Thoughts on "The Time Traders"

Spoilers...

“The Time Traders” (1958) is the first Andre Norton book I’ve read. I was a little bit surprised that it was a typical 50s science fiction action/adventure story. I mean, I guess I incorrectly thought that since it was written by a woman it would have some sort of feminine touch, but there was only one female character in the entire novel and her part in the story was pretty much insignificant.

The book felt like one of those old movie serials because the hero was constantly getting himself into some sort of cliffhanger moment. I found myself constantly thinking, “How is he going to get himself out of this one?” Through out the course of the novel the hero, Ross Murdock is captured, hit so hard he develops amnesia, tortured, left for dead, shot at, falls into the river, captured again, tortured again, etc.

At the beginning of the story Ross has been found guilty of a crime and is meeting with his judge. The judge tells him that his two options are mental rehabilitation or signing up for a secret government mission. This beginning really reminded me of the beginning of “The Stainless Steel Rat.” I wonder if Harry Harrison ever read “The Time Traders”?

I thought it was neat how at the beginning of the novel Ross doesn’t care about anyone and he just wants to escape, but as the novel progresses this changes. The first change occurs when Ross runs away from the base with a guy that turns out to be a Russian agent. Ross suddenly realizes he does care about America. And then, when he finds out the project concerns time travel, well then Ross is interested because he craves adventure. And as the story progresses Ross forms a friendship with Ashe his mentor and fellow agent.

I really liked the concept of this novel that the Russian and the American in addition to the “space race” were having a “time travel race” and the prize was that somewhere there was advanced technology in the past. It was an intriguing mystery.

I thought the part where Ross has amnesia and thinks he really is a Beaker Trader got to be confusing especially when he’s going through the Russian time machine and ending up who knows when. But, it became less muddled once he got to the alien spaceship and remembered who he was.

I thought it was really cool that Norton didn’t spell everything out. We learn almost nothing about the aliens in the novel. What are they like? Are they evil to the core or, do they just think humans aren’t ready for their technology? And is their civilization still around in the present?

It is also only subtlely implied that Ross has certain mental powers. He says he was such a good criminal because he could read people. Was that undeveloped telepathy or empathy? Then the aliens took a special interest in him. Was that interest really just because he took a pair or their clothing or, was it because they sensed latent mental ability? And then at the end of the book two of the aliens try to invade Ross’s mind and he fights them off with the raw power of his mind. I hope the sequels farther develop this angle.

I’ve already started the next book in the series “The Galactic Derelict” and am excited that it has a Western theme with the point of view character being a “modern day” Apache.  

When Did the Doctor Become a God?

Spoiler...

I’ve been having more and more trouble with Doctor Who lately and I think I’ve finally put my finger on what the trouble is, the writers have fallen into the classic trap of making their hero too powerful. Superheroes like Superman go through this all the time. I mean if they do a story where Superman survives a nuclear explosion one month, it’s hard to find something to up the stakes the next month.

On the original Doctor Who series, the Doctor was a renegade Time Lord. Most of the time he was on the run from his own people. But, the Doctor didn’t elude capture because he was invincible or smarter than other Time Lords, he eluded capture because the Time Lords occasionally had a use for the Doctor, and so they let him get away. You see the Time Lords didn’t like to get their hands dirty fixing incongruities in time. They preferred to sit on Gallifrey and twiddle their thumbs. They were the Lords of Time, they had mapped out history until the end of time and they didn’t feel the need to worry about small details that would most likely resolve themselves or not affect the larger picture much. But even they had to admit that every once in a while a wrench was thrown into their grand plans.

The Daleks, for instance, were a large problem. They should not exist and yet they did. When they became a large enough problem, the Doctor was sent to the time of their creation in Genesis of the Daleks. They hoped that the Doctor would destroy them before they could ever be a problem, but unfortunately that’s not what happened.

But, that was the original series; at the start of the new series, we meet the 9^th Doctor. This incarnation of the Doctor has been through “The Last Great Time War,” a war between the Daleks and the Time Lords that results in the mutual destruction of both races. (With the exception of the Doctor, the Master who was hiding, and the Daleks that pop up from time to time) Eventually we find out that the Doctor was responsible for not only stopping the Daleks, but also for destroying his own race.

