Time Travel: A History (24 page)

Stuck as we are in our own time, most of us aren’t trying to make history, much less change it. We take the days one at a time, and history happens. Clive James has said that the greatest poets aspire not to change literary history but only to enrich it. One more reason for the special fascination with Hitler is his playing God. “The Führer was different,” thinks Kate Atkinson’s Ursula Todd, “he was consciously making history for the future. Only a true narcissist could do that.” Beware the politician who aspires to make history. Ursula herself lives in her many moments, one timeline after another: “the future as much a mystery as the past.”

We cannot escape the alternative realities, the limitless variations. The
OED
carefully tells us that the word
multiverse
was
“orig. Science Fiction”
but now, alas,
“Physics”:
“the large collection of universes in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics…in which each in turn of the different possible outcomes occurs.” At the same time, entirely apart from quantum theory, we have discovered the pleasure and pain of virtual worlds, inside the computer or the matrix, forcing us to contemplate the possibility that we ourselves are characters in someone else’s simulated reality. Or our own. Nowadays, when one speaks of “the real world,” it is difficult to refrain from using ironic quotation marks. We inhabit virtual worlds as familiarly and as avidly as the real one. In virtual worlds time travel could not be easier.

Follow me down the rabbit hole into the looping tunnels. William Gibson will be our Virgil. He is reading
The Alteration,
a 1976 novel of alternative history by Kingsley Amis, better known for his comic satires of contemporary Britain. In this world Europe has succumbed to authoritarianism, but never mind Hitler—the papacy is in charge. The Reformation never happened, and the Catholic Church holds much of the world in a theocratic grip. Amis is, of course, investigating in a sidelong way his own, all-too-real world, just as Philip Roth is in
The Plot Against America
and Fry in
Making History.
Amis’s story opens in the Cathedral Basilica of St. George at Coverley, “the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas.” In passing we observe bits of perverted art history: Turner has evidently painted the ceiling “in commemoration of the Holy Victory,” Blake has decorated one wall with some holy frescoes, and the choir sings Mozart’s Second Requiem, “the crown of his middle age.” Science has been suppressed. Although it is 1976, there are wagons and oil lamps, but “matters electrical were held in general disesteem.” And there are wheels within wheels.

Lacking science, literature in the world of
The Alteration
has failed to generate science fiction, but the novel’s young hero enjoys reading in a disreputable genre known as Time Romance, or TR, for short. TR “appealed to a type of mind.” It was illegal but impossible to suppress fully. Inside this genre has evolved a subgenre known as Counterfeit World, CW. In this subgenre, books imagine histories that never happened—alternative histories. Now Gibson will explain:

Amis accomplishes, as it were in the attic of his novel, a sublime hall-of-mirrors effect. In our world, Philip K. Dick wrote
The Man in the High Castle,
in which the Axis triumphed in World War II. Within Dick’s book there is another, imaginary book,
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,
envisioning a world in which the Allies won, though that world clearly isn’t ours. In Amis’s counterfeit world, someone called Philip K. Dick has written a novel,
The Man in the High Castle,
imagining a non-Catholic world. Which isn’t ours.

And isn’t
theirs.
It’s hard to keep track. Amis’s boy hero, in his world without science, is amazed to read of a counterfactual world where “they use electricity…they send messages all over the Earth with it” and Mozart died in 1799 and Beethoven wrote twenty symphonies, and another famous book explains that humans evolved from a thing like an ape. “This business of TR and CW strikes me,” says Gibson, “as it plays so artfully through the book, as likely the best Jorge Luis Borges story Jorge Luis Borges never wrote.”

The shelves continue to fill with counterfeit worlds. The future becomes the present, and so every futuristic fantasy is slated to become alternative history. When the year 1984 arrived, Orwell’s particular surveillance state made the transition from TR to CW. Then 2001 came and went without any noticeable space odysseys. The careful futurist learns to avoid specifying dates. Still our literature and our filmmaking keep breeding new pasts, along with all the putative futures. And so do we all, every day, every night, waking and dreaming in the subjunctive, weighing the options, regretting the might-have-beens.

—

“DUAL TIME-TRACKS,
alternate universes,” scoffs a skeptical lawyer in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel
The Lathe of Heaven
. “Do you see a lot of old late-night TV shows?”

Her troubled client is a man named George Orr. (A tip of the hat to George Orwell, whose special year, 1984, had nearly arrived when Le Guin, in her forties, departed from her previous form to write this strange book.
^*7
) When aliens appear, they pronounce his name Jor Jor.

He is an ordinary man—an office worker, apparently placid, milquetoast, conventional. But George is a dreamer. When he was sixteen, he dreamed that his aunt Ethel had been killed in a car crash, and when he awoke he realized that his aunt Ethel
had
been killed in a car crash, weeks earlier. His dream changed reality retroactively. He has “effective dreams”—a sci-fi trope invented here. You might say he carries alternate universes within. Who else does that? The author, for one.

This is a lot of responsibility, and George doesn’t want it. He has no more control over his dreams than you or I—not conscious control, anyway. (He fears he had resented Ethel’s sexual advances.) Increasingly desperate, he doses himself with barbiturates and dextroamphetamine in hopes of suppressing his dreams altogether and ends up in the hands of a psychologist—a dreaming specialist—named William Haber. Haber believes in striving and control; he believes in the power of reason and science. He is plasticoated, like his office furniture. He hypnotizes poor George in an effort to guide his effective dreams and remake reality, step by step. The doctor’s office decor seems to have improved. Somehow he has become Director of the Institute.

