What Makes This Book So Great (44 page)

JUNE 24, 2010

112.
Academic Time Travel: Connie Willis’s
To Say Nothing of the Dog

Like
Corrupting Dr. Nice,
To Say Nothing of the Dog
is a comedy about time travel. But while Kessel’s model was the screwball comedy movie, Willis’s was Jerome K. Jerome’s gentle Victorian novel
Three Men in a Boat
. Like Willis, I was alerted to the existence of
Three Men in a Boat
by the mention of it in
Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
unlike her I’ve never been able to get through it. If I hadn’t already been sure I liked Willis, I wouldn’t have picked this up the first time. Fortunately, I was sure, and even more fortunately this is enjoyable even if Jerome makes you want to tear out your hair.

To Say Nothing of the Dog
takes place in Willis’s “Firewatch” universe, along with her earlier
Doomsday Book
and more recent
Blackout
(and much anticipated
All Clear
). In this universe, there’s time travel but it’s for academic research purposes only. It’s useful to historians who want to know what really happened, and experience the past, but otherwise useless because time protects itself and you can’t bring anything through the “net” that will have any effect. The thought of time tourists hasn’t occurred in this universe, or rather it has been firmly squelched—and just as well, considering the problems historians manage to create all on their own.

Despite having time travel and time travel’s ability to give you more time, Willis’s historians seem to be like my family and live in a perpetual whirlwind of ongoing crisis where there’s never enough time for proper preparation.

To Say Nothing of the Dog
is a gently funny book about some time travelers based at Oxford in the twenty-first century dashing about Victorian England trying to fix a glitch in time, while at home Coventry Cathedral is being rebuilt on Merton’s playing fields. Like all of Willis’s writing, it has an intense level of “I Want To Read It,” that thing where you don’t want to put the book down. With this book she succeeds in a number of difficult things—she makes a gentle comedy genuinely funny, she has time travel and paradox without things seeming pointless, and she almost successfully sets a book in a real country not her own.

There aren’t going to be any spoilers in this review, but I should warn you that the book itself contains spoilers for Dorothy Sayers’s
Gaudy Night
.

To Say Nothing of the Dog
is charming. It’s funny and gentle and it has Victorian England and severely time-lagged time travelers from the near future freaking out over Victorian England, it’s full of jumble sales and beautiful cathedrals and kittens. This is a complicated funny story about resolving a time paradox, and at the end when all is revealed everything fits together like oiled clockwork. But what makes it worth reading is that it is about history and time and the way they relate to each other. If it’s possible to have a huge effect on the past by doing some tiny thing, it stands to reason that we have a huge effect on the future every time we do anything.

The evocation of Victorian Britain is quite successful, the only place it falls down is the way they go to Coventry, from Oxford, just like that. I’m sure Willis had a Bradshaw railway timetable open before her and every train she mentions exists, but British people, whether in the nineteenth century or for that matter now, know in their bones that a hundred miles is a long way, and do not just take off lightly on an expedition of that nature, even with spirit guidance. That’s the only thing that rings really false, which is pretty good going for an American. There is the issue of the lack of mobile phones in the future, which is caused by Willis having written
Doomsday Book
before cell phones took off, and which I think is one of those forgivable problems, like the astonishing computers in old SF that have big spools of tape that can hold 10,000 words each!

I read this the first time because it’s Willis, and really I’m just going to buy whatever she writes because she’s that good. I re-read it now as part of my continued contemplation of useless time travel. Willis’s continuum protects itself: actual changes and paradoxes may be built into it but the real purpose of time travel seems to be to help people to learn lessons about themselves. There are no alternate universes, no “moment universes” and while there’s often a threat of a change that will change everything, time itself is resilient. It’s possible (from
Blackout
) that she’s doing something more than this with time and the drops, if so, I’ll be interested to discover what it is.
*

JULY 1, 2010

113.
The Society of Time: John Brunner’s
Times Without Number

John Brunner’s
Times Without Number
(1969) is a surprisingly short book, and the ideas are the best part of it. It’s 233 pages and if it had been written today it would be at least twice as long. It wouldn’t be any better for it. This is minor Brunner but I’ve always been fond of it, and it seemed to fit with all these other things I’ve been reading recently about useless time travel.

The Society of Time is an organization founded to take control of Time Travel. They’re kind of time-traveling Jesuits—which isn’t surprising, as they live in a world where the Spanish Armada conquered England, with the Spanish thereafter getting kicked out of Spain by a second Muslim conquest, and where their allies the Mohawks are the dominant people in North America. Don Miguel Navarro is an obedient servant of the emperor of Spain, a licentiate of the Society of Time, and a good Catholic. He goes into time to observe, without changing anything even by speaking to anybody, because any little change could be disastrous. Of course, things don’t go as planned.

The thing about time travel here is that time can be changed, it has no elasticity or protective mechanisms, and nor are there multiple universes. Time travel works and isn’t useless—you can go back to the past and mine resources that are under your enemy’s control in the present, and bring them back to the future. But woe betide if you change anything—if you’re doing the mine thing, better go for seams not yet worked. You can also change your own personal timeline—if there’s a disaster you can avert it if you can find a place to change things before it happened—at the cost of having memories of something that never happened and no memory of the “real” past. And there are alternate worlds, made by careful experimenting and then putting everything back exactly the way it was, and for purposes of study only, as there can be only one world at a time.

Brunner introduces these ideas one at a time, and always through the devout and honest Don Miguel, who isn’t always all that quick on the uptake. This starts off seeming like a simple story of an alternate world, and gets more complex as it goes. The end, when you reach it, is simultaneously surprising and obvious.

