SF and Time
SF dealing with the nature of time or with time travel itself has been popular
since H.G. Wells. SF writers and readers love the paradoxes that can be created
by such fictions, the endless loops, the branchings off of alternative futures,
the travels into the past in order to change the future, the journeys to
parallel worlds, the alternate histories. Many commentators have insisted that
such fiction is not SF at all but fantasy, since in terms of our known science,
time travel and journeys to parallel worlds (if in fact these worlds exist) are
not possible. For physicists’ writings about the nature of time, however, you have only
to consult publications like The
Scientific American to see the range of scientific speculation about
the possibilities of time travel and the theories of possible futures. The
impossibility of time travel is by no means agreed upon! Today’s impossibility
may be tomorrow’s fact.
Physicists are quick to admit that they do not know what time is. They agree that alternate futures and pasts are not impossible. It is only the human observer who fixes reality to one outcome, where the possible becomes actual and the future becomes the past. The observer alters the observed.
"Legions in Time” by Michael Swanwick
In this story, both the past and future are up for grabs. Here’s what Michael Swanwick himself says about the story on his website:
“I wrote the story for the sheer fun of it. But also I wrote it in order to learn. As you're aware, the best of the old pulp stuff had a furious narrative drive to it that contemporary SF can't touch [.....].
“So I sat down and wrote the snazziest opening line I could think of: ‘Eleanor Voigt had the oddest job of anyone she knew.’ I made the heroine an oldish woman because women of that age tend to be underestimated and because I thought it would be a hoot if one got to conquer the universe. I lifted the situation from A.E. Van Vogt because I loved "Recruiting Station" [a similar story] and learned a lot of my craft from it. So I thought an homage to the Grand Master might be an appropriate way of acknowledging my debt.
“I determined that the story would start out as slow as I could make it, and then by increments go faster and faster until it was moving as fast as it could possibly go. To acknowledge what I was up to, I scattered references throughout to the original story and I named my protagonist Voigt - which is Vogt with an "I" in it. Because I'm a postmodern writer, I almost reflexively came up with an ending which in its extreme solipsism contains a disturbing hint that the human race might in the end be supplanted by a lone woman. And I had a lot of fun with the speculations of a Depression-era woman about what a girl from the Twenty-First Century might be like and why.
"That's it, basically: For the fun, to learn, and in praise of a pulp master. If I'd known it was going to win a Hugo, I would've come up with a loftier purpose. But I didn't.”
In case you missed it, one of the “speculations from a Depression-era woman about a Twenty-First Century girl” occurs when Ellie and Nadine are piloting the police vehicle and ordered to stop: Nadine pulls Ellie through a hole in the roof of the vehicle telling her, “I can see the black doorway-thingie–the, you know, place!" and “Following, Ellie had to wonder about the educational standards of the year 2004. The young lady didn’t seem to have a very firm grasp on the English language.”
A. E. Van Vogt’s “Recruiting Station” “concerns two normal people caught up in the vast, cloudy machinations of two warring groups in the future; [….] scenes shift abruptly, basic elements of the story are kept hidden till the end and then unsatisfactorily explained; and as an added attraction van Vogt has introduced a string of unresolved time paradoxes.”
“Legions in Time” is replete with paradoxes. Eleanor Voigt, an ordinary though very capable woman, even in her first incarnation, does not know what Ellie knows by the end of the story when she returns to her own time. This time she comes with the purpose of halting the Aftermen, who have grown out of the Rationality, embodying its worst flaw:`”that streak of persuasive coercion within themselves. [….] The ability to tell millions of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the common good is simply too useful to be thrown away.`
The Aftermen are related to “men like Hitler, Mussolini, Caligula, Pol Pot [. . . ]. All they had was the force of their personality, the ability to get others to do what they wanted. Well, the Aftermen are the descendants of exactly such people.”
But the Aftermen are journeying into the past one year at a time. They don’t want to journey forward because, as Nadine/Ellie says, there is something in the future they fear: “You’re afraid to go there–afraid that you might find me!” Ellie gets to do what we would all like to –and this is part of the appeal of time travel fiction: she gets to go back to where it all started, armed with knowledge of the future; she gets to do it all again.
More than that, she has been “recruited into the most exclusive organization in all Time–-an organization that was comprised in hundreds of thousands of instances entirely and solely of herself.” She has indeed conquered the universe -- perhaps another one of our fantasies --and she's done it through a closed causal loop.
"A Dry, Quiet War,” by Tony Daniel
The world presented in “A Dry, Quiet War” is more brutal and more familiar,
or at least it seems familiar past the first few sentences, which tell us we are not on earth or in our present time:
“I cannot tell you what it meant to me to see the two suns of Ferro set behind
the dry mountain east of my home. I had been away twelve billion years.” That's long. But
the sparse human colony on the “backwater” desert planet Ferro echoes the towns
of western fiction. Like the 1950s film Shane, it is “a symbolic myth: the
age-old story of the duel between good and evil.” The hero, Henry Bone, returns from a war
and finds the town terrorized by outlaws from the same war. Like the archetypal
gunfighter Shane, who has forsworn violence, he is put to the test. When outlaws prey upon the inhabitants, killing those who try to stop them, at first, for
reasons known only to him, he does not act against them. But when his
sweetheart Bex, a tough independent western woman, is violated by the rapacious
Marek, he throws his scruples to the wind and avenges her. Like Shane, he must
then move on.