When the new series started the writers must have thought that it was more exciting for the Doctor to be “flying without a net.” After all he’s the last of his kind, if he doesn’t solve the problem he can’t go back to Gallifrey and get help. Also, they thought that the Doctor would seem like a tragic figure who sacrificed his entire species to save the universe from the Daleks. But unfortunately, the time war also changed the Doctor from a happy-go-lucky adventurer into the most powerful judge, jury, and executioner in the universe.

As I said before, the Time Lords are called the Time Lords because they mapped out time until the end of the universe. The Doctor visits the end of the universe in the episode Utopia and humans are there. The Doctor says, “End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable!” Humans are the ultimate survivors, maybe that’s one of the reasons why the Doctor has taken such a shine to humanity.

The Time Lords are able to map out time because, the way time works on this series, there is only one path, one history. The TARDIS can’t normally go to alternate realities. That’s not to say that a time traveler can’t alter history, the TARDIS goes to tipping points in time every episode, but these tipping points are small potatoes, whether or not the Earth gets destroyed is only a footnote in the history of the universe.

But, it’s not small potatoes to the Doctor, so he goes from tipping point to tipping point and makes sure no one messes with his view of history. But why does the universe need constant saving? The Time Lords mapped it out. Did they miss that much stuff? Well, the Doctor typically encounters two types of problems. Problem one is an alien where he/she is not supposed to be. Typically, this is an alien invader on Earth. My theory is that these tipping points aren’t in the Time Lord master plan because it is the Doctor’s destiny to clear all this mess up. You see one of the running gags in the last few seasons with the Doctor’s girlfriend/wife River Song is that she leaves the Doctor notes with time coordinates in museums or on ancient cliff faces and the Doctor always comes to her rescue. But each time he claims he’s not going to help her again. “I'm not gonna be there to catch you every time you feel like jumping out of a space ship,” he says in The Time of Angels. But, River just laughs and says, “And you are so wrong.” You see there are a near infinite number of these tipping points, but it is the Doctor’s destiny to visit them all and fix them. How do we know this? He’s the last of the Time Lords, who else is going to do it? Therefore he can’t die before all the points are dealt with. Therefore the Doctor can never die while dealing with alien invaders hence why the Doctor often gets so cocky.

However there is a second kind of problem he deals with, other time travelers. And this type of problem can get him in trouble. A time traveler can kill the Doctor because time travel is an x-factor, the Time Lords were the Time Lords because they were the only ones with time travel, and therefore other people time traveling wouldn’t fall into their master plan.

But, the Doctor is still too powerful. He is just one man (Gallifrian) and the fate of the entire universe is a lot to put on his shoulders alone. With the rest of the Time Lords gone he is effectively the God of the universe. He decides what species can and can’t do based on his morality and no one can stop him!

I think the last straw for me was in the season finale of the last season, The Wedding of River Song, where the Doctor tricked time. Yes, the Doctor tricked time itself into believing that the Doctor was dead. What?? How do you trick time? It’s not a person or an alien or a consciousness; it’s time. So we are now to believe that the Doctor can outsmart the very fabric of the universe. If that’s not like unto a God, I don’t know what is.

I think it is time for the Doctor to be de-powered, either he needs to lose his TARDIS or be told by some hereto-unseen powers of time and space that he exists only at their pleasure or he needs to meet an enemy that poses a real threat. Anything, to bring back the happy-go-lucky adventurer we all know and love.

Thoughts on "To Say Nothing of the Dog"

Spoilers...

“To Say Nothing of the Dog” by Connie Willis (1997) is basically an homage to Victorian literature. For the most part, time travel is used merely as an explanation for why characters with our modern sensibilities and knowledge of popular culture are walking around Britain in 1888. More specifically, the novel is a tribute to “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome. Like that humorous travel log, a chunk of this story is about 3 men and a dog on a riverboat in Victorian England. During the boat trip Ned Henry, often thinks about “Three Men” and at one point a boat passes his and in it are the characters from the novel, George, Harris, Jay and Montmorency the dog, traveling up river for their “appointment with destiny” as Henry might have put it while suffering from time-lag.

Ned is a historian from the Oxford history department in 2057 where they utilize time travel to study the past. Ned’s job at the start of the novel is to track down the fate of Coventry Cathedral’s “Bishop’s bird stump,” (the MacGuffin of the novel) a particularly ugly cast-iron footed pedestal figural urn, believed to be destroyed, along with the rest of the Cathedral, by German bombs during the Blitz in 1940. After traveling through time an unknown number of times in order to visit jumble sales in Coventry on the off chance that the urn survived the Blitz and was later pawned off, he is suffering from time-lag which results in the following symptoms: difficulty distinguishing sounds, fatigue, tendency to become distracted by irrelevancies, irritability, slowness in answering questions, disorientation, blurred vision, and a tendency to maudlin sentimentality.

