necessarily the voice of the author, and (2) Stranger was satire. That said, I will admit his characterization was pretty shoddy. I remember discussions arguing that he only had two basic characters, one male, one female. Then Time Enough for Love and Number of the Beast demonstrated that those were only a single character, as he cloned a couple of the men (not to mention an AI) into girls and women….
Indeed, that’s one reason I think I’m not as into modern SF as I was into the stuff I read as a teenager. The newer works are better at character and a certain “realism”, but they’ve lost some of the sense of wonder and “fun” that came from more-or-less inventing a whole new genre.
I’ve been going through Asimov’s works fairly systematically lately, and with a very few exceptions, you’re right. Susan Calvin has personality and is memorable, ditto for Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw from The Caves of Steel, and the whole cast of the middle third of The Gods Themselves. A less famous example is Wendell Urth, who appeared in four Asimovian science fiction mysteries, and Arkady Darrell, heroine of Second Foundation.
Clarke, I think, fares a bit better with respect to current modes of writing. There are several stories in Tales of Ten Worlds that are heavy on character and light on the kind of whizz-bang gimmicks that made up a lot of science fiction in the early days (“Death and the Senator” is probably my favorite there), and several of his novels deal with a bit more character development than one would expect. Specifically, Rendezvous with Rama has strong poetic tones and has no small amount of character detail, and I’ve always felt that the relative lack of character development in 2001 was a commentary on the humanity of HAL9000 and of the rigors of long-distance space travel.
Modern guys I tend to like are Stephen Baxter (particularly The Time Ships and Ring) and Greg Egan.
Egan’s wonderful: he has the deep understanding of the scientific worldview and the imagination to explore the potentialspace it creates, AND he tries quite hard to make interesting and developed characters.
We’ve left the stage of concepts without characters behind, and now the pendulumn has swung back to characters without concepts. It’s nice reading an author who manages to unify the two approaches.
Zim!
Pagoo!
Me too!
As for Asimov, I bet I’d still enjoy the Foundation series if I read em today.
For me, Dune was seminal…some pretty good ecology and even physiological ecology (e.g. stillsuits) in there.
Ahh, yes, good ol’ TS Jr. When I was little I think I had the entire series from Tom Swift and his Electric Caesarian to Tom Swift and his Atomic Funeral. Can’t remember a bit of the “science” in them, which is probably merciful.
I’d approach the modern version of the Hardy Boys with caution. Back when I read them (early sixties- I’m the same age as P.Z.) the worst thing about them was deciphering the language in the first part of the series, which still included the original books from the ’30s. It wasn’t until I read Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag years later that I found out what a “roadster” was.
A few years ago I was passing through the kids’ section of a bookstore when a set of Hardy Boys books caught my eye. Out of curiosity I picked one up and started thumbing through it.
You may remember that in the original series the Boys had girlfriends, who had essentially no function in the books save to keep anyone from thinking that the Boys might be teh gay or something. It turned out that in the late ’90s Hardy Boys universe they played a somewhat bigger role in the plot.
I hadn’t gotten through the first ten pages of that book before one of the girls had been blown to pieces by a mail bomb.
If I had a smart six-year-old like my 1963 self, I think I’d find him/her something different in the way of reading matter.
BTW, did you know that the Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and one other kids’ series which slips my mind were all written by the same person? She inherited the business from her father, who created all those characters back in the 1930s.
I suspect that nowadays they’re written by a committee- of unemployed TV scriptwriters.
Ahh, yes, good ol’ TS Jr. When I was little I think I had the entire series from Tom Swift and his Electric Caesarian to Tom Swift and his Atomic Funeral. Can’t remember a bit of the “science” in them, which is probably merciful.
I’d approach the modern version of the Hardy Boys with caution. Back when I read them (early sixties- I’m the same age as P.Z.) the worst thing about them was deciphering the language in the first part of the series, which still included the original books from the ’30s. It wasn’t until I read Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag years later that I found out what a “roadster” was.
A few years ago I was passing through the kids’ section of a bookstore when a set of Hardy Boys books caught my eye. Out of curiosity I picked one up and started thumbing through it.
You may remember that in the original series the Boys had girlfriends, who had essentially no function in the books save to keep anyone from thinking that the Boys might be teh gay or something. It turned out that in the late ’90s Hardy Boys universe they played a somewhat bigger role in the plot.
I hadn’t gotten through the first ten pages of that book before one of the girls had been blown to pieces by a mail bomb.