It’s worth noting that here, as in
Corrupting Dr. Nice,
but unlike
To Say Nothing of the Dog,
the life of Jesus is of central interest—but it has been placed off-limits except to popes, for fear of changing anything.

At one point Don Miguel muses that time travel is inherently unlikely, because once you have it there’s a temptation to make changes, and changes will eventually inevitably lead to a future in which time travel is not invented, like a snake swallowing its own tail. This is a view of the futility of time travel that I hadn’t considered.

JULY 5, 2010

114.
Five Short Stories with Useless Time Travel

I want to consider a selection of short stories on the theme of useless time travel. In SF, often a lot of the best work has always been at short lengths. I’m going to talk about Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” (1956), Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (1958), R. A. Lafferty’s “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” (1967), Robert Silverberg’s “House of Bones” (1988) and Robert Reed’s “Veritas” (2002).

All five of these are excellent stories, all of them are thought provoking, and they’re all in dialogue with the novels I’ve been discussing. Most of them have been much collected and anthologized and are easy to get hold of, but the only copy of “Veritas” I have is in an old
Asimov’s.

What I mean by useless time travel is time travel that doesn’t change anything—either where somebody goes back in time and stays there without making any difference, or time travel that changes itself out of existence, or time travel that is in some other way futile. I don’t just mean changing time. In books like Butler’s
Kindred
where the protagonist saves the lives of her ancestors but doesn’t otherwise affect the world, time travel still serves a useful purpose.

“The Man Who Came Early” is notable for being from the point of view of the locals who meet the stranded time traveler and are not impressed by him. Anderson is taking the
Lest Darkness Fall
model and saying no to it, showing a man from the future failing to make any headway among the Norsemen. His protagonist is even less successful than Tarr and Turtledove’s Nicole, who at least makes it home.

In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” it is the nature of time itself that confounds time travelers—history is personal, in Bester’s memorable metaphor it’s like a strand of spaghetti for everyone, and when you change history you become like the spaghetti sauce, detached from the world. So you can go back in time and change it, and it doesn’t change it for anyone except yourself. Very clever, very funny, and quite chilling when you think about it. Typical Bester.

“Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” is typical Lafferty in that it’s very weird, very clever, and impossible to forget. It’s the traditional three wishes fairy tale told with time travel and making changes, with the twist that after the changes have been made the time travelers are unaware of any changes, though the reader can see them plainly. The time travel isn’t useless, but it appears to be, and ultimately everything returns to the way it was.

“House of Bones” is about a time traveler stranded among cavemen and Neanderthals, learning a lesson about what it means to be human. He doesn’t change history and he doesn’t go home, and so it’s all useless in that sense, but it’s a surprisingly heartening story nevertheless, and I’d list it among Silverberg’s very best. Silverberg has written plenty of other things about time travel, but it’s usually useful.

“Veritas” is set in a world that has easy time travel to “moment universes” as in
Corrupting Dr. Nice
. Once you’ve gone into a universe, you can’t get back to your starting point. The story concerns some young men who go back to conquer Rome, and end up with a mission to spread Romanitas over as many worlds as possible. It’s futile, or perhaps quixotic, because there are an infinite number of worlds, and they can never revisit any of them to see what happens.

JULY 8, 2010

115.
Time Control: Isaac Asimov’s
The End of Eternity

Asimov published
The End of Eternity
in 1955, and so it’s short—my 1975 Panther edition is 155 pages, and cost 35p or $1.25 Canadian, and features a typical British paperback SF Chris Foss generic spaceship cover that has absolutely nothing to do with the book. It’s a fast read, I got through it in a couple of hours, and still an interesting one. Asimov was incapable of being boring. I hadn’t read it in a long time, and I only remembered the skeleton of the plot and one telling detail.

Time travel was invented in the twenty-third century, and Eternity was founded a few centuries later. Eternity stands outside Time, observing and messing about with it, to make the one and only reality the best of all possible worlds. Eternals are drafted from Time—they are people whose absence from history makes no difference. They’re all men, because you seldom find women in that position. (This is firmly stated, and it’s necessary for plot reasons, but I raise my eyebrows at it every time.) Time travel works only between centuries in which Eternity exists, you can’t go back further than that. So what we have here, astonishingly, is a time travel book that is all about the future with nothing about history at all.

The Eternals live outside Time, though time passes for them the same way it does for everyone. Paradoxes and the issue of meeting yourself can happen only within Time. The Eternals are incredibly smug and self-satisfied and busy making “Minimum Necessary Change” to keep everything nice. They change the one and only reality to promote lowest common denominator happiness. They take the technology they want and then change reality so that it doesn’t exist in Time because it would be too disruptive.

Andrew Harlan is a Technician who identifies and makes those changes. His hobby is “Primitive” history, the history of the period before the invention of time travel, history that always stays the same. He thinks of himself as a monk in the service of Eternity. Then he falls in love with a young lady from the 575th century, gets caught up with a loop in continuity his bosses are arranging—and then everything goes wrong. The book is called
The End of Eternity,
so you may think you don’t need a spoiler warning, but actually you do. Spoilers follow.

This is the ultimate book about the futility of time travel. Brunner suggests that time travel that changes reality will tend to wipe itself out by changing reality so it isn’t invented. Asimov specifically says that it’s a terrible idea because with the power to change things, however benevolent you are, you’ll change things in a cautious way, to make things safer. Space flight dies out every time because of the changes they make.

In swapping Eternity for Infinity, time travel is expressly rejected in favour of space travel. One change is made—and not one that would be made today to bring about a brighter future! They give the people of the primitive era of 1932 a hint about atomics, which of course will lead to mankind going to the stars at the earliest possible opportunity. It’s hardly possible to read this in 2010 with the same optimism as readers did in 1955, or even as I did in 1975, even given the recent discovery of lots more extra-solar planets.