The Time Traveler's Almanac (2 page)

Because the truth is, fiction is one of the most effective time travel machines in the universe and always has been.

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Tallahassee, Florida, 2013 and 2150

INTRODUCTION

Rian Johnson

Let’s time travel. Right now. Are you ready?

After this paragraph I’m going to type a symbol that is a sort of hidden Easter egg on the Mac keyboard, and after you see it, once your brain absorbs its contours and angles, a metaphysical displacement will occur and in the space between two beats of your heart we will both be transported through time. Alright. Let’s do this. Here we go.

*   *   *

We have now hopped into the near future, and you have already read a good chunk of this book.

How am I certain of this? Oh, subtle changes in the room. An almost imperceivable ghosting of dust on the desk. A different charge to the ions in the air. A shift in the quality of the light. But most of all, I am certain that you have already read a big chunk of this book because nobody in their right mind would pick up this volume filled with some of the best science fiction writing from the last one hundred and fifty years from the greatest writers the genre has known on the most beguiling and thematically rich topic sci-fi has produced,
nobody
would pick this up and read the “Introduction by Rian Johnson” first. Hell, just looking over the table of contents, I want to flip ahead myself. (Go ahead and flip at any time, by the way. I encourage it. It seems fitting.)

The stories in this collection span across the past century and a half, from the nascent beginnings of genre itself in Edward Page Mitchell’s pre-Wells “The Clock That Went Backward” (1881) through those gilded golden years of the 1950s with (my own personal favorite) Bradbury, into the cultural cross-currents that sci-fi charted for our generation in the late twentieth century, and finally forging into some of the best and brightest voices in the genre today.

As a broad survey it’s invaluable, and in one way this book can be seen as a cultural almanac. Charting how we’ve used this infinitely malleable tool of time travel to engage with the changing landscape around us is a tempting method for mapping our recent history. A back-to-back reading of Wells’s “The Time Machine” with Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” makes your stomach drop, as within a few quick pages we plunge from the scientific advancements of the late 1800s that were opening the world up for mankind to those of the 1950s that were threatening to bring the sky down onto his puny head. Flip a few more pages into Reagan’s 1980s in Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which the enemy (and focal point of the story) is no longer technology at all but a vision of a utopian society rising from the mythologies of the past to crush what makes modern man human.

Sci-fi attracts armchair tinkerers. I know that I’m one myself. It makes sense that the take-it-apart-and-see-why-it-works (or if-it-works) instinct is drawn to this impossibly broad realm of fiction whose one unifying element is some degree of world-building. The one thing you know when you pick up a science fiction story is that there will be some sort of geared mechanism at its core that you can take apart and analyze, whether it’s a PKDish thought puzzle or an Asmovian interplanetary society. If you’re denying your healthy (and encouraged!) flipping instinct and are still reading this introduction in a few paragraphs I’ll passionately argue that this is not the essential appeal of great sci-fi, but it’s a biggie. When it comes to time travel stories this tinkering instinct kicks up into a higher gear, but is also (to badly mix bad metaphors) a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, the pleasure of time travel dissection is a beautiful and necessary thing. If someone hands you a kinked-up slinky, what do they expect you to do with it? Turn it over in your hands and appreciate the beauty of the tangle? Nuts to that. “Let’s see if we can untangle and make sense of this thing” is part of its purpose, and a good time travel story will have an interior logic that encourages and stands up to untangling, and smoothly slinks down the stairs when you’re finished. However, with time travel stories there’s also a unique danger to this untangling. There is, I believe, a right and a wrong way to do it, and the wrong way can very easily lead to becoming “that guy.” You know the guy I’m talking about. He’s the guy who can talk to you for an hour at a party (in a tone pitched between the Comic Book Guy from
The Simpsons
and a Whit Stillman character) about why this or that slinky is well tangled or isn’t, but doesn’t seem to actually enjoy playing with them.

