If you've ever scanned the cheap paperback section in a used bookstore for an interesting science fiction, then you've probably skipped right over Dr. Orpheus by Ian Wallace as its charm is largely hidden behind bland genre artwork.
In truth, the term "B-rated" might be a stretch as applied to this book, but it's certainly worth the 50 cents an all-too-happy-to-move-it-off-the-shelf bookstore owner would accept for it.
As it turns out, I forked over no cash whatsoever for my copy, as a SF enthusiast and friend of dad's dumped off a whole bunch of books for me more than 22 years ago and it had remained there until some house cleaning by my parents.
Looking for a distraction one day, I picked up Wallace's book and started it. After about 100 pages - about twice as long as I usually give a novel because I'm frustrated with not getting all the way through before I start another book - I found myself rather enjoying its quirks.
The author of this little diversion might have had high hopes this offering would become a genre-breaker, an iconoclastic work that would shatter SF expectations, like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Instead, it ends up being a loosely strung together mix of the paradoxes of time travel and pseudo philosophy and technobabble injected with a strong hippy-dippy vibe about heroism and love as befitted the particular period it happens to be from.
The book never reached either critical or popular acclaim, but it may well have offered the inspiration to a Hollywood script writer for Marty McFly's time traveling conundrum in the first Back to the Future movie.
Dr. Orpheus did have a moment or two that I genuinely did not expect - like the fact hero Croyd decided against a Rambo-style, kill-all-enemies solution to a threatened alien invasion of Earth.
If for any reason you want a quick, bubble gum SF read, simply pull out that used bookstore's copy of Dr. Orpheus. There's bound to be one stuck in that shelf of lesser-lights science fiction that they find hard to sell.
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