Hawksbill Station

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Hawksbill Station is a science fiction novel written by Robert Silverberg. The novel is an expanded version of a short story published in 1967; the novel was published in 1968. It was released in the United Kingdom under the title The Anvil of Time.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Station is a prison colony created in the pre-Cambrian era by an authoritarian United States government by means of a time machine invented by an eponymous Dr. Hawksbill. The colony houses only male (to prevent them breeding) political opponents of the regime; they are sent to the past as a "humane" alternative to execution, but like execution, there is no reprieve: Hawkbill's machine can only transport to the past, so the prisoners are marooned.

The distant (although in time, not space) prison in a barren land (literally barren: it is prior to the colonization of the land by life) evokes a Tsarist Siberia or a Soviet Gulag. The personal relationship of the main character, the de facto leader of the colony, and both his government torturer/prosecutor and Dr. Hawksbill, each of whom had been members of the dissidence movement, as well explication of the picayune ideological differences among the prisoners, and the confused circumstances leading to the establishment of the authoritarian government, further parallel Russian history.

As the novel opens, the prisoners, all of them middle-aged or elderly, are surprised by the arrival via the time machine of a much younger prisoner. Their surprise increases when they question the new-comer, ostensibly an economist, about economic theory and political ideology, and his answers reveal his ignorance of basic knowledge of either. His ignorance and youth cause the prisoners to wonder if he is fact a political prisoner at all or a "common" criminal who would only have been exiled for a heinous crime.

When the new-comer arrives via the Hawksbill time machine a second time, it is revealed that he is a police officer of a new government which overthrew the authoritarian regime but was unrelated to the dissidence movements of which the Hawksbill exiles were members; upon the overthrow, the new government discovered both the existence of Hawksbill Station and that means had been discovered to effect time travel from past to future, making it possible to retrieve prisoners from the colony. The new-comer has been sent to evaluate the prisoners and to recommend whether they are mentally stable for retrieval.

But with return now possible, the leader of the exiles realizes that he is a time traveler of a different sort: the struggle against the authoritarian regime, his life's work, is over; his closest friends in the movement (and his bitterest enemies, who left the movement to join the authoritarian government) are irretrievably dead; and even those who finally did overthrow the government have little connection with or regard for his brand of dissent (as demonstrated by the new-comer's ignorance of their ideologies). He is now inclined to perhaps visit the new-comers future, but to staying at Hawksbill Station, is now the only existence he knows.