Experience Before Understanding

Before he is shuttled to the Oligocene, Manse Everard has been carefully warned that the organization that is recruiting him patrols time. Some other characters experience a disorienting dislocation and must then come to an understanding of what has happened to them. In Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis, Duncan Reid is snatched by the vortex and black thunders and deposited in a desolation where, he thinks, he must be dreaming, delirious or dead. Needless to say:

"A wind boomed..."

-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (New York, 1972), III, p. 25.

Reid must learn that he is in the time of Atlantis.

("...vortex..." is a terminological parallel with Doctor Who.)

In James Blish's A Midsummer Century, John Martels finds himself not only in a strange environment but also in the wrong body and is stunned to be told that, by his reckoning, he is now in about 25,000 A.D. In this respect at least, his experience is closer to that of Wells' Time Traveller than of Anderson's visitors to historical periods.

In Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge travels along what looks like a long underground tunnel before being told that the tunnel has taken him and his companion to a historical period.

We encourage blog readers to remember other examples. 

We are puzzled by this long detour into time travel and might return to Starfarers tomorrow.

(Timefarers would make a good title.)

Concept And Experience

Time travel involves physics, philosophy and fiction. I can only read popular accounts of the physics but am more familiar with the philosophy and the fiction. 

Any time travel narrative has at least two aspects, conceptual and experiential: a conceptual framework, whether explicit or implicit, for time travel and the experiences of the time travellers.

In HG Wells' The Time Machine, the framework is explicit although confused, a detailed discussion of the nature of time. There are two experiential stages. First, the process of time travelling is itself experienced. The Time Traveller perceives everything outside himself and his vehicle as accelerated. Secondly, his experience of several future periods is described, vividly and colourfully.

In Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol," the conceptual framework is provided by some brief instruction in the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene. Instead of the Time Traveller's four dimensions, the Time Patrol deals with 4N dimensions.

The experiential aspect is present but different. First, there is no experience of time travelling as such because each temporal transition is subjectively instantaneous. Secondly, although Manse Everard has been shuttled to the Oligocene for training, then back to the twentieth century, the reality of time travel does not strike him until he is travelling through London in a hansom cab in 1894. Thereafter, this and every other historical period is described in detail.

Different Ways Of Describing Observed Or Imagined Events

I have read that sometimes on a subatomic level a particle-antiparticle pair is created but the antiparticle almost immediately mutually annihilates with an already existing particle. Is this creation and annihilation or a single particle zigzagging spatiotemporally? On a macroscopic level, it would mean that, as a man, A, walks across a city square, something appears or materializes nearby. The materialization immediately splits into two men, B and C, identical with A and with each other. B walks forward on a path parallel to A's whereas C walks backwards towards A and collides with him, whereupon C and A disappear. Are they A, B and C or just A zigzagging spatiotemporally?

Sf writers usually imagine bodily continuity of a time traveller between his departure and his arrival. HG Wells' Time Traveller and Poul Anderson's mutant time travellers become mysteriously invisible and intangible but do continue to exist while time travelling whereas Anderson's Time Patrