This is a dystopian philosophical novel. It begins in the year 1915, with a debate between two scientists: the protagonist, Arnold Pennell, and his rival, Lazaroff. Both scientists are vying for the love of a woman named Esther, the daughter of their benefactor, Sir Spofforth Moore.

Moreover, since it’s a philosophical novel, they have opposing moral ideologies: Pennell, like Moore, is a Christian traditionalist. Lazaroff is a man of material science, who believes that technology and reason have rendered the old superstitions obsolete. Man, he reasons, is nothing but a biological mechanism that can be perfected through appropriate stimuli, and anybody who thinks different is a moron. “Moron” being a term which Lazaroff applies with scientific precision, as he is also a strident phrenologist.

Pennell and Lazaroff’s research is on the subject of we would today call cryogenic freezing. They are preparing an experiment to seal and freeze three live monkeys in huge cylinders, to sleep for a century. So, after the dinner debate with Sir Spofforth, Lazaroff invites Arnold and Esther down into the lab, just to show Esther around. And so the three of them wander in to look at the three cryogenic tubes.

Can you guess what Lazaroff does next? If so, you are much smarter than Arnold. Maybe Lazaroff does have a point about Arnold’s skull not housing enough brain matter…

So Arnold wakes up centuries later in a strange world, filled with flying machines, men with ray guns, and society apparently strictly regulated and regimented, with people divided into classes based on their physical structures. He meets a man named David and his daughter Elizabeth, who give him a book that explains how the new order was founded. Forgive me quoting at length:

I learned of the great war that had begun a few days after I entered the cylinder, when Russia and the democracies of Europe stamped out German autocracy and laid the foundations of democratic government. I learned how this democratic spirit burst out in 1945, when all the experiences of the social order, accumulated by mankind since the dawn of history were jettisoned, with all their lessons and all their warnings.

It was extraordinary to me that none of us had realized the changes which had been impending. Warnings there had been, as there always are. They were the decay of parliamentary government in all lands, the breaking down of tradition and authority in every phase; only there was nobody to heed them. Then, previously, whether by acknowledgment or in spite of denial, society had always been founded on servile labor. The harnessing of the tides, and, later, the control of solar power, threw millions out of employment, millions of hungry men with time to think and nothing to reverence.

The book said that the movement could have been stayed by wise measures. But it was doubtful, for a frenzy for change was spreading like wildfire over the civilized world. Now only Spain, restored Russia, and monarchical and prosperous South America resisted it, among Occidental nations.

I read that in 1945 democracy initiated the millennium by bursting all the dykes. Millions were slain. London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Winnipeg were burned to ashes, with scores of other cities. Peace was restored fifteen years later by a few military chiefs who came into power owing to the universal exhaustion. At that time whole populations were turning cannibal. All organized industries had been destroyed. The path for reconstruction was clear.

Men called that the period of reaction, but it might have been the period of reconciliation. Both sides failed in the ensuing years; the mob, because it lacked idealism; the leaders, because they failed to recognize the unassailable truth in the old Socialist propaganda, that the era of machinery and of an inexhaustible supply of industrial power had made the systematization of production inevitable. With half the people workless, it was ridiculous that they should suffer and starve because they could not buy the goods rotting in the stuffed warehouses. The system did not fall because it was ridiculous, however, but because it had become unworkable. Production had to be for use, not profit. When profit went, rent had to go, and interest, that leech of society, so long forbidden by the Catholic Church, and no doubt the direst result of the Reformation. Failure to realize this need dragged down the old order in 1978. It fell forever, and with it died all hope of a civilization built on that of the past.

It was then that the writings of the great Wells, since called the Prophet, were discovered and proved the inspiration of the new order. In place of the illogical instinct of nations there was to be a New Republic, based on pure reason, and shining with facets of unanswerable facts. The world was to forget its past as thoroughly as it had forgotten the Stone Age. The new revolution was led by Sanson, I gathered, and swiftly conquered.