Willis is a very skilled writer of comedy. She puts her characters in the most absurd situations and just has you laughing out loud and chuckling for pages at a time. I don’t know of very many other authors who could make pen wipers, Bishop’s bird stumps, séances, globe-eyed nacreous ryunkins, human Bradshaws, and Victorian sensibilities funny for over 400 pages.   

However, the one problem I had with the novel is the time travel itself. Let’s suppose that time travel is possible for a second. One of the basic laws of time travel is that when you go back in time you either can or can’t change history. (We won’t involve any sort of parallel universe theory in this discussion).

If you can change history then you have to be careful because you could step on a butterfly and erase all known history or push your dad away from an oncoming car, which unwittingly causes your mother to develop a crush on you instead of your father. (Ray Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder” and the movie “Back to the Future” respectively).

Of course if you can’t change history then you don’t need to worry about it, right? I’m always skeptical about this later option because isn’t it always a possibility that someone could send a modern day SWAT team back in time with orders to blow stuff up? You’re telling me that wouldn’t change history?

Anyway, as the novel progresses we are told how time travel works in the universe of this story; you can’t change history because God/Fate/Time/the laws of time just don’t allow it. The first rule is that you can’t time travel to pivotal points in time like the battle of Waterloo. You can try and program it into the computer, but it just won’t happen, either the machine won’t work at all or you’ll go through the portal and end up two days early, but 500 miles from the battlefield.

Another rule is that you cannot take anything from the past and bring it into the future. The time net will not open if you have a person from the past, money from the past in your pocket or even such a small thing as a button on your clothes from the past.

The inciting incident of the story is that Verity Kindle another time traveling historian saves a drowning cat and brings it through the time net. This is as I said supposed to be impossible and the Head of the Department Professor Dunworthy thinks that it may be the center of an inconsistency or incongruity in time.

Ned’s primary mission, other than getting some rest and getting over his time lag, is to return the cat to its owners. Unfortunately he was too time-lagged to understand what his mission was or even to know that he had a cat in his luggage. He kept mishearing rat or hat anything, but cat.

By the end of the story Ned figures out that the incongruity wasn’t centered around the cat it was centered around the Coventry Cathedral being bombed during the Blitz in 1940. And a woman Elizabeth Bittner, who time traveled to the Blitz from 2018 and saved many of the cathedrals artifacts seconds before they would have been destroyed. You see you can’t bring something through the net except you can if it’s seconds from being destroyed.

But here is the sticky part, Ned theorizes that all the events of the novel were time’s way of fixing the incongruity caused by Bittner According to him Tossie meeting Terrence, their engagement, the trip to Coventry by train, everything was an elaborate correction to chance history and marry off a woman named Delphinium Sharp so that she wouldn’t glimpse Bittner stealing the artifacts from Coventry. I’m sorry, it made for a great story, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me. First off, it is personifying Fate, time or what have you. You’re basically saying that time is a god that watches over itself and makes sure no one changes anything. And if someone alters time, the incongruity is corrected in the most elaborate and round about way possible. That’s not how science works, science follows Occam’s razor or the path of least resistance. If the force of time wanted to correct the incongruity caused by Bittner stealing artifacts it would just blow a hole through London or through the Earth or through this part of the Milky Way galaxy. I mean, where do we get off thinking that a force of nature cares whether Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo or whether the Germans found out the Allies had cracked the Enigma code? It seems very human-centric of us to imagine that time gives a damn. I mean does nature care where our cities are? No, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis hit indiscriminately. If there is some sort of fabric that preserves time it will show us no mercy when repairing itself.

To Say Nothing of the Dog" won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1999. The other Willis stories that feature Oxford’s time traveling historians are the novelette “Fire Watch” (which won a Hugo in 1983) and the novels, “Doomsday Book,” and “Blackout/All Clear,” which won the Hugo Award in 1993 and 2011 respectively. This is a completely unique streak that every story in the series has won a Hugo Award. It's also definitely worth noting, that Willis has won 11 Hugo Awards, which is more than any other author. 

