Now

Places coexist. Thus, someone who has traveled from place 1 to place 2 can then ask, "What is happening now at place 1?" However, times, e. g., 4.00 am and 4.00 pm, do not coexist but precede and succeed each other. Thus, someone who has either lived or "time traveled" from 4.00 am to 4.00 pm cannot then meaningfully ask, "What is happening now at 4.00 am?"

However, HG Wells writes, of his Time Traveller:

"He may even now - if I may use the phrase - be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef..." (The Time Machine, London, 1973, p. 101)

- and John Brunner writes of men affected by an as yet unexplained "temporal surge":

"Now - if one could say such a thing - they were scattered across history..." (Threshold Of Eternity, New York, 1959, p. 11).

It would be interesting to know if Brunner realized as he wrote that he was echoing Wells on this precise point. However, Poul Anderson, who wrote three independent novels, one long series and several short stories about time travel, never made the mistake of referring to different times as if they were different places existing at the same time.

Addendum: In a film adaptation of The Time Machine, after the model time machine has disappeared, the Time Traveller says that by now it may be several years in the future.

Summits Of Time Travel Fiction

Mark Twain: a novel about "transposition of epochs" to the Arthurian period.
HG Wells: the story of the Time Traveler's journey to the future.
Robert Heinlein: two stories and one novel about time travelers experiencing circular causality in the future.
Harry Harrison and Tim Powers: one novel each about time travelers experiencing circular causality in historical periods.
L Sprague de Camp and Ward Moore: one novel each about time travelers experiencing causality violation in historical periods.
Poul Anderson: a long story about a traveler around the circle of time.
Poul Anderson: a novel about time travelers experiencing circular causality in Atlantean prehistory.
Poul Anderson: two novels about time travelers experiencing circular causality in historical and future periods.
Poul Anderson: a series of stories and novels about an organization of time travelers experiencing both causality paradoxes in many historical periods.
Jack Finney: one collection and two long novels about time travelers to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States.
Richard Matheson and Audrey Niffenegger: one novel each about circular causality in romantic relationships.

I do not rate A Connecticut Yankee highly but Twain was there before Wells and before the Wellsian phrase "time traveling." I had thought of Anderson's Time Patrol series and Finney's two Time novels as the two peaks of time travel fiction but later had to add Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Adhering to a single consistent timeline, Niffenegger avoids the incoherencies that Finney generates with his causality violation.

World Con

www.loncon3.org

I do not usually attend sf cons but there is a World Con in London next year so will any readers of this blog be there?



http://www.loncon3.org/index.php

Time Travel Logic Strikes Again

In James Blish's Midsummer Century (London, 1975), when John Martels falls into a new radio telescope, the apparatus accidentally generates a field that projects Martels' personality to 25,000 AD, when it is picked up by a suitable receiver. When Martels has helped the men of that era to defeat their evolutionary enemies, the Birds, he is told that:

(i) they can return his personality to his body the moment before it fell;

(ii) his knowledge acquired in the future will return with him;

(iii) he will not slip (because he will know not to try to climb down?);

(iv) but " '...your additional knowledge will last only a split second...'" (p. 104);

(v) "You will never come to our century, and all the gains you have made possible will be wiped out.'" (p. 104)

But he is in their century! I think that (i)-(iii) make sense if Martels is returned to the past of a divergent timeline (timeline 2). In timeline 2, there is no reason why he should not retain his knowledge so (iv) is wrong. (v) is true in timeline 2 but not in the original timeline (timeline 1). In timeline 1, he did come to the future and help humanity against the Birds. It is in that timeline that this conversation is taking place.

Like The Time Machine, Midsummer Century is a good short novel or long story about travel to the future but it would be conceptually better, in my opinion, if this conversation were to be revised somehow.

The Best Of Times

I envisage a single collection of the very few very best works of time travel fiction, which I suggest are:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
"A Stitch In Time" by John Wyndham;
"By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein;
"The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth" by Poul Anderson.

These happen to comprise two British literary works and two American genre stories.