When we’re talking about whether or not a story’s “time travel logic” makes sense, it is important to remember that every story builds its own framework for its own logic. In that sense, time travel is more of a fantasy-based story element than a science-based one. Time travel does not exist in the real world, and any broadly accepted rules for how it can and can’t work were derived from a bunch of “that guys” talking about time travel
fiction.
There is no “makes sense” in the universal sense – that is to say, criticizing a time travel story because its rules do not line up with rules in the real world is akin to dismissing the Harry Potter books because the conductive properties of wood could never sustain the energy required for spell casting.

Approaching a time travel story with a dogmatic measuring stick in hand also denies the unique pleasure that the genre affords tinkerers. A good story’s internal logic is flawless, and everything in between its first and last word makes sense on its own terms. In that way, it presents the tinkerer with the literary equivalent of an Escher drawing. Internally, step by step, the logic of Escher’s staircase makes (or makes you believe it makes) nefariously perfect sense, and its dissonance with what we know to be possible is not something you have to “just accept and get over to enjoy it,” but is the very source of what’s enjoyable about it.

For all its pleasures, though, the untangling-game cannot sustain a story, let alone a sub-genre that has thrived for so many years. Something about the concept of time travel snaps into our selves like a jigsaw-puzzle piece, just like invisibility or the power of flight. It is wish fulfillment on a primeval level of the psyche. When I fly in my dreams I’m not doing any of the “wouldn’t it be cool to…” things that our conscious minds wish for, like saving time getting across town or arriving at parties through the window or having lunch on top of the Empire State Building. In my dreams I’m just flying, and just that feeling of soaring through the air feels like it scratches some deeply rooted itch.

Meeting Abraham Lincoln, hunting dinosaurs, making a fortune on the stock market, giving your younger self one piece of advice, all these “wouldn’t it be cool” reasons we’d like to time travel do not get to the root of why we really
want
to time travel. I think partly it has to do with the cruel cold clockwork of this defined span of years each of us is assigned, the linear piece of chain we’re all rolling across like a gear from beginning to inevitable end. Few wishes in life go deeper than the desire to give that chain the finger.

There’s also something deeply familiar about time travel. It feels like something that is not at all foreign to our brains; it makes sense in an odd way. How much of our lives do we live in the past or future, looking forward or looking back, whether regretting or pining or fearing? Speaking for myself, the answer is a sheepish “lots.” Time travel stories give us the dual pleasure of the carrot and the stick, on one hand letting us imagine going physically to where our minds can only take us, to re-experience that perfect day or change that awful thing, and on the other hand warning us that actually doing this would not turn out well, and that our place is in the present.

Ultimately, though, there is only one base ingredient that everything in this book absolutely has in common: they are all damn good stories by damn good storytellers.

But I don’t have to tell you this. You’ve already read them. And I feel bad about that. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go back and experience all these incredible stories for the first time again?

Rian Johnson

TOP TEN TIPS FOR TIME TRAVELERS

Charles Yu

1.
Here’s the thing: you’re doing something that you don’t understand. That’s not a knock on you. It’s just a fact. Humans can’t wrap their heads around time travel, and it’s not a software thing. It’s hardware. Our brains just don’t get it. Not yet. Maybe someday. But that will take, for lack of a better word, time. We could evolve, as a species, but that would require a selection pressure, some environmental advantage for minds unburdened by the illusion of temporal sequence, of the notion of cause and effect. But that’s not what we have. What we have is the opposite. What we have are minds that are very good at being trapped in time. We are geniuses, each and every one of us. We are unbelievable machines, capable of incredible feats of psychological athleticism. We are full-grown, half-starved Bengal tigers, pacing in our cages, and we know every inch of the space in front of us, and behind, and to either side. We have evolved to survive as prisoners, and so, when one of us manages to get free, we look for walls, for a ceiling. We want to get back indoors, back inside time. We look for our cages. We look for rules.