    

Thoughts on "The Foresight War"

In this review of “The Foresight War” by Anthony Williams, I will refer to the author as Tony, because the two of us are both active members of the Classic Science Fiction Message Board. Where we discuss all kinds of things science fiction related.

The plot of the novel concerns two present day (2004) WWII historians traveling back to 1934. One historian is British (Don Erlang), and the other is German (Konrad Herrman). Each of the historians informs their respective governments as to what will happen during the war. Both countries use the knowledge from the historians to better prepare for the war so that weapons that in our history were available in the middle or end of the war are mass produced by the start of the war.

Time Travel

Erlang briefly talks about his mother and father being just children in the 1930, but he never goes and seeks them out. I would have found it irresistible, I mean, his parents might have just been children, but what about his grandparents? I’d love to meet my grandfather when he was in his prime; he died before I was born. He was a doctor and had a private practice in a suburban town for many years. If I’d gone back in time, I’d probably go see him as a patient. That kind of harmless encounter probably wouldn’t put the space-time continuum at risk.

Erlang speculates as to the nature of time travel. He cites a time paradox that is worth mentioning. Since he has altered the course of the war there is a chance that one of his parents might get killed by a bomb during the Blitz that in the normal course of things didn’t explode anywhere near them. If they died then Erlang would have never existed, therefore Erland couldn’t travel back in time and alter events therefore history would return to the way it was in the first place. Unless, as is speculated, Erlang’s time traveling created a parallel universe or dimension which is no longer looped to the previous future, but instead free to explore an entirely different future.

My theory is that the “Foresight” universe is tangent dimension created by an all-powerful being (the author) just to have a playground to test his what ifs. (The novel's Afterword pretty much proves my theory).

German Historian

Herrman, the German historian who is sent back through time, was written as less capable then Erlang. He just didn’t seem to be a historian on the same level as Erlang. I couldn’t help but wonder how much more prepared for the war Germany would have been if Herrman had truly been Erlang’s equal. Also, I never really understood why Herrman worked with Hitler and Himmler and the rest when he clearly found them repulsive. His motivation was to create a stronger Germany that wouldn’t end up controlled by Russia for decades. From the beginning, I would have looked for a ways to circumvent and destroy Hitler and the Nazi’s, not work with them.

Glossary

Especially helpful is the glossary in the back of the book that lists all the military terms used in the book and also explains all the equipment used in the book. So when I read about a Churchill tank, I could look it up in the glossary and learn it’s specifications as well as whether the Churchill in the “Foresight” universe was different from the historical Churchill tanks.

This means that the book is readable to a Joe Shmoo like me, who is not one of these dumb Americans you read about that doesn’t know who fought in WWII. But, I am also not an expert on the war. Heck, for most of the book I kept wondering when they were going to start building trenches.

Vignettes

The action of the war is played out in vignettes that run anywhere from one paragraph to a page and a half. Most times the vignettes are strung together so they tell the story of a battle or a certain campaign. You see the action from different perspectives such as, British planes, then German U-boat, then a British tank, etc. Sometimes it was difficult for me to figure out what I was reading about, and by the time I understood the perspective changed again.

The perspective also shifts back to Erlang or Hermann who are in respective command centers and are reacting to the events of the day like a sort of Greek Chorus evaluating the course of the war and providing exposition.

Sometimes the vignettes were emotionally powerful such as the story of the British plane that fires at a German bus. Shrapnel from the bus ends up downing the plane. The pilot bails out and hits the ground near the bus. It is then that he realizes that the bus he destroyed was full of children. A crowd of Germans grabs the pilot and lynches him. As they tie the rope around his neck he pleads, “I didn’t know it was children.” This level of pathos is impossible to sustain, especially with so many short pieces.

One part of the book that worked really well was the part that dealt with Pearl Harbor. Morgan, an RAF (Royal Air Force) officer, is one of the few that know about future events. He is given the horrible task of going to Pearl Harbor to minimized US loses without telling them there is going to be an attack ahead of time. This piece wasn’t really longer then some of the other perspectives, but it meant more to me because I’d gotten to know Morgan throughout the novel.
That would have been my preference to follow certain soldiers’ perspectives for longer periods. I know the whole point of the book was to explore questions like how this British tank would have faired against that German tank, but without having the humanity of a soldier you get to know and care about, it just may as well be robot tanks fighting other robot tanks.

