The Thing About Time Travel - Pt. 2

This discussion of time travel is continued from The Thing About Time Travel - Pt. 1.

I've already mentioned that it was hard for me to read Dragonfly in Amber the first time.  Let me qualify that--it was hard for me to reconcile myself to the beginning of the novel and its implications.  Once I was reading, I was zipping through.  However, it was very difficult for me to suspend my disbelief--specifically with reference to the time travel.  What was the problem?--you might wonder.  It clearly wasn't an issue with Outlander.  Stepping through standing stones into the 18th C--why not?  But hindsight-is-not-quite-20-20 with a time traveler transported the 18th C?--not so much.  Even so, there was a lot to keep me zipping through, and I will continue to chronicle those things.  But the whole premise--"should we change the course of history?"--grated on me.

It seems to me that the whole question of "changing the future" by the time traveler's actions is a fruitless question.  It's something akin to the "chicken and the egg."  Sure--the act of time travel changes something.  It must, right?  If we believe that even the smallest thing affects everything else, and we want to believe this.  George Bailey knows it to be true, whatever the dark, Walmart-facilitating, community-destroying implications of his progressive endeavors.

But here's the thing...  In the future from which the proverbial time traveler departs, it is not necessarily clear whether the time traveler's experience in the past has already happened.

Now, I don't know anything about Dr. Who, so perhaps the creators of the Dr. Who series (both of them) deal with this issue better.  But as a child of the 80s, I was raised on the logic of Back to the Future, so I know a thing or two about how time travel is supposed to work--when you go to the past, you either have to stay out of the way to prevent crucial events from being interrupted, or you have to engineer a way to get them back on the right track again--hopefully with better results than the first go-round.

These days, the time travel motif--its groundwork firmly laid by Back to the Future--can be casually employed without over-explanation (that whole "space-time continuum" thing) in the Disney children's series Phineas and Ferb.  Though the show is generally a stroke of genius, I nevertheless quibble a bit with their elimination of "alternate universe" Candace.  In the manner of Heinlein, in The Cat who Walks through Walls, I would like to see the alternate histories existing as parallels.

Heinlein employs agents in The Cat who Walks through Walls (O! Wikipedia, how I hate thee!) to alter history in a way that will be favorable to their cause--possibly the Lunar Revolt.  Each altered timeline creates a parallel universe in which events continue along their logical paths.  Long before I read the (somewhat convoluted) Cat who Walks through Walls, I remember seeing ads for a short-lived TV-show called Voyagers!, in which time-traveling agents are sent to correct historical events that were somehow disrupted.  Given the dates, I am surprised that I remember the commercial so vividly, but I do: a boy's shrill voice intones, "Moses was found by the pharaoh's daughter--" [pushes basket] "--in the Nile!"  We can only be grateful that the constraints of the TV show did not allow for the creation of parallel timelines.  There was only one, and its events were either correct or incorrect.

The Outlander books deal with time travel as a dilemma more or less frequently, depending on the novel.  The question hangs over Dragonfly in Amber like the sword of Damocles--(I stand by the metaphor)--because the actions of Claire and Jamie (which include multiple counts of betrayal) hinge on the question of whether one (or two) mere mortals might prevent the disastrous Battle of Culloden--or the entire Jacobite Rising of 1745.

George Bailey notwithstanding, I don't believe in the ability of one person or two to make that kind of impact, even with the benefit of limited hindsight.  It seems the height of arrogance for them to make the attempt, particularly since Claire, in so doing, completely sacrifices Jamie's personal honor.  So my own skepticism limits my enjoyment--and it's pretty important to be able to admit to these biases when reading.  It's part of the "rhetorical situation" of the reader.

Literarily speaking, if the characters accomplish what they set out to do, the books would change from historical fiction to alternate history.  So if we know what genre we're reading, it's a foregone conclusion.  Watching machinations that are doomed to failure makes me glaze over a bit, right up to the point when political intrigue becomes personal tragedy.  Consider the classic Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," which crosses personal and political destinies as Kirk is forced to sacrifice the woman he loves to prevent Hitler from winning World War II.

A far more interesting question to me--and perhaps what I think we should be asking--is whether history as the characters know it (which is also how the reader knows it) depends on time travel itself.  In Outlander, there is implicit suggestion of this very question in Claire's instructions to Jenny of what she should do to prepare for impending doom:

     "Plant potatoes," I said. 

     Jenny's mouth dropped slightly open, then she firmed her jaw and nodded briskly. "Potatoes. Aye. There's none closer than Edinburgh, but I'll send for them. How many?" 

     "As many as you can. They're not planted in the Highlands now, but they will be.  They're a root crop that will keep for a long time, and the yield is better than wheat.  Put as much ground as you can into crops that can be stored.  There's going to be a famine, a bad one, in two years.  If there's land or property that's not productive now, sell it, for gold.  There's going to be a war, and slaughter.  Men will be hunted, here and everywhere through the Highlands." (Outlander 672)

In preparing Lallybroch for the aftermath of Culloden, which in the 20th Century is historical fact, Claire might raise a question in the mind of the reader--when were potatoes introduced to the Highlands? Is the introduction of potatoes--and the survival of Lallybroch--a fact in Claire's 20th Century as well?  It is impossible to know, since Lallybroch was not on Claire's radar when she was in the 20th C (the first time--sigh).

The question of how time travel influences personal history is a little easier--both easier to accept change and easier to see the influence that has already occurred.  Would, for example, characters not exist had someone else not traveled back in time?  Well, no.  In fact, some characters would not exist if a time traveler had not traveled to the past.  So there are clues that the things Claire will go back and do in the 1740s will have already affected the future/present of1945 or 1965...  The very existence of Roger MacKenzie Wakefield--descendant of a woman who went from the 1960s to the 1740s (and arrived before Claire, our traveler from 1945)--strongly implies that history as we know it depends on the activity of time travel.  That's a little bit mind blowing, but not unprecedented!

