City at World's End, by Edmond Hamilton
Classic (1951) SF
(Review posted 26 Jun 2007 19:26:55)

Classic 1950's hard SF. The little Midwestern town of Middleton is hurled into the far distant future by the explosion of a super-atomic (super-atomic!) bomb, and the inhabitants must deal with the dying Earth, galactic civilization, aliens, and all like that.

Good conservative two-fisted engineers-rule sort of SF, of the kind in which all that really happens in a million years is that we invent really fast spaceships, and we find some aliens who are basically exactly like (but basically subordinate to) us. Rather obvious but well-done themes about the pull of home, the scariness of change, courage, love, and all that.

(Annoyingly conservative assumption that the lovely female Galactic Administrator would really rather have been dancing and staring up at the moon safe at home than having to do scary things in distant lands, because she is after all just a girl. I mean, pheh!)

The notion that the future will really be strange, and not just in "bigger faster brighter" sorts of ways, is pretty absent here. To some extent that's the 50's, and to some extent it's just Hamilton. I don't have a good example on the tips of my fingers of 50's SF that did make the leap to actual strangeness but I imagine there are some (Dick? Lafferty?), and there's lots of more modern SF that doesn't. So maybe when I think to myself that it's a modern, even XXIst Century, idea, I'm just being provincial. Must someday write that monograph on the Singularity Idea and its Antecedants... *8)