The Holocaust

I felt like it was weird that the Holocaust was only mentioned once or twice by Erlang and nothing about it was ever seen first hand. However, I realize concentrating on this horrible genocide wouldn’t have added anything to the focus of the novel, which was exploring how the “Foresight” universe differed from our own.

The Ending
(Warning major Spoilers)

The end of the book reminded me of two recent movies, both of which came out after this book. Is Hollywood stealing ideas from you Tony?

The movie “Valkyrie”(2008) is all about the ill-fated German resistance movement. Operation Valkyrie is not mentioned by name in “Foresight,” but it is pretty clear that after Herrman blew up all of the Nazi leaders, the resistance used the Reserve Army to seize and remove the Nazi Party under the false pretense that the SS had attempted a coup d'état.

The second movie that came to mind was “Inglourious Basterds” (2009). At the end of the movie several plots to assassinate Hitler and the other leaders of the Nazi Party collide with explosive results. The traitorous SS Colonel Hans Landa describes the film premiere in Paris that is being attended by Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels and other prominent part members as having “all the rotten eggs in one basket.”

I think the book ended in the right spot, at the end of the German/British conflict, because that’s what the book was generally about. However, I did have a lot of questions about what may have happened next:

-Did the increased Japanese navel losses at the beginning of the war cause the use of atomic weapons to be unnecessary?
-Was the United Nations created?
-Was the State of Israel declared?
-When did Britain “get the Bomb”?
-Did Russia emerge from the war a super power?
-What happened to Mussolini?

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I also reviewed Tony’s second novel “Scales.” here. I gave it an A+. It is a great read and it’s available for free here.

Some Details in "Back to the Future"...

Everyone has been celebrating the 25th anniversary since the debut of the movie "Back to the Future" and I'm no different. After all, I love the movie and watched it many times when I was a kid.

I watched it again a couple of nights ago and paid attention to some of the details in the film. You know, stuff I missed the first hundred times I watched it.

The first detail is the comic book the kid shows his dad in 1955, that proves that the DeLorean is a space ship and Marty in the radiation suit is an alien. "Shoot it, shoot it, it's already taken human form." I figured maybe it was a real comic, but it's just a creation. It really does capture the feel of the EC comics of the 50's doesn't it?






The next thing I wondered about was the movies that are featured on the marquee at the movie theater in 1955. The first one is "The Cattle Queen of Montana" starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Regan which was obviously picked just because Regan was in it. "Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's Vice-President? Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady! And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury."

The movie on the marquee on the night Marty goes back to the future is "The Atomic Kid," a 1954 movie starring Mikey Ronney. The theatrical poster has the tagline "It's a laugh explosion" and a woman telling Mikey to "control your neutrons." That sounds kind of like a lost Doc line.





The next details are in the scene where Marty uses George's love of science fiction to convince him to ask Lorraine out. "I am Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan." George had fallen asleep while reading the fall 1954 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine, this time the robot kind of like Marty in the radiation suit. The difference this time is that it's actually a real magazine!

However, the music Marty tortures his dad with may or may not be real. As the tape Marty puts in says it is definitely Eddie Van Halen on the tape, but I'm not sure whether the clips are from. Some websites say "Eruption"others "Donut City" from the movie "The Wild Life" which stars none other then the original Marty, Eric Stoltz and Lea Thompson. Still other websites claim that the music is just some original riffs Eddie played just for the movie as a favor to record producer Quincy Jones. Since the last claim was said to be from the commentary track with Bob Gale and Neil Canton it just might be the true one.



Finally, when Marty goes back to 1985 and it turns out his whole family is happier and more successful because George learned to stand up for himself when he decked Biff. George gets a copy of his book in the mail.

The joke being that it looks like a retelling of how Darth Vader told him he had to date Lorraine.

But the book is proof that, "if you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything."

Thoughts on "The Door into Summer"

Originally posted Feb 20, 2010
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/17538

When I finished "The Door into Summer" and found it had a
time-travel-into-the-past-twist and a May-Dec Romance twist at the end, I couldn't help but think of the Heinlein book we read last year "Farnham's Freehold," which also had these same plot points. Maybe some of you are still trying to forget that one. As I recall, it left a bad taste in some member's mouths.

I went back and looked at some of out posts from when we read that book and they weren't quite as negative as I remembered. Some people, myself included, enjoyed
"Freehold," but it was kind of an ugly novel exploring the consequences of nuclear war, and the horror of cannibalism, and it featured lots of unlikable characters.

