Crisis!

"The explanation on which you must act is that I have told you the truth: you are a man who was born in a future that has almost used up all hope; you were sent to this time and place to alter the events that created the future. Am I telling the truth? The only evidence you have is your apparently unique ability to foresee consequences - it comes like a vision, not of the future because the future can be changed, but of what will happen if events take their natural course, if someone does not act, if you do not intervene. But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget." - Bill Johnson, message to himself Except for the prologue, which is a different sort of animal, the short stories herein - each originally published in ANALOG - are sequential episodes in the life of "Bill Johnson", a time traveller from the future sent to resolve a crisis. The catch is, once he prevents the crisis from happening, his memory of his past - the future he's prevented from coming to pass - vanishes, to be replaced by another crisis. The back cover blurb is an almost verbatim quote of the message Bill Johnson leaves for himself at the end of each crisis, knowing that in the morning he will wake with no memory of what he did. Only the details of *what* crisis has just passed really change from message to message. "Prelude: Man in the Cage" Every few days, Bill Johnson dreams of a mechanism like a gigantic clock pendulum, but with a man-sized cage where the weight should be, moving too fast to be seen. He never knows if he is troubled by memory or nightmare of a device that marks passage *through* time rather than of time. "End of the World" (January 1984) A crisis in the Middle East is escalating rapidly toward nuclear annihilation. How can one very obscure man - even Bill Johnson - save the world? As the story develops, we see that he acts more as a catalyst than directly as an agent of salvation. He acts as an impromptu confessor to those under stress, so that they leave him comforted and better able to function. He can persuade an editor at the Associated Press to engage in more balanced reporting of human interest items that portray the enemy-to-be as just ordinary people, thus dropping the level of tension. Most of all, he searches for a hacker named Tom Logan who's on parole, but in a world building up to disaster, the bureaucrats who can trace him tend to be taking time off to be with their families... "Child of the Sun" (March 1978) is a kind of modernized version of 'Rumpelstiltskin', but in this case the kidnapper is the child's happy-go-lucky father and the mother is the director of a large solar power project. The background of the world Bill Johnson has been sent to rescue is fleshed out a bit more; "like the curse of the witch who has not been invited to the christening, the Depression had lain like death a

But, alas, CRISIS! by James Gunn suffers from several flaws that prevent it from reaching the masterpiece status it could have had.The idea of a time-traveller who tries to save the world from crisis after crisis, but in doing so loses his memory over and over again, is certainly interesting. It's an eternal cycle that's almost heartbreaking; at any time Bill Johnson could simply give up, but instead he chooses to remain the doomed amnesiac savior, never to be known or rewarded for all his efforts, never to even see the future he left to save.Unfortunately, it's very easy to tell that this book is simply a reprinting of linked short stories. If this had been a true novel, it could have been great. The episodic feel rather hurts it, I believe.What also hurts it is the misleading back cover, which gives the impression that the entire space-time continuum is at stake. It is not.Most of the female characters, it seems, simply exist to be attracted to Bill Johnson; this is fine for one or two, but during the fifth story, it's simply ludicrous.Also, the final story seems rushed. There wasn't a proper conclusion. The reappearance of a character from an earlier story actually made me laugh at how corny it was.The stories themselves are a bit unbalanced; the first was great. The second was good, with a letdown of an ending. The third is unquestionably the best, but the fourth gives it a run for its money. The fifth and sixth stories, though, are rather bad.I should also note that this book has one of the coolest front covers I've ever seen: as a giant skeletal snake unhinges its jaws to swallow the Earth, a dove appears surrounded by white light.Overall, I'd say that CRISIS! is worth picking up if you can find it for the same price I did: two dollars.