Project Pendulum

Ol' Silverberg has finally disappointed me, but I suppose we all have our off days. Project Pendulum came much later in his career after his hiatus and subsequent return, though at the time he was mostly writing fantasy novels. I can't even really call this a novel though, because as it is Project Pendulum is a simple one-dimensional skeleton of what could've been something much better.

The novum is a time travel device that takes two perfectly equal humans (twins in this case) and swings them both forward and back in time on "logarithmically increasing intervals, each one ten times as wide as the one before". One twin will exist 5 minutes in the future, the other 5 minutes in the past, followed by them switching places and now 50 minutes distant from the starting time. This goes on and on until one twin is in the cretaceous period, and the other in an comprehensible future.

As far as time travel devices goes I really enjoyed this one. I can can see the implications of this being explored in an exciting way, despite the glaring logical issues that Silverberg ignores here. The problem is... this is all we get. The twins go off on their shared but separate adventure, popping in to different settings for mere moments, only to be whisked on unceremoniously. There are, quite literally, no stakes, no character depth, no plot, no texture at all. It's one of those books that comes off unintentionally like YA, which is always a bad place to end up.

Honestly, I have no idea why Silverberg thought this one idea was enough to publish on its own. I didn't hate this like I do most works I rate so lowly, but I just can't give what is essentially a crude initial sketch any more praise than I am. An inferior and minor work from one of the greats. Super skippable.