Although never explicitly explained, “the great Wells” is clearly H.G. Wells, and the entire book is a response to Wells’s own novel, When the Sleeper Wakes. Rousseau takes issue with Wells’s scientific socialism, and wrote this story as an explicit rebuttal to it.

As for that Sanson character, he is one of the leaders of the new society. It is again not stated explicitly, but he presumably takes his name from Charles-Henri Sanson.

The society in which Arnold finds himself is, in short, an amalgam of all the worst characteristics of the First French Republic, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.  If the book were written today, this would just seem lazy. But given that it was written in 1917, when the Tsar was still alive and Adolf Hitler was just a courier in the trenches of France, we must give Rousseau some credit for anticipating the horrors the 20th century had in store.

We give him less credit for how the story develops. The cylinder trick that Lazaroff played was only the start; at times this is a downright idiot plot.

Then there’s the writing style itself, which, as the cover suggests, is Victorian melodrama through and through. The version I have includes illustrations, which are also firmly in the mid-19th century style. (I couldn’t help wondering how Frank Frazetta might have rendered some of these pulp-y sci-fi scenes. I’m sure Rousseau would faint dead away at how he would have depicted Esther in the cylinder!)

Like many philosophical novels, the book is strongest when it’s doing world-building and describing characters, and at its worst when action is happening. Although I suppose a pro-religious novel can be excused for using a deus ex machina ending.

Still, the book is interesting as a historical document, just for predicting how wrong the early 20th-century experiments in Utopianism would go. And even more for how it shows the fundamental ineffectiveness, and perhaps even downright counter-productivity, of the cautionary tale. The Torment Nexus effect is older than people suspect!

Theodore Judson is a curious case. He wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Fitzpatrick’s War. I consider it to be one of the greatest works of science-fiction ever penned, with its sweeping world-historic story, its understandable, profoundly human characters, and most of all, its ingenious “dueling narrators” storytelling style.

Then he wrote The Martian General’s Daughter, which is a thinly-disguised re-telling of Roman History with the flimsiest patina of sci-fi coating to make it qualify as a novel. It’s hard to think of a time when I’ve been more disappointed in a book.

This past August, after many years out-of-print, with used copies costing thousands of dollars, a new edition of Fitzpatrick’s War was published. Naturally, this news thrilled me, as now I could recommend Fitzpatrick’s War to friends, family, and random strangers without reservation.

But there was a second part to this development: not only was Judson’s classic finally available again, but a sequel, The Timerman, was also being released concurrently, thus making Fitzpatrick’s War but the first entry in the “25th-Century Yukon Confederacy” series.

This news I met with a mix of excitement and apprehension. I was eager to rediscover the world of Fitzpatrick’s War… but not if this new story was on a par with The Martian General’s Daughter.

This was all or nothing, as far as I was concerned, for Judson’s literary credentials. If he could recapture the magic, he would be one of The Greats. If he came out with another Martian General-level effort set in the same universe as Fitzpatrick’s War, he would ruin his earlier masterpiece, and I would view the whole enterprise as a tragic literary collapse to rank with Harry Potter after the fiasco that was Book 7.

So, with a heavy feeling of anxiety and anticipation, I picked up The Timerman. And…

Well, I have to say this, review is a bit hard to write, because to understand anything about The Timerman, you have to also understand Fitzpatrick’s War, including how it ends. And since Fitzpatrick’s War has only become available again in the last month, probably not many of you have read it, and I don’t want to spoil it.

In my review, I said that Fitzpatrick’s War was a love letter to Clio, the muse of history. The Timerman is much the same thing: the theme is how cycles of history repeat endlessly, and individuals are in some sense destined to perform the function in the great drama that the circumstances of their birth assign them. Like the Notary sings in The Grand Duke: “Then take a card with heart of Grace / Whatever our fate, let’s play our parts.”

The Timermen are a secret organization with access to powerful technology that allows them to eternally control the cycle of history, choosing, as Leonard Cohen might say, “who will serve and who will eat.” The implicit question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes looms large in the story, but is never asked as much as it should be, much as it isn’t in real life.

The main character, John Randel, is a junior member of the organization, apprenticed to the veteran Timerman Dr. Murrey, who readers of Fitzpatrick’s War will readily recall.