But this is not quite it. The war Henry Bone returns from is not the American Civil War; it is the War at the End of Time. Bone’s description of the end of the universe echoes modern physics’ discovery of dark matter. Once physicists speculated that the universe was infinite. Now many believe that dark matter will one day pull the universe apart. Bone reflects: “there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night.”
At the end of the universe in the story, there are “twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy to galaxy, system to system, fighting until the critical point is reached, when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless, stagnant pools of nothing. No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain [ ...] inherit the dark field. They win.”
But what do they win? This war is fought because it has to be: “If we don't fight at the end, there won't be a beginning. For there to be people, there has to be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that kind of universe, and not another, they told me [….] And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home, come back.”
In other words, that’s the way it is, a reflection of current thinking about the kind of universe we live in.
Time in the created universe of the story is
circular. The end and the beginning of time – and all the time in between -- are
inexorably linked. Bone cannot tell his sweetheart Bex who won the war:
"Every time a returning soldier tells that answer, he changes everything.
Then he has two choices. He can either go away, leave his own time, and go back
to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all mean nothing, what he did. Not
just who won and who lost, but all the things he did in the war spin off into
nothing." Changing something in the
past changes the future as in Ray Bradbury’s classic “The Sound of Thunder," in which a time traveler into the far past
steps on a butterfly and returns to his own time to find his world terribly different. The one tiny
alteration of the past has had repercussions that spread out over time and
changed the future. How much more would be changed by the revelation of the winners of a future war.
The War at the End of Time has had consequences that stretch back into the past. The outlaws in this story are a “renegade squad” from the war, known as Glims or “war-ghosts”:
“Soldiers who don't go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they don't want to give it up, or can't. Sometimes they have [ ...] modifications that won't let them give it up. They wander the timeways -- and since they don't belong to the time they show up in, they're hard to kill. In the early times, where people don't know about the war, or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies."
The Aftermen in “Legions in Time” are the
descendants of historical monsters; the
Glims, traveling into the past, become the monsters of the human imagination – they are wanderers from the War at the End of
Time, appearing to the humans of the pre-scientific
past with powers that seemed supernatural. Further, time here is seen metaphorically as spatial -- the Glims travel "timeways" analogous to roadways.
Henry himself is no longer quite human. He has been given super human powers so that he can fight. He alone in his town can see into the timelines the Glims inhabit. But even with all his power, he is prohibited from fighting the Glims:
“what could possibly be of use against a creature that had survived will survive that great and final war and so must survive now? You can't kill the future. That's how the old sergeants would explain battle fate to the recruits. If you are meant to be there, they'd say, then nothing can hurt you. And if you're not, then you'll just fade, so you might as well go out fighting.”
Syntax and even punctuation here -- The Glims "had survived will survive" -- reflect the circularity of time. Like the conflict between the marauding outlaws and the town sheriff in a western, tensions build between the Glim, Marek, and the hero, Henry Bone. Also augmented, Marek is intrigued by Bone:
"I know what you are, but I can't get a read on who you are, and that worries me." Though Bone styles himself just a “grunt,” Marek quickly senses the difference: "I don't think we've got a grunt here […] I think we've got us a genuine skyfalling space marine."
Soon Marek realizes what Bone is: "You're some bigwig, ain't you, skyfaller? Somebody that matters to the outcome […] This is your actual and you don't want to fuck yourself up-time so you won't fight." Knowing Bone is important to the outcome of the war and has returned to his “actual” time, Marek now thinks he has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Bone warns him: "If you hurt her, I don't care about anything. Do you understand? Nothing will matter to me." But Marek doesn’t believe him, and rapes Bek.
As she lies recuperating, to comfort her Bone now reveals the end of the war to her though he is not sure she hears and hopes she does not: "Bex, in the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That's why we're here. That's why we're all here.” He has now possibly altered that future: “I'll just have to go back up-time and do it again."
He kills Marek with grisly brutality “in such a way that he would never come to life again, not in any possible place, not in any possible time [….] Marek is now [i]rrevocably gone from this time line, and that was what mattered. Keeping this possible future uncertain, balanced on the fulcrum of chaos and necessity. Keeping it free, so that I could go back and do my work.”
The people of the town now know he is Colonel Henry Bone, who won the war. “They knew what I was, what I was to be.” At the end of the story, he sits drinking: “I sat, and as the suns of Ferro rose in the hard iron sky, I faded into the distant, dying future.”
Has he gone to the future in order to fight again? Or is it already too late and his actions of telling Bex the outcome of the war and killing the Glims have insured that the war will be lost: “If you are meant to be there, they'd say, then nothing can hurt you. And if you're not, then you'll just fade.”
Whatever the alternative, he has chosen to avenge brutality against the woman he loves, to triumph in his own time even at the possible cost of the existence of the human race. The specificity of love for an individual human being is more important than a generalized victory in a war at the end of time. And perhaps a species that could allow someone like Marek to exist – and invent the technology that makes him almost unkillable – is not worth saving.