Wells implies but otherwise avoids the issue of causality paradoxes. The other three works are circular causality stories although the last is set in a causality violation scenario. The four works present a good balance of past, present and future -

Wells: nineteenth century to 702,601 AD, then the furthest future of Earth, and return;
Wyndham: time travel within a character's life time;
Heinlein: twentieth century to far future;
Anderson: twentieth century to the Dark Ages.

The Time Traveler interacts with Morlocks and Eloi. Anderson's Time Patrolman interacts with Goths and Huns. The Time Patrol's mass produced, streamlined, futuristic timecycles are conceptual descendants of the Time Traveller's elaborate nineteenth century contraption. The time traveler sits on, instead of being enclosed by, each of these vehicles. Both Wyndham and Heinlein instead envisage a machine that sends people through time instead of moving past- or future-wards, taking them with it.

The Cleverest Kind Of Time Travel Story

The cleverest kind of time travel story is one in which the past seems to have been changed but then turns out not to have been. Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977) is one such. Erissa remembers that, before the catastrophe, she and Duncan were together on Crete where he became the father of her first child.

However, the catastrophe occurs while Duncan is still en route to Crete. So why does Erissa remember events that cannot have occurred and who was the father? By the time Duncan arrives, Theseus has raped the teenage Erissa but the adult Erissa, accompanying Duncan, hypnotises her younger self with spurious memories. Thus, the causal circle is completed.

When the older Erissa and Duncan meet - the second time for her but the first for him - they resume a physical relationship that they had not in fact had when she was younger. Parting from the hypnotised younger Erissa, Duncan says, " 'Know that in the end I'll call you back to me.' " (p. 166)

We last see Theseus swaggering away - not a usual last scene for the villain of an action-adventure novel. However, by rescuing young Erissa, Duncan and the mature Erissa prevent Theseus from using her to consolidate his power through the Goddess religion. To that extent, they thwart his plans.

The high priestess called "the Ariadne," conspiring with the invader Theseus, had ordered that a thread of lamps be lit to guide his men through the main halls of the Minos' palace, called "the Labyrinth." Thus, very understatedly, Anderson presents a possible origin for the myth of Minos' daughter Ariadne helping Theseus to escape from the Labyrinth that had housed the Minotaur.

Duncan and Oleg, stranded in 1400 BC but knowing that futurian time travelers will probably observe the imminent Atlantean eruption, build anachronistic ships to sail nearby in the hope that the futurians, seeing the ships, will deduce the presence of stranded time travelers and rescue them. It works:

"A shining shape descended from the clouds."(p. 167)

- while the anachronisms burned in battle.

Erissa's Cretans celebrate the death and resurrection of the god, Asterion. While it is true that Paganism included such myths, I wonder if Anderson had to invent some of the details for novelistic purposes? Lastly, I would like to read a time travel story in which the hero is told of a happy summer that he spent in Crete and ends the story by beginning that summer exactly as it had been related to him!

Doctor Who

Doctor Who will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in November, 2013. Like Superman, Star Trek and Flash Gordon, it is a story that needs to be retold from the beginning, getting it right this time. The Time Lords should be:

not aliens but our future;
not extraterrestrials but extra-temporals;
our evolutionary successors, like Poul Anderson's Danellians.

The originals of the Doctor and his companions fighting the Daleks are the Time Traveller and Weena against the Morlocks.

On a Doctor Who fan's shelves, I saw:

a boxed set of CD's of the first three Doctor Who stories - the beginning;
a boxed set of DVD's of the two feature films starring Peter Cushing - an alternative beginning;
a "Doctor Who: Lost in Time" CD collection of episodes of early stories that no longer exist in their entirety - truly "lost in time";
the DVD of the television film starring Paul McCann in his single appearance as the Doctor;
CD's of various stories featuring different Doctors;
thus, television and cinema history.

The TV series is Doctor Who but the first feature film is Doctor Who And The Daleks and the second is Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD so the Daleks take over the titles. In the TV series, the second story is "The Daleks". Curiously, the poster for the second film prominently features not a Dalek but a roboman with Daleks and other figures in the background.

I have stopped watching the TV series which cleverly presented the circular causality paradox in the first "Weeping Angels" story but mishandled causality violation when Rose tried to prevent her father's death. I advise Whovians to read The Time Machine, The Time Patrol and The Time Traveller's Wife.