The Time Tunnel

Murray Leinster The Time Tunnel (1967)
This, as you may recall, was an Irwin Allen television series thus described somewhat harshly by John Clute:

In one of the worst 1960s series, time travellers - trapped in a vortex created by experimenting scientists - carom through cardboard sets, overturn whole societies, and escape again and again.

I remember watching a few episodes as a kid but not much else. The basic premise and title, albeit lacking the definite article, came from Leinster's Time Tunnel of 1964, published a couple of years prior to the series. My guess for how any of this relates would be that Leinster conceded the rights and title to Allen in return for a couple of novelisations more directly tied in to the television series.

I began reading under the assumption of the book most likely expanding on the first couple of episodes, given that it kicks off with more or less the same cast of characters and vaguely scientific furniture - significantly featuring our main guys, Doug and Tony, sent into the time stream so as to demonstrate the validity of the government funded project to a disgruntled Senator Clark who wants to know where all the money has gone. Having myself novelised an episodic television show, I've been surprised at the slender page count which tends to be generated by even a full hour of television drama - as anyone who ever read a Terrance Dicks Who novelisation will probably appreciate - and so a certain quota of padding or treading of extemporary water is usually necessary to avoid the finished thing resembling a pamphlet. There's a lot of that in evidence here, but it turns out that the first episode of the television show sends Doug and Tony to the RMS Titanic just as it's about to make the acquaintance of that iceberg. Leinster instead first sends the boys to Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 - site of a catastrophic flood - then to a critical battle at Adobe Walls, Texas in 1874, neither of which correspond to anything we saw on the screen. Given that Leinster was nothing if not quick off the mark, I suspect that either Allen's people gave him license to go his own way, or possibly this book may represent a novelisation of something he proposed for the television show which was deemed to have less potential impact than the Titanic story filmed as Rendezvous with Yesterday, which is probably fair.

With this in mind, what I've read as padding is therefore most likely Leinster doing what seemed right for the story, and so we get a ton of historical detail delivered in large chunks, which is interesting but makes for somewhat chewy reading. We additionally get certain imaginative flourishes and elements which attempt to make sense of what was seen on the screen to some degree - our time travellers each wearing a kind of technological harness which connects them to those operating the Tunnel; and then an additional harness is sent to join them equipped with a poorly defined means of locomotion and a camera - amounting to a remote drone - by which I suppose the reader might rationalise the screening of historical events unfolding on the other side of the next hill, beyond the ken of our travellers; and this remote drone is then developed into a sort of time car by the end of the book, allowing our temporal castaways to whizz around the futuristic city which provides the slightly puzzling setting for the final chapters.

It's a novel which does a lot of telling and not quite enough showing to strike the right balance, which is also true of the 1964 Time Tunnel which, for all its wacky ideas, is really a bit of a mess. This is a shame because Leinster's best is usually wonderful, notably The Greks Bring Gifts and The Wailing Asteroid both of which are just screwy enough to overcome any objections one might harbour regarding the pulpier end of the genre. His greatest strength seems to have been the short story form - or at least sequential short stories welded together into novels - and his short stories mostly appeared in the digest magazines and would thus have been subject to the attention of some fairly astringent editors. His three Time Tunnel novels were, on the other hand, published by Pyramid Books whom I gather were in the business of wacking them out fast and cheap and may therefore have left established writers to their own devices - and the sheer weirdness of those novels they published by Robert Moore Williams seems to support this as a possibility.

All the same, The Time Tunnel is a book which could have been better rather than a bad one. It somehow maintains a heady pace in spite of the infodumping, its ideas are engaging, and my initial concerns about Doug and Tony helping out in the extermination of hostile Indians at Adobe Walls proved mercifully unfounded for the most part, for Leinster achieves a surprising objectivity in his sensitive portrayal of what might not unfairly be described as genocide.