Prisoners of the past: Hawksbill Station (1968) by Robert Silverberg

A swift tale of political radicals trapped in the late Cambrian period

In Robert Silverberg’s short novel Hawksbill Station, originally published in 1968, prisoners struggle to hold on to their sanity while trapped hundreds of millions of years in the past. This distinctive deployment of time travel reconfigures it as a tool of political repression, a means to create the ultimate prison: without guards, walls, or any means of escape.

The story began life as a novella published in Galaxy magazine. Asked to expand it for republication as a novel, Silverberg developed its political angle and heightened its personal stakes. At novel length, Hawksbill Station is a fleet, effective yarn about the struggle to hold on to purpose and sanity: whether under the yoke of an oppressive regime or condemned to live in the deep past.

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In the time of the trilobite

Hawksbill Station imagines a scenario in which an authoritarian regime, the Syndicalists, rise to power in the United States during the 1980s. It abolishes the presidency, tightens its grip on power, and begins a campaign to smash the radical groups which oppose its rule. While it does this, a brilliant mathematician - Edmund Hawksbill - devises a set of equations which lay the groundwork for a time machine: albeit one which can only send people and objects back in time. The regime uses this technology to exile its opponents in the primordial past, being “too civilised to put men to death [...] and too cowardly to let them remain alive and at large.”

The novel comprises two narrative threads which both centre on Jim Barrett, a political radical and sworn enemy of the Syndicalists. In one thread, Barrett is the aging leader of the prisoners at Hawksbill Station, a coastal penal colony in the late Cambrian period - “a silent, sterile place”. In this bleak era, no life has yet evolved on land, and the inmates share the world only with the strange and prolific species of the primordial ocean. Nursing an injured foot, Barrett tries to help the other inmates to hold on to reality and some shred of hope.

The other narrative thread - which was added for the 1968 novel version - is set over a longer period, and details Barrett’s life prior to his inevitable arrest and exile. These episodes explore Barrett’s development into a revolutionary, and his personal ties both to the rebellion and to the Syndicalist regime it is pledged to overthrow.

The development of the novel

The shorter, novella version of Hawksbill Station was published in the August 1967 issue of Galaxy magazine, then under the editorship of Frederik Pohl. Pohl had a standing arrangement with Silverberg, committed to buying almost anything he submitted. First pitched to Pohl in April 1966, the 20,000 word story was written in what Silverberg recalled was “one white-hot week”. The following year, the story would make Silverberg a Hugo Award finalist for the first time, in the inaugural run of the Best Novella category. 

Silverberg expanded the novella to fulfil a contract with Doubleday editor Lawrence P. Ashmead. Happily, Ashmead had a background in geology and was able to assist with improvements to the novel’s scientific grounding. Silverberg was delighted with praise he received from the science writer Willy Ley about the original novella version; Ley passed away relatively soon afterwards, in June 1969.

Comparison with Up the Line

In 1969, Silverberg would return to the theme of time travel with his novel Up the Line. Originally serialised in Amazing Stories, it approaches the topic very differently. In Up the Line, time travel is available to tourists, who crowd historical events like the crucifixion of Jesus. While the novel deals extensively with paradoxes, it is dominated by the protagonist’s prurient sexual adventures in 6th century Constantinople. This aspect may have been a result of Silverberg’s prolific output of erotic novels (under the pseudonym Don Elliot) bleeding over into his science fiction.

Conversely, sex is barely an issue in Hawksbill Station. It is mentioned at one point that the Syndicalists established another penal colony specifically for women, about 200 million years closer to their present. This was partly intended to prevent the exiles from conceiving children, and thereby altering human evolutionary history. Of the two novels, Hawksbill Station is easily the stronger one.

Keeping it together

Silverberg’s acclaimed work in the late 1960s and into the 1970s is often praised for its psychological elements. His novel The Second Trip (1971), for example, centres on a conflict between two minds - one genuine, one synthetic - over control of one body. The World Inside (also 1971) explores the immense psychological pressure experienced by people living in a claustrophobic, hugely overpopulated future. 

Hawksbill Station is also strong in this respect, being tightly focused on the mental state of the inmates. As the de facto leader of the prisoner group, Barrett spends much of his time visiting his comrades and monitoring their mental wellbeing. Such is the pressure of isolation in the past that only a minority of the men are really functional. Their coping methods are various: one lies on his bed and cries all day, even after years of exile. Another undertakes a vast scientific study of trilobites, knowing it will never be used. Still another spends years trying to cultivate his mental energies, in the vain hope of opening a psychic gateway to the future.

Refreshing the trope

Time travel stories tend to boil down to efforts to change or protect “the timeline”. This is sometimes escalated to the level of the changewar, in which whole civilisations struggle for control over history. 

Hawksbill Station is refreshingly different. By redeploying time travel as a punishment, it sets up a powerful scenario of alienation, with a rich psychological dimension. Silverberg augments this with a fraught political tale, building our sympathy with his time-displaced characters. 

Hawksbill Station is a fine work of late 1960s American SF, a unique take on a well-worn trope, and not a bad place to start with Silverberg’s golden era. 

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• In the UK, the novel was originally published under the title The Anvil of Time. This relates to the two main components of the time machine receiving equipment at Hawksbill Station, known as “the Hammer” and “the Anvil”.
• The joint winners of the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novella were “Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey and “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer.
• A previous Silverberg novel made up of stories first published in Galaxy is To Open the Sky (1967).