October the First Is Too Late
by Fred Hoyle
Dick, a composer, and his boyhood friend John, now an eminent scientist, find themselves
in a patchwork world of different times from classical Greece to a far future that
humanity barely survives.
My favorable impression is no doubt reflective of the time when I read it (the summer of 1970, nearly 13, while moving from Washington State to Alabama). Perhaps the fiction doesn’t hold up as well decades later up, but the issues of time that it brings up still interest me and it was my first exposure to the idea of a geographic timeslip. And, similar to Asimov, Hoyle served to cultivate my interest in the natural sciences.
— Michael Main
To the Reader: The “science” in this book is mostly scaffolding for the story,
story-telling in the traditional sense. However, the discussions of the significance of
time and the meaning of consciousness are intended to be quite serious, as also are the
contents of chapter fourteen. —from Hoyle’s preface
October the First Is Too Late by Fred Hoyle (William
Heinemann, 1966).