If I had a smart six-year-old like my 1963 self, I think I’d find him/her something different in the way of reading matter.
BTW, did you know that the Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and one other kids’ series which slips my mind were all written by the same person? She inherited the business from her father, who created all those characters back in the 1930s.
I suspect that nowadays they’re written by a committee- of unemployed TV scriptwriters.
“Speaking of cities…Simak’s City stories, anyone? It’s hard to find anything by Simak anymore.”
John Pelan’s Dark Side Press has undertaken to reprint _all_ of Simak’s short fiction, in a twelve volume series.
http://www.darksidepress.com/simakstories.html
Mike Walsh’s Old Earth Books has reprinted WAYSTATION and CITY, on the occasion of the centenial of Simak’s birth (However, neither B&N nor Borders has seen fit to order any copies).
I must admit that Simak fell out of print with astonishing rapidity once he died. I remember in 2002 only being able to find two books by him in print: WAY STATION and OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS.
“Does anyone remember James Blish and his flying cities? I thought they were really something about forty years ago. They contained the first mention of entropy I eve saw (and did not use it to deny evolution! :) ). I am afraid to look at them now,[…]”
Probably just as well. There’s a reason why NYC uses as its management model old timey Baseball and it’s related to why it is of all the SF authors out there, Blish (and Norman) was the one to write a book the _author_ called a fascist utopia.
He wrote a horrific pair of young adult novels, created out of the intersection of his fondness for top-down systems and what I like to call Those Darn Kidism.
It’s true that a lot of SF becomes straight F as we learn more and the speculative S part becomes more obviously wrong.
But I have a question. I dearly loved Danny Dunn and Lucky Starr and Tom Swift Jr when I was about the age my son is now. But their science is so obsolete as to be obvious to a ten-year-old today.
So — what is the equivalent preteen SF today? Is there any? Doesn’t have to stand up to adult criteria — those never did — but it has to excite the ten-year-old imagination the same way those books did for us. And I don’t know what would. There’s Harry Potter for fantasy, but I mean stuff that makes the reader think about the future, not the past.
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Europa, anyone? Anyone?
Well, I think the answer is that there isn’t any. Putting the science in the foreground and the characters in the background is exactly what most of this thread is slamming the Golden Age for doing – so do modern reviewers and authors. So SF today isn’t about the science or scientific concepts, it’s just fiction that happens to be set in a science-y setting, like Weber.
I’m not saying ths to run down Weber or similar authors – he writes some enjoyable books – but just to point out that the goalposts aren’t where they used to be and nobody is taking shots at the old goalposts. SF today is held to a standard that much more closely resembles the standards of conventional literature, to the extent that you can’t really build a story around an idea the same way you could before.
Literary standards demand that the characters and their concerns occupy the foreground and dominate the reader’s attention, that most if not all events happen for a reason (or even with a purpose), that the story come to an ending that resolves its major conflicts… if you tried to write, say, “The Dead Past” today, the premise of the story would be forced into the background behind dramatizing the human events surrounding it.
These are not necessarily bad standards, but they constrain work written and published under them, in a way that’s incompatible with the idea-centric writing of the Golden Age.
Thanks to all who brought up Simak – he was my favorite SF author when I was in my early teens and younger, and I was transfixed by “City”. At the younger end of the period, I was also an avid Tom Swift fan.
How about the “Tarzan” series? I had my father’s set of these, and blazed through them at a younger age. They were an excellent combination with extensive walks in the North Carolina woods and a summer spent at my grandmother’s house in southeast Georgia in close proximity to many botanical wonders (pitcher plants, sundews, butterworts, and their associates in the actual yard – that’s hard to beat, if you’re a kid who’s fascinated by plants…).
I have tentative plans to re-read at least some items by Simak, but, on the other hand, am hesitant with regard to damaging (probably not the right word…) the memories. I’ll probably eventually do it anyway, though.
“[…] if you tried to write, say, “The Dead Past” today, the premise of the story would be forced into the background behind dramatizing the human events surrounding it.”
See, for example Baxter and Clarke effort in just that, THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS. It’s basically TDP stretched out to novel length, with added boob-groping. The title itself is a reference to Bob Shaw’s Slow Glass stories (possibly the most horrifying window substance ever: a 10 year bit of SG exposed to sunlight could easily have the same energy content as ten tons of TNT stored in it).
Baxter and Clarke also re-used some ideas from Hoyle’s OCTOBER THE FIRST IS TOO LATE in TIME’S EYE.