The Year of the Quiet Sun

By Wilson Tucker

Brian Chaney is offered a job on a time machine project. Chaney is a scholar and a demographer and is offered the job because they want him to go into the future and see if trends predicted in the current time were correct and to gather information about demographics of the future. He agrees to join the project, one of the main reasons being the attractive woman who offered him the job; she first approached him while he was sunning himself on a Florida beach and she was wearing a see-through blouse with nothing on underneath. (And delta pants, whatever those are. The delta pants are mentioned quite often in the story. I did a Google search on them and the only thing I could find where some baggy, ugly clam diggers and some ever uglier military-looking pants, which can't be what the delta pants are as the Chaney character found them quite alluring and sexy and they are described as form-fitting.)
Their first trip in the time machine will be just two years into the future. When Chaney makes his leap, he is surprised to find out that Chicago is experiencing fierce race riots and martial law has been declared. Subsequent leaps by other team members to about the year 2000 reveal that the USA is embroiled in a race war, black vs white, with the blacks being backed by China. Chaney's final leap puts him at about 2030 where he gets stranded because there is no electricity to send the machine back to his time. The good news is that the war is over and he is reunited with the delta pants woman he has been lusting after. The bad news is that the country is depopulated, that nukes were used in the war, and that the woman is old and decrepit. Also, the whites apparently won which is bad news for Chaney since he is black, a fact that is not revealed until the very end of the book, although it is occasionally hinted at.

This was a pretty boring book. It takes them forever to go on the first time travel trip. It seemed to be mostly about Chaney's unrequited love for the woman, a woman he never gets until he meets up with her again in the future when she is old and dried up. The descriptions of America's future were not even close, which made it kind of irritating to read.