The Time Axis

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Very Minor Kuttner.

Either by himself or with his wife, C.L. Moore, Kuttner was one of the great writers of classic science fiction. Even today, Kuttner's stories remain thought-provoking and thoughtful and worth reading. I count Kuttner's death at such an early age as one of the great tragedies of science fiction.

This book, however, is not one of Kuttner's great books. It is, altogether, a fairly mediocre representative of “super science” science fiction of the 1930s, which is strange because this book was written in 1949, after Kuttner had written many other classic stories. I suspect that this may have started out as a draft that Kuttner had lying around from the thirties, one of his early efforts, that he polished up and sent off to be published.

It has the undisciplined quality of an early effort. There is so much going on. The narrator, Jerry Cortland, has a run in with a strange force that is killing people in Buenos Aires. He returns to America and is enlisted by super-scientist, Ira De Kalb, to join a team with gray, aging Dr. Letta Essen, and Colonel Murray to journey into the future to fight the entity that has been released into our time. The journey involves going to the crossroads of magical ley lines in Canada to travel millions of years into the future the entity, called “the Nekron.” Kuttner covers this explanation with pseudo-scientific bafflegab, and the reader is left to wonder how this works, since the four will apparently sleep in a sphere buried in the Laurentian mountains. De Kalb knows that these four will make the journey because when he discovers this magical place, he sees the four of them sleeping where they will sleep.

As time-travel devices, this is pretty slim.

The four go into the future a relatively short way, where they discover a technologically advanced civilization, and imitations of themselves. They do things at this time, which seem pretty pointless, except that aging, gray Dr. Essen is replaced by vital, younger Dr. Essen 2.0. They then go back into hibernation, and come out at their desired destination, where they find “the Face of Ea, and mystically fight the Nekron, which is a creature of pure death and negation from out of time and space.

So, time travel, evil entities from beyond time and space, reincarnation (of sorts), androids (in the future), magical ley lines...this story is far, far too busy, which speaks to my theory that it is the product of a younger writer, whose mind is brimming with ideas and no editorial control.

I found the “hidden” Lovecraft element fascinating. Kuttner was a friend of both H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and wrote some stories int he Lovecraft Mythos in the 1930s. He met his wife, C.L. Moore, through a Lovecraft circle. The Nekron is archetypal Lovecraft creature - it is pure evil and from outside time and space.

Kuttner's opening line in this book is classic:

“THE WHOLE THING NEVER HAPPENED and I can prove it — now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story.”

And, likewise, the ending:

“Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me — Like Washington being the capital of the United States — now!”

I certainly wouldn't recommend this to anyone who hasn't read Kuttner's better works. Honestly, if this story had been written by anyone else, I would have given this story two stars, but I feel justified in giving three stars because Kuttner is a major influence on science fiction and this story is part of the legacy of a great writer.