For the rest of the universe, pulled in the wake of George’s dreams, progress is not so simple. Just as quantum theorists may have trouble finding sensible pathways through an unconstrained cornucopia of universes, so might the conscientious novelist. Le Guin does not make matters easy for the reader. She draws us no diagrams.
^*8
We must drift in her currents and listen carefully. The music changes. The weather changes. Portland is a city of ceaseless rain, “a downpour of warm soup, forever.” Portland enjoys clear air and level sunlight. Was there a dream about President John F. Kennedy and an umbrella? Dr. Haber encourages George to focus on his dread of overpopulation—Portland is a crowded metropolis of three million souls. Or Portland’s population has fallen to a hundred thousand, since the Plague Years and the Crash. Everyone remembers those: pollutants in the atmosphere “combining to form virulent carcinogens,” the first epidemic, “the riots, and the fuck-ins, and the Doomsday Band, and the Vigilantes.” Only George and now Dr. Haber remember multiple realities. “They took care of the overpopulation problem, didn’t they?” George says sarcastically. “We really did it.” When are we less the masters of our thoughts than when we dream?

He is not a time traveler. He does not travel through time. He changes it: the past and the future, at once. Much later, sci-fi developed terminology for these conventions, or borrowed them from physics: alternative histories may be called “timelines” or, per William Gibson, “stubs.” In any one stub, people are bound to think that their history is the only one that happened. It’s not so much that Orr’s dream brings a new plague; it’s that once he has dreamed, the plague had always happened. He begins to appreciate the paradox. “He thought: In
that
life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century. But in
this
life, which I then created, I did
not
dream an effective dream.” There was always a plague. If this sounds like George Orwell’s “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” that’s no accident. Totalitarian governments also purvey alternate histories.
^*9

The Lathe of Heaven
is a critique of a certain kind of hubris—one that every willful creature shares in some degree. It is the hubris of politicians and social engineers: champions of progress who believe we can remake the world. “Isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?” says Haber, the scientist, when Orr expresses doubts. Change is good: “Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.”

George sees it differently. “We’re in the world, not against it,” he says. “It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life.” Evidently he is a natural Taoist. “There is a way but you have to follow it. The world
is
, no matter how we think it ought to be.”

Having solved overpopulation, Haber tries to use George to bring about peace on Earth. What could go wrong? The Alien Invasion. Sirens, crashes, silvery spaceships. The eruption of Mount Hood. Orr dreams an end to racial strife, to “color problems.” Now everyone is gray.

A word from Zhuang Zhou: “Those who dream of feasting wake to lamentation.”

It seems there is no way out of this mess—no way based on intention or control—but an unexpected source of wisdom appears: the Aliens. They look like big green turtles. They sense a kindred spirit in Jor Jor, as well they might, since he has presumably dreamed them into existence. They speak in riddles:

We also have been variously disturbed. Concepts cross in mist. Perception is difficult. Volcanoes emit fire. Help is offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all. Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned.

They sound vaguely Taoist themselves. “Self is universe. Please forgive interruption, crossing in mist.”

Reality vies with irreality. George doubts his sanity. He doubts his free will. He dreams of deep seas and crossing currents. Is he the dreamer or the dream?

“II descend, réveillé, l’autre côté du rêve
.
”
(Le Guin is quoting Victor Hugo now.) He descends, awakened, the other side of the dream.

The Alien says: “There is time. There are returns. To go is to return.”

—

“THIS ABOUT TIME
being only a thingummy of thought is very confusing,” said one of E. Nesbit’s wise children, having been initiated into time’s new mysteries. “If everything happens at the same time—”

“It CAN’T!” said Anthea stoutly, “The present’s the present and the past’s the past.”

“Not always,” said Cyril. “When we were in the Past the present was the future. Now then!” he added triumphantly.

And Anthea could not deny it.

We have to ask these questions, don’t we? Is the world we have the only world possible? Could everything have turned out differently? What if you could not only kill Hitler and see what happens, but you could go back again and again, making improvements, tweaking the timeline, like the weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) in one of the greatest of all time-travel movies, reliving Groundhog Day until finally he gets it right.

Is this the best of all possible worlds? If you had a time machine, would you kill Hitler?

*1
Opinions vary. James E. Gunn (1958): “You are naked, because you can take nothing with you, just as you can leave nothing behind. Those are the two natural rules of time travel.”

*2
“…that the friend and companion who ran the household was the mother of one of these young people, that young Miss so and so, who played Badminton with a preoccupied air was the last capture of Hubert’s accomplished sex appeal. All this E. Nesbit not only detested and mitigated and tolerated, but…I think found exceedingly interesting.” Then again, Wells himself fathered children with various women besides his wife, and may have had an affair with one of Bland’s illegitimate daughters. Free love, after all.

*3
The book is dedicated to the British Museum’s leading Egyptologist, Wallis Budge.

*4
For example, Mr. Peabody solemnly explains that Isaac Newton had a brother, Figby, who invented a cookie.

*5
The reader may recall an entirely different
Time and Again.
There have been at least three. As the time-travel express got going, in the second half of the twentieth century, publishers must have had a panicky realization that they were using up all the possible titles. They run together in the mind:
Time and Again — Time After Time — From Time to Time — Out of Time — A Rebel in Time — Prisoner of Time — The Depths of Time — The Map of Time — The Corridors of Time — The Masks of Time — There Will Be Time — Time’s Eye.
At least four novels have been titled
Time After Time.