2.
So, the most important thing is, forget any rules. If you’re really going to do this, you’re going to have to open your mind. If you go into it with preconceived notions about what time is, what causality is, well, then, you’re only going to see it through those conceptual lenses. You’ll understand it, of course, because that’s what we do. We understand things. But sometimes understanding gets in the way. Especially when something can’t be understood.

3.
But, but, but, you say. What do you mean? What could it even mean to understand something that can’t be understood? Well, that’s easy. When things can’t be understood, and you understand them, well, then, what you’re doing is just making stuff up. A circle looks at a sphere, and it understands it as a circle. A cross-section, it understands it exactly to the extent that it already makes sense to it.

4.
So if you can’t understand it, then what are you supposed to do? Well, not supposed to do, that’s not right. You can’t suppose anything, that’s the point. You are free. As free as any human who has ever lived. You broke out. Of the ultimate constraint. There have been a few others – go look in your library books. Maybe in your religious texts – they’ve got stories of people who have done the same. Although you might not think of them as time travelers, that’s what they were. We tend to worship them, tell stories about them. People might tell stories about you, too, depending on how you handle this.
    So get rid of the concept of supposed to do. Suppose anything. You can, you know. Suppose that you are a time traveler. Sounds like some kind of philosophical experiment, doesn’t it? And that’s the thing. You’re traveling in time, my friend. That’s pretty philosophical. And the ultimate experiment.

5.
Which is not to say you are imagining this. This is as real as anything.

6.
What kinds of tips are these? You thought you were going to get some advice about avoiding paradoxes. About ripple effects and avoiding stable time loops and all of that. Don’t kill grandma, do kill Hitler, don’t step on that twig. No kissing family members. All good ideas, to be sure. Don’t need to repeat them here.
    Or maybe you wanted a brochure. A guide from the tourism office. Some good times to visit, catch the show. Back-row seats at some key moments in the history of the world. Crucial moments in the history of the world.
    But that’s not what you’re getting.
    What you’re getting is this instead. Ask yourself, who am I? Am I important?

7.
You are. You’re very important. By definition. You’re a time traveler, and with that comes some level of responsibility. Think about it. Your whole life, you’ve imagined time travel. You have the power to affect the flow of events, the lives of other people, the course of the universe, in a way that is unique and ineffably strange. How did you get to be one of these select, chosen few? What makes you so special?

8.
Here is what makes you so special: you remember. You always had a gift, a knack, a predisposition to this. You look ahead. You knew there was more to it. That there had to be, if not a way out, a way up, and around, and back in. That there was something fishy about the whole infrastructure. Why build roads if no one can go anywhere? Why do we have all of this temporal equipment inside of us, if we can never use it? You were right. You didn’t know how right you were. Everyone thought it was poetic. A grand metaphor. A way of thinking about our psychology. You knew it was more, waited for the moment, waited for this moment. You were right, and you had no idea how right you were.

9.
Here is what you need to ask yourself: how did you come to be a time traveler? Did you choose this, or did it choose you? Are you on some kind of mission? Do you feel like you might be stuck in a stable time loop? Is there anyone in your life who you need to go see in the past? Have you ever had dreams about the future that might not be dreams but premonitions? Are you lost and adrift outside of time and if so do you want to get back in? Who is asking you these rhetorical questions? Why are you looking for tips, and especially from someone or something that you don’t know anything about? How do you know you’re not asking yourself these questions, that this isn’t your own diary you are reading, from the past or the future or the present and that you haven’t read this eleven million seven hundred ninety three thousand four hundred sixty one times? And will read it an infinite number of times more? That these tips are all that you have, all that there ever will be, or ever was, which is the same thing, because nothing has ever existed that has not always existed, that you live in an eternal block universe, timeless and frozen, and that time, as you knew it when you started this, that time is in the past, but it’s still there, and you can go back, and then you can come back here, and you have, and you will.
    You wanted some tips. You have some tips. Probably not quite what you were expecting. But what were you expecting? Time travel is a lonely activity. Time travel means you can never go home again. But maybe it also means always being able to see home from here. Don’t you remember? These tips are what got you into trouble in the first place.