Up the Line

Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line was nominated for a 1970 Hugo but lost to Ursula Le Guin’s classic Left Hand of Darkness, and it was also up against Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. But Up the Line is a snidely clever story that puts a New Wave gloss on a time travel riff, piling up paradoxes with abandon. The tongue-in-cheek treatment of future time-hopping playboy sex suggests that Silverberg was ahead of Robert Heinlein when it came to extrapolative fun with the sexual revolution. The time travel gimmicks show Silverberg could chop logic with the best of them. My favorite bit is the Paradox of Temporal Accumulation in cross-time tourism, which would lead to crowds of future folk at significant events like the crucifixion. show more The story also allows Silverberg to indulge his curiosity in Byzantine culture. Did it deserve the Hugo? Nope. But it was a worthy nominee. show less

I enjoyed this book a lot, but it is not for the pious. It is an well written, clever time-travel novel, with humorous passages. Jud Elliott bails on his job as a law clerk, moving to New Orleans in 2059. He blunders into a job as a Time Courier, taking tourists "up the line" (into the past) to Byzantium, one of his few areas of interest and knowledge. His mentor Metaxas helps bring teaches Jud how to bring the past to life for tourists, but also builds himself a comfortable life in the past, risking discovery and sanction by the Time Patrol. He encourages Jud to sleep around with women in the past, leading Jud to fall in love with an ancestor. Then, Jud begins to make mistakes and paradoxes result. 4.5 stars.

My reactions to reading this book in 1992. Spoilers follow.

This book was a lot of fun, a lot better than I expected. Along with Robert Heinlein’s "All You Zombies" and Alexander Jablokov's "Ring of Time", it's one of the most complicated time travel stories I've read. I read recently a scientist saying that Silverberg did about all you can do with time travel in this novel, and that's true.

This is one of those few books that lives up to that sf reviewer's cliches about an author throwing off in a paragraph ideas others would base a novel. (And Silverberg would do fine either way.) Silverberg gives us the idea of killing one's ancestors (one of the very oldest and hoariest time travel ideas) as a form of suicide and revenge on one's show more father. Linked to this is the idea (with more or less incestful connotations) of sleeping with your female ancestors (not your mother though). Silverberg introduces the idea of financial schemes via time travel: currency manipulation, planting antiques to be found by archaelogists, smuggling artifacts. Of course, there is the possibility of altering history (a possibility guarded against by the comically fanatical and boorish Time Patrol) by saving JFK, poisoning Christ, killing Hitler. Silverberg has his Time Couriers fully use time as a fourth dimension of travel to set up alternate lives in history, to meet each other at non-sequential points in their lives. And he comes up with what I believe is a new question for time travel: the Cumulative Paradox. If many time travlers through the centuries go back to a fixed point in space and time (say the Crucifixion), why doesn't the historical record show thousands of people at an event instead of a few.

Silverberg has a broad knowledge of history (he's written several non-fiction books on history) so it's no surprise that he's able to bring history alive as well as his Time Courier protagonist who carefully arranges the order and length of time jumps he shows his charges. Silverberg, with brief passages, brings history alive. And he knows what kind of things people me want to see in history: assassinations (including Huey Long), plagues (there's a special Black Plague tour), riots, revolts.

So, I expected the history to be well-done, but I didn't expect such clever variations on the time travel theme, and I certainly didn't expect the light, breezy style and comedy -- most of it being of the sexual farce variety. If this novel were filmed, it could be a porn movie with the sex scenes in it (in the text there's not that much explicit sex. Amongst the many things SIlverberg has written is porn, so that adds an extra punch to the sexcapades of the hero (including a not so great, rather mechanical session, with the infamously rapacious Theodora) who concludes there's a lot of truth to the notion that "jazzing one snatch" is much like "jazzing" another. Our hero, Judson Daniel Elliott III, also says, self-mockingly, sex with love with his ancestor Pulcheria is better than sex without love.

It's not only a plenitude of sex that marks this as a late sixties book but a plenitude of drugs. The sex is mostly heterosexual but homosexuality is mentioned. A case of child molestation is integral to the plot. A major mention is madeof race relations. (Here a black named Sambo Sambo befriends Elliott -- who he describes as a loser. Sam feels sorry in a pitiful way for Elliott when he screws up by duplicating himself temporally and incurs the fatal wrath of the Time Police, so he gets him a job as a Time Courier. The element of race is played up in some witty repartee between Jew Elliott and Sam. Sam is also a product of genetic purification of black genes. There is some element of Black Pride with Sam's life in Africa. Another element of the sexual farce is Elliott watching himself -- with first cold terror, then clinical detachment at the comic, rather grotesque sight -- copulate. Synaesthia -- experimental subject of some 50's and sixties' sf -- shows up here.

Silverberg manages a clever ending with Elliott just waiting for the Time Patrol to catch on to his temporal sins, and then he vanishes into never existence in mid-sentence. show less

I thought I had read some Silverberg before, I may have been mistaken. I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but this was a lot more raunchy (Heinlein and then some) than I was expecting, and there's definitely some racist language to get over.
Think Heinlein-esque (but again, raunchier) 60s free love romp, without all the heavy political commentary. Instead we get a pretty decent time travel as corrupt capitalism story that's not half bad. The future world, culture, and subcultures are believable and I think at least at the time it was written most of the historical bits were at least semi-accurate (obviously some literary license is taken). The twist ending was unexpected and fun. It was, overall, a little heavy in parts on the show more history lesson, but at least it works within the framework of the time traveler as travel guide structure.
If you like Heinlein and his ilk, you'll like this. If, for various reasons, you find the house of Heinlein distasteful, you'll definitely want to skip this one. show less

This book is definitely a product of the times in which it was written. Set squarely within the mindset of the sex & drugs counter-culture that sprang from 1960's America, much of it simply falls flat today. I get that Silverberg was going for humor - and there are a few humorous situations - but the rampant sex, the misogyny, the pedophilia, and the incest pretty much ruined it for me. I very nearly quit at about 1/3 of the way through but decided to persevere. I guess I'm glad I finished because it did get better. By better, I mean that it went from a DNF 1/2-star rating all the way up to a less-than-mediocre 2 stars.

The creepy sex stuff kept rearing its squicky head but, behind all that unnecessary cruft, there was a pretty cool show more time-travel story/history lesson trying to catch my attention. Unfortunately, every time the story started to get interesting, along would come some poorly-inserted boinking. Ah well, I did enjoy the ending - partly because the book was finally over (hah!) - but also because it happened to be a fun little twist. At the end of this one, Silverberg continues to be hit & miss for me. Too bad this one was mostly a miss. show less

Garbage.

An intriguing premise, but way too much unnecessarily graphic sex. The main character is a lecher who's every female interaction is entirely sexual. He stops at incest, but otherwise not a passing thought for a woman's emotions or personality or character. Women are for men's amusement, according to him. Disgusting.

A shame, because the title concept is a rather good one. But it comes at too high a price. I stopped reading this halfway through, fed up with the gratuitous sex. Don't bother polluting your mind. Skip this one. Or better yet, do as I did, and throw your copy away. Make room for more quality material.

Terrific time travel novel from Silverberg, in which travelling through time has become so much a matter of course that one of its major aspects is -- time tourism! Silverberg's hero (or perhaps more accurately his central character) is a Greek American time travel guide obsessed with Byzantium -- and, eventually, with one of his own ancestresses in Byzantium. Wonderful detail on the workings of the time travel business and on Byzantine history, and some great characters. The ending, shall we say, has issues, and modern day Turks may not love this novel. But it is a very funny book, and a terrific read.