Murrey is, essentially, the voice of History, as when he tells the protagonist:

“There are—I don’t put this in any of my books because it is a rather mystical idea—there are certain personality types that keep popping up over and over again throughout the recorded story of mankind.”

Even more pointed is his reply when our hero suggests to Dr. Murrey the idea that electrical power could be harnessed to benefit humanity, instead of relying on steam-power as society currently does:

“We cannot lose our focus by fussing over the possibility of helping the sick. Trust me, if you knew as much of History as I do, you would appreciate that the world is much better without the use of the electronic equipment we have on the islands. The mass media and thinking machines of olden times were, without exception, the enemies of all humanity.”

(Readers of Fitzpatrick’s War may recall that the late 20th and early 21st century are classified colloquially in this universe as “the Age of Shit.”)

The central plot of the book concerns the present ruler of the Yukon Confederacy, Lady Chelsea or “The Chrysanthemum Woman”. Again, if you have read the Fitzpatrick’s War footnotes, you will already know, in broad outlines, what will happen to her and her decadent court.

But as always with Judson (yes, even in Martian General) the point of the story is about those little individual lives that get lost when historians write on a scale of the rise and fall of empires. The book captures all the little details of life that are swept away in the great tides of time. (Ironically, this is exactly the sort of history that two characters explicitly endorse in the story itself… and are denounced by Dr. Murrey for believing in.)

In the end, like real history, the book doesn’t provide us with easy answers, and every reader must work out for themselves their own interpretations of events. In that regard, Judson held true to the spirit of Fitzpatrick’s War.

So, in the final analysis, is The Timerman as good as Fitzpatrick’s War?

Not quite, I think. The way the footnotes contradict the main narrative in FW was a masterful bit of writing, and this book lacks that. And the funny part is, I don’t even really blame Judson for not doing that again, because it would have felt cheap. It would have been awesome if he had come up with a different, but equally clever framing device—but that’s essentially asking him to catch lightning in a bottle again.

The Timerman is nevertheless a worthy follow-up to Fitzpatrick’s War, and like its predecessor deserves to be read by lovers of science-fiction and history alike.

Andrew Crowther posted about this book the other week. I shared his reservations, but as a longtime Marxist of the Groucho School, as well as a fan of offbeat books generally, I had to give it a try.

The book is narrated by… some guy. Frank Denby, I think, or something like that. And he’s a reporter in 1930s Hollywood. But he’s just filling the role of the Poor Nut, to use Stephen Leacock’s phrase. Nobody’s reading this book for him. No, they’re reading to see how the author manages to turn Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx into a detective.

Well, all told… it’s a mixed bag. Groucho, as depicted here, is certainly witty and gets off plenty of good lines. Moreover, I don’t think they’re just recycled gags from the movies; at least I didn’t remember most of them. The author appears to have gone to some effort to mimic Groucho’s style while furnishing him with original material.

Less impressive is the mystery itself: a starlet is found dead, and the authorities rule it a suicide, but Groucho knows better. He suspects foul play by shady characters in show business.

And, lo and behold, it turns out that it is indeed foul play by shady characters in show business. Granted, there are enough of them that figuring out exactly which ones did it is something of a mystery. But not really enough of one.

Again, though, is anyone reading this because they expected a mystery to rival one by Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie? Or are they reading it because it’s an amusing novelty? Exactly. It is the literary equivalent of a gadget play. And for what it is, it succeeds well enough. My favorite scene is the one where Groucho, disguised as his brother Harpo, narrowly avoids assassins sent by some of the villains. Groucho’s press conference afterwards is particularly amusing.

Fans of the Marx Bros. will probably enjoy it. Fans of mysteries will find it fairly predictable. But to me, the acid test of a book like this can only be: what would Groucho himself think of it?

My guess is he would say something complimentary, and then immediately add something else that would reframe his initial comment as an insult. Then he’d waggle his eyebrows, take a puff on his cigar, and walk comically away to his waiting vehicle, which Harpo would drive away without him.