"Door Into Summer," by comparison seems bright and cheery. In theory, it is primarily about the engineering of robots that would help women around the house. It's also about time travel, cats, the future of civilization, and
betrayal.

I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative style, it was kind of light and easy to read, it doesn't challenge the reader to understand technical aspects of robotic engineering though that is the narrator's (D.B. Davis) job. Perhaps this lack of more hard science bothered some readers? Instead the novel focused more on Davis' humanity, his relationship with his cat, his relationship with his
business partners (Miles and Belle), and his relationship with Miles' "daughter" Ricky.

(Side note: I told my wife about the novel, especially all the cat stuff, because we have a cat, and she commented that Heinlein captured the human/cat relationship so well that must have been a cat-person himself).

The novel is, in a way, timeless since it explored a future (1970) where robotic technology was exploding; a time that has not yet come to be. Then it explores a further future (2000) where man had begun to explore the solar system. While reading the novel it really bothered me that Heinlein picked the close years of 1970 and 200. Why didn't he choose 2300 or 2XXX. But upon reflection, I decided that the close year must have been a sort of optimism that civilization was
going to go through great changes quickly or maybe he didn't think anyone would still be reading his novels after the turn of the century.

What did you all think about the significance of the years?

Bill talked about the casualness of references to nuclear war bothering him. This didn't bother me; mostly because it was so in the background I hardly noticed it. Also, after reading Bill's post I thought that leaving it in the background just kind of fit. As I said before, the novel was written in a very intimate sort of narrative voice. It explored Davis' character and his life and interpersonal relationships. It explored the differences between 1970 and 2000, but only anecdotally. So, I felt it fit that there were questions sort of left unanswered about the "6 Weeks War."

Imagine someone in another reality writing a sci-fi novel about our reality. Would Sept. 11 be mentioned? Maybe, but only if it was important to the story, perhaps it would only be mentioned in passing. Certainly the nuclear war hinted to in this novel which caused Denver to become the US's capital had a bigger impact than 9/11, but I think the analogy works.

Now, I want to talk about the ending. Specifically, Davis pining for and marrying a girl he'd only known till she was 11. Doug talked about having met "old souls" in real life. I know the concept fairly well because I've always been kind of an "old soul" myself. I had older siblings growing up and I've always been pretty smart, so, growing up, I was often more comfortable with older kids or adults, more so than I was with kids my own age.

Anyway, Mary Beth thought the end of "Door Into Summer" was a sort of romantic fairy tale ending, but I found it to be downright creepy. I was fine with this plot-thread until the end. Remembering "Freehold" and the relationship between that story's protagonist and the much younger Barbara, I was worried where this story was headed when Ricky's character was first introduced. But for the bulk of the novel Davis' love for Ricky seemed to be platonic or fatherly. I thought, in the future Davis was searching for Ricky as a friend, a link to his past, not
a lover. Though maybe I failed to read between the lines since Davis gives up the moment he finds out she's married.

In my opinion, Davis falls in love with an idea. The idea of him finding Ricky and living happily-ever-after keeps him going when he is thrust into a future where he doesn't belong. But, how can you fall in love with an abstract idea? The Ricky who emerges from cold sleep is not an 11-year-old girl, but a 21-year-old woman Davis has never met.

I always feel like the man I am today bears little resemblance to the man I was 8 years ago when I was 18. Maybe I'm closer to that version of John than I think, but one thing is for sure, 10 years can be a long time.

Personally, I think the novel would have made more sense if Davis had met Ricky in 2000 and fallen in love with her. Given the time-loop quality of the novel, she would have been already married to Davis' future self, but she could have played coy and implied she was married to someone else. Thiscould have been the event that caused Davis to visit Denver and Dr. Twitchell. Or when Davis tracked Ricky down he could have met his future self. It would have spoiled the ending, but it would have been an interesting meeting. The same scenario I just
described happened in the Red Dwarf episode "Stasis Leak," one of the best of the series.

Either of these would have made the ending less "creepy" and more realistic, but maybe I'm just not a "romantic," as I wouldn't fall in love with a person I'd never met or talked to as an adult.

What do you think was Heinlein's thought process: Was he a romantic, was he making a statement about pedophilia or was it all incidental because he just wanted an interesting time-travel-twist ending?

