Charles Eric Maine’s Timeliner

Timeliner is a 1955 science fiction novel by Charles Eric Maine and it’s a time travel story, of sorts.

Charles Eric Maine (1921-1981) was a successful English writer of science fiction as well as detective fiction. He co-edited a science fiction magazine called The Satellite and wrote quite a few science fiction novels in the 50s and early 60s.

It is 1959 and Hugh Macklin is a British scientist engaged in top-secret research on time travel. His team has constructed a time travel capsule. Only it’s not time travel as such that he’s working on, but psycho time travel. What is psycho time travel? To tell the truth Hugh Macklin doesn’t really know. He believes it’s possible but he doesn’t know what will actually happen if it’s attempted. But he’s about to attempt it anyway. It works by dimensional quadrature. Macklin invented the technique but he doesn’t understand it.

His other current preoccupation is his marriage to Lydia which seems to be heading for the rocks. He’s a scientist so he has an analytical mind. He can’t deny that there is evidence suggesting that she is having an affair. But he’s a man and he does love her and he doesn’t want to accept that this might be true. Lydia will indeed betray him, but not in a straightforward way. His marital problems will soon complicate his scientific experiment.

The experiment is made. And now Hugh Macklin is Eddie Rayner and it’s 2035 and he’s on the Moon, in the newly established moonbase. Only he’s not really Eddie Rayner, he’s still Hugh Macklin. Only he’s not really Hugh Macklin any longer, he’s Eddie Rayner. And he has no idea how he got to the Moon and why it’s now 2035. The experiment was not supposed to work like this.

In Eddie’s wallet is a photograph of Eddie’s girlfriend Valerie. Except that the girl in the photo is Lydia. Only it isn’t. But it is.

And then he’s on Venus 400 years later. He’s now someone different but he’s still Hugh Macklin.

Macklin is now a timeliner but he doesn’t know it yet and he doesn’t understand the full implications although he is starting to become aware that there are some serious ethical and moral implications. He’s not comfortable about these things but he has no idea what he can do about. This is a science fiction novel that does confront ethical issues and it doesn’t do it in a simplistic way. Hugh Macklin is a scientist. He assumes that scientific and technological progress are always good, and if that means a scientist is tempted to do morally questionable or even reprehensible things well that’s the price of progress. At the same time he does feel uncomfortable about such things.

He’s not a straightforward hero. He’s certainly no villain. He is perhaps a species of mad scientist. He is blinded by his scientific ambition. This makes him reckless. His project is nowhere near sufficiently advanced to justify a live test but he goes ahead with one. He avoids facing up to ethical dilemmas. He doesn’t understand people particularly well. He’s fundamentally decent but he is definitely a flawed hero.

The psycho time travel is a clever and original idea and as Macklin slowly learns more it becomes more clever and more original. Affinities are the key. And the ethical problem involved is a rather nasty one.

Of course he would like to return to the 20th century but that appears to be impossible. He doesn’t know what went wrong in 1959. He does however know one curious fact which may be a clue.

Maybe he’s destined to remain a timeliner for all time. Maybe he’s trapped on a temporal rollercoaster.

An intelligent inventive science fiction novel with cool ideas and a bit of depth. I recommend this one very highly.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Maine’s other science fiction novels, Wall of Fire and Spaceways. The latter is excellent and was made into a very good movie by Hammer, Spaceways (1953).