Set mostly in Scotland in 2010, a small group of scientists create a computer controlled machine that can send messages back in time, initially only by a few minutes, later expanded to a day.

When they first demonstrate the machine to someone new, they pull a sheet of paper out of the computer’s printer, fold it over, and put it aside. Then they ask the person to type something into the computer, a string of digits, a sentence, anything they can think of. After the subject types the message and sends it, they show him the sheet of paper, which contains the exact message – sent back in time by about a minute. The subject is convinced. They clearly thought of  the message after it was printed on the paper. It was sent back in time.

As they experiment with their new toy, unexpected things start happening, like a message from the future that warns them that the Earth might be destroyed unless they take specific action.

Paul Hogan writes “hard science fiction.” This means that he gets deep into the science and as a result, his fiction is sometimes too meticulous in detail. I don’t care about every minor hard scientific detail and all its underlying theory and background when I want to know what happens next in the story.

I do get a lot of enjoyment out of novels that paint a world decades in the future, with all the Jetson stuff and whizbang gadgets and science the author envisions.

However, it’s especially fun when I wait 35 years after such a book is written, which was the case with Thrice Upon a Time. Paul Hogan first published the novel Thrice Upon a Time in 1980. It plays in 2010, so Hogan shows us the world as he imagined it might be 30 years in his future. Of course, he didn’t think readers like me would wait 34 years to read the book for the first time, and thus have a way to compare his predictions to how things actually turned out.

To put things into perspective, in 1980, the IBM PC didn’t exist yet. The closest thing to a personal computer was the Apple II. The Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 was the most popular mini computer. The very first fax machines started showing up in business after 1980. Commercial jet traffic was just as it is now, with the workhorse planes being the Boeing 737 and 707.

Hogan’s 2010 turns out to be way off the mark compared to what really happened.

The computer they are using is a DEC-22/40. It’s pretty much the same concept as the PDP-11 was thirty-five years ago, with terminals and printers hooked up. Of course, there was never another PDP after the PDP-11/70. The concept of personal computers does not exist in this story.

This picture from an alternate cover for the book shows a scientist in front of his computer terminal. It looks just like what I used when I worked on a PDP-11 back in 1981. We don’t find terminals like that anymore in 2014.

Politically, he didn’t predict the world to change. the U.S.S.R is still intact in 2010 and the geopolitical landscape is the same it was during the cold war in the 1980s.

There are no cell phones and definitely no smart phones in his 2010. To make a call, they have to go to a hardwired machine. Calls are forwarded to people all the time. They do have a video phone, and they can turn off the picture – like when they’re in the bathtub receiving a call.

There is no Internet. However, there is frequent mention of computer networks, where machines can connect to each other and exchange information.

But the multi-functional user interfaces are not there. There is a “scratchpad section” on the screen to write notes. There is a hardcopy slot that issues printouts from the screen.

Airlines have come a long way. Boeing has suborbital planes that can fly from the U.S. to London in less than an hour. Those are the airliners Hogan envisioned we’d use in 2010.

At one point, he talks about the Governor of California. He only refers to the governor by title. I wonder what we would have thought if he had known in 1980 that a famous body builder by the name of Schwarzenegger would be the Governor of California by 2010.

Overall, Thrice Upon a Time was a fun time-travel related story, too heavy on the science, making it somewhat slow and dry, but hilarious in its predictions of a future which is the past to us now.