Re-enter pop culture.  The Futurama episode "Roswell that Ends Well" actually has a nice treatment of the paradox of time travel--Professor Farnsworth's warning to the crewe is "You mustn't interfere with the past.  Don't do anything that affects anything.  Unless it turns out that you were supposed to do it; in which case, for the love of God, don't not do it!"  Fry takes the advice to heart, and when he inadvertently places his (presumed) grandfather in the way of nuclear testing, he assumes that his grandma must not, in fact, be his grandma, and assures his own existence by yielding to her advances.  History--and thus, the future--depend on time travel.

Meanwhile, H. G. Wells' time traveler plays it safe--he leaves the past alone and only meddles in the future, where he can't jeopardize his own existence or the history of the world.

I'm not going to touch Time Bandits.  After all, it proceeds from the warped mind of Terry Gilliam.

For me, having the characters actions explain history, or tie neatly into it, is preferable.  When there is a neat intersection, I can sit back and admire the cleverness of it all.  If changing history is going to be a valid possibility in a time travel novel, go big with it.  Have the Americans lose the Revolutionary War--I dare you!  But accept the consequences, and show me what would have happened. It never really is a possibility in the Outlander novels.  We know that from Roger's date with Brianna to view the Culloden battlefield in the beginning of Dragonfly in Amber that Jamie and Claire do not succeed.

So at the end of the day--and the novel--it really is the personal tragedy that is most important, and the impulse to change history, the hubris that propels it.  The function of the fantasy element, then?  Perhaps to reveal that hubris for what it is, and to justify Claire's suffering when she returns to the 20th Century.

SF Stories: "The Bookshop" by Nelson Boyd (1946)

I have been trying to get the ball rolling on a research project I'm committed to. I'll be investigating representation of literacy in science fiction in the archives of the university where I live. Last Saturday I managed to squeeze in an hour before they closed up to talk to the Science Fiction archive librarian, a friend who has helped me a lot with knowing where to start looking! This Saturday, having taken his hints and gotten in my request of things for them to pull ahead of time, I still only managed to squeeze in a little while before they closed, but even so, I managed to look at a few things and read one short story. This truly is archival research, as some of the stories are not available in anthologies--ANY anthologies. Pretty exciting. If there was not already a glut of super-specialized Science Fiction anthologies, both in and out of print, that serve only about 5 science fiction readers and researchers each, I might have dreams of a "literacy in SF" anthology. Oh well. I'll stick to my dreams of a fantasy anthology that would actually work for the class I teach.

This weekend's story is "The Bookshop" by Nelson Boyd (1946), republished in Avon Fantasy Reader in 1951. The interesting thing about these early SF/F short stories is that they are very reminiscent of early Twilight Zone episodes. Maybe because they often became Twilight Zone episodes. Or Star Trek.

"The Bookshop" has that familiar feel about it. The narrator begins the tale trying to complete a novel--his best, he believes--but he is stuck, and feeling the heat. He gradually realizes he is sick--actually physically ill. In his illness, he comes to fixate on a bookshop where a poet friend of his stops suddenly during a bus ride--a bookshop our narrator has never noticed before--very shortly before the poet friend dies suddenly of a heart attack. The narrator is drawn to visit the place when he recovers, and finds a familiar-looking proprietor presiding over a very dark shop containing volumes upon volumes by many of the usual names--Shakespeare and Twain among them--but unusual titles: Shakespeare's Agamemnon, for example. He sees among the books, the work his poet friend told him he was writing before his death--supposedly, his masterpiece. The bookshop, then, contains the works that authors were unable to finish (or even begin) in their lifetimes, including the novel of our narrator, in all of its perfection.

The bookshop, then, is an allegory for heaven, suggesting a comparison to E. M. Forster's "The Celestial Omnibus," in which "heaven" is a literary creation--filled with the characters from literature as early as Homer and continuing through the 19th century with Dickens's Mrs. Gamp and Fielding's Tom Jones. The idea, I argue, is that literary enjoyment (as opposed to dispassionate "appreciation" of literary texts) transports one to heaven--though in retrospect, Forster's allegory suggests a disbelief in an actual Heaven in a way that "The Bookshop" does not. In "The Bookshop," one can not return from "heaven" where one's works exist in their perfection (much like Plato's realm of Forms). In "The Celestial Omnibus," one is transported back and forth between "heaven" and "the real world" by the authors themselves, who pilot the omnibuses. (Dante is one of the drivers, and his horses are black, grey, and white--the grey being the finest.) The idea of perfection isn't important for Forster, who seems to focus more on how the literary works act upon or are received by the reader rather than the writer's quest for perfection (which is largely irrelevant to the reader once the work has been published).

Some of the important ideas in "The Bookshop" from the perspective of literacy theory are some tidbits about the permanence of writing, curiously undermined by the ephemeral nature of the unwritten masterpiece. There is a kind of lonely near-despair that permeates the story, which clearly takes the solitary vision of the "writer writing in isolation" to heart. The idea of "the Story" as it could be or should be rather than the story that "IS" situates the perspective of "The Bookshop" as far removed from the theoretical reader, who doesn't really matter to the writer-as-artist. However much we might wish to read Shakespeare's Agamemnon (a singularly unlikely title), we realize, being left in the cold by the voice of Sarumon, that it (like Hamlet or Macbeth) was clearly not written for us.