Backward in Time

Leo P. Kelley (1928-2002) US novelist, for some time also an advertising copywriter, whose early works were mostly sf, but who concentrated on Westerns from about 1980. He began publishing sf with "Dreamtown, U.S.A." for If in February 1955, and published occasionally in the magazines for some years. In general in his novels, he demonstrated a verve for sharp clear ideas, and some of his novels are genuine Satires with considerable bite; but he habitually descended into routine Genre SF plotting, so that his oddly affectless baroque style sometimes jars against the stories he tells, claiming an urgency it fails to convey. His reputation has faded. Kelley's first novel, The Counterfeits: A Startling Science Fiction Novel (1967) as Leo F Kelley, typically jumbles several promising lines of thought as Shapeshifting Aliens, having destroyed their own planet, set about destroying Earth, perhaps inadvertently. Odyssey to Earthdeath (1968) is a Dystopia; The Accidental Earth (1968) features an inimical Counter-Earth in a plot whose highly coloured complexities approach Time Opera; The Coins of Murph (1971) is a Satire set in a Ruined Earth; Time: 110100 (1972; vt The Man from Maybe 1974) carries its protagonists into a Pocket Universe which is governed, it may be, as a Godgame; The Earth Tripper (1973) subjects an Alien to the cruel exigencies of life on Earth in terms reminiscent of Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963). Kelley rarely wrote a novel lacking interest; but never wrote one that entirely met readers' expectations. He also wrote two series of sf adventures for younger readers, the Space Police tales and the Galaxy 5 tales, along with a few singletons. Backwards in Time is volume 4 of the Space Police series


Genre: Children's Fiction