Or I'll ask the same question in a different way: Why didn't Heinlein have Davis meet Ricky in 2000? Was it to maintain tension in the story or was it supposed to be romantic?

Of Time Travel and Time Loops

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/17171

At the end of “the Stainless Steel Rat Save the World,” by Harry Harrison, our hero Slippery Jim is in the year 20,000. He has for a third time failed to kill his time traveling enemy “He” before He can make an escape to a time unknown.

Since Jim destroyed the time-helix in an attempt to stop He, Jim is stuck, but out of nowhere pops another time-helix machine with a recording from Coypu, Jim’s scientist friend in the year 30,000 or so. Coypu gives Jim the code to postpone the launch of some nuclear weapons and Jim and his wife Angelina return to the year 30,000 something.

However they arrive before Coypu sends them the time-helix, in fact Jim dictates the instructions on the disarming of the weapons to the scientist who them makes the recording and sends the device back.

Jim learned the disarmament sequence in the past and gave it to Coypu in the present, who in turn gave it to himself in the past, but where did this knowledge originally come from?

The answer according to the logic of the novel is nowhere; Slippery Jim had found himself in a time loop.

And so it follows that if an idea can appear in a time loop out of nothingness why not a person…

At the start of the novel, Jim is in the office of Special Corps, the secret police of the galaxy, when everyone around him begins to disappear. Scientists rush up to him and explain that they have been attacked and are in a Time War. Someone is changing time and erasing Special Corp’s very existence.

Jim travels back to the 1970s as the lone hope for his future. He defeats his enemy a mad creature called He, a cyborg in a red android body. However, He escapes to 1805 where he joins forces with Napoleon and conquers England; Jim again thwarts his plans. However, just as He is about to escape into the time helix Jim alters the controls so that He ends up in the year 20,000 something, instead of where he had intended.

Then just as the alternate 1805 was collapsing all around him, Angelina traveled back from a restored year 30,000 to rescue her husband. Together they traveled to 20,000 something to defeat He once and for all.

For whatever reason they arrived 200 years after He. In the meanwhile He had armed all the nuclear weapons on the planet. Jim defeats He again, but once again He escapes and as I said earlier Jim escapes back to his present with the help of a time loop containing the knowledge to postpone the termination of the nuclear weapons.

But the point of all of this is Jim wants to follow He again, but Coypu tells him not to. You see from the year 20,000 something, He traveled to the 1970s where he launched an attack on Special Corps, that Jim had already defeated as evidenced by everyone in Special Corps being alive.

You see He was locked inside a time loop himself, eternally fighting Jim in 1970s, 1805, and the 20,000s .

“Where did he originally come from?” Jim asked.
“Nowhere,” was Coypu’s reply.

At first after reading this I was skeptical after all how can a person come from nowhere and exist only in a loop of time. But I can’t deny the simple example of the disarming codes existing out of nothingness, so why not an evil cyborg too?

My only question is how He doesn’t realize he is stuck in a loop? Does He experience some sort of amnesia when Jim alters the controls at the last second in 1805, so that when He arrives in 20,000 something he only remembers his hatred of Special Corps. That would explain things.

Here is a crude visual aid. He’s time loop is in black ink while Jim’s trip is in blue. Disregard my notes for this article at the sides of the chart.



What do you think, is a time loop possible or is that not how you think time travel works? I’d love to hear any opinions.

John

Thoughts on "the Time Machine"

The first notes I have are about the audio book specifically. It's the 1999 Blackstone Audiobooks version. The cover features some kind of black circular warship flying in the air and fighting a red machine that has some sort of clusters of spheres as armor. Does anyone know where this image came from, it has nothing to do with the contents of "The Time Machine," all I can think of is "War of the Worlds" but there are no black flying battleships in that book either.

The other thing about the audiobook itself is the narrator sounds like a weenie. Bernard Mayes is the gentleman's name and I'm sure he's a nice guy, but he sounds like a feeble old man. His voice cracks, creaks and brings to mind an ancient science teacher one year from retirement. I found it distracting, but perhaps Blackstone thought it was a good fit, though I don't picture the Time
Traveller (When did we take an L out of the word?) in my mind's eye as more than middle-aged.

Many of the ideas expressed in the novel got my brain working overtime.

1) The novel opens with a gathering of men circa 1895. The narrator whose profession is not identified makes a big deal over everyone else's; one man is a psychologist one is a medical man another is in politics. Then the true protagonist of the novel comes in and demonstrates a working model of a time machine. The narrator calls the protagonist "The Time Traveller." I suppose he is some kind of scientist, though it seems more like he is some kind of Tinkerer. Anyway my main question with this whole scene is: Why it was so important to the Traveller to prove himself to these men of society? And, who is this chorus of professionals supposed to represent, the reader? Skeptics? Is it all just a convenient way to get out some exposition about the theories of time travel?

2) Listening to the book got me thinking about science fiction in a very broad scale. It seems to me that most science fiction whether it is generally Space cowboy or Dystopian. This is not a hard fast rule but it seems to me that most Science Fiction writers agree with Stephen Hawkings, the human race is either going to spread to other planets or it is going to eventually collapse due to a natural disaster or our own technology (nuclear war). Some authors overlap the
genres such as Asimov's Foundation series, which shows that even a vast empire of thousands of planets is just as vulnerable to the ebb and flow of civilization as one planet is.

In my mind Dystopian novels like "1984," "Brave New World," "Gather Darkness," were almost not true science fiction, because I thought rather then exploring theoretical advances in science and technology they explored theoretical "advances" or declines in governmental systems and economic ideologies.

However, reading "the Time Machine," though I was familiar with the story (and had read abridged versions growing up), made me realize how linked all these genres really are. The only true difference between Space Cowboy or Dystopian novels is how long humans will enjoy dominance over Earth or the universe and how long will we continue to advance our civilization, before we fall into a harsh decline.

3) The Time Machine, I thought was somewhat unique in the sense that it supposed that in the year 802,701, human civilization had long ago fell into decline, but according to the evidence presented never got off the planet.

802,701 seems like farther into the future then most science fiction. That probably not true though. Can anyone figure out when Dune or The Foundation Series take place in relation to today?

An episode of Doctor Who ("Utopia") took place in the year 100 trillion, the theoretical end of the universe. As does Douglas Adams' "Restaurant at the End of the Universe."


4) One of the things that bothered me about this novel was that the Time Traveller never sees anything futuristic in 802,701. Nothing on the Eden like landscape of future England or in the huge dwellings of the Eloi, under the surface of the earth or most noticeably in the museum; except one brief mentioning of machines the Time Traveller didn't immediately understand.

My own guesses for this lack are that A) Wells thought that the one huge suspension of disbelief that someone could travel though time would be all the readers of the time could except or B) Wells didn't want the book to seem dated if he predicted technology that didn't come to pass the way he imagined. C) That wasn't what the book was about.

I found it disappointing because I was so impressed to find that in Jules Verne's long unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, (which I haven't read but want to) Vernes predicts such technology as air conditioning machines, skyscrapers, gasoline-powered automobiles, high-speed trains, calculators, The Internet (a worldwide "telegraphic" communications network), electric chairs (criminals "executed by electric charge"), televisions, elevators, and fax machines. I want to read the book in order to find out what technologies he incorrectly predicted.

I can't help but wonder what Wells the other great Victorian science fiction author, would have predicted for our near future.

5) The end of the book really lost me. After the great adventure in 802,701 I thought the Time Traveller would return to his present day, but no he makes a brief journey to an even more futuristic earth where the Sun is now Red. Now Wells gets points for being right that a Red Giant is the next step for Sol, but Earth will be swallowed when that happens and long before that happens all water on the planet will boil due to increased temperatures and the Earth's atmosphere will disappear. Also even if Earth was somehow spared there is no way Mercury, which the Time Traveller states causes an eclipse would be spared from the Sun's expansion. How come we didn't know all that back in 1895?

Also, more in general, I didn't understand what the point of this sequence was? It was really brief and didn't seem to add anything interesting. I read on Wikipedia that in the original draft the Time Traveller finds some sort of "rabbit-like hopping herbivores" in this future and only after stunning or killing it realizes that it might be humans after further thousands of years of
decline. Without this deleted part, I would have just cut the whole sequence.

It reminded me of reading "Gulliver's Travels" unabridged for the first time and being stunned that Gulliver went to lots of other islands in addition to the three well known ones. But in "Gulliver's," while those adventures are shorter they are all significant because each one expressed a different idea about government and human nature.

6) The last thought I had was: if as the book supposes, time travel technology was possible using Victorian era science, then why doesn't the Time Traveller run into other time travelers from the 20 or 21st century? Maybe he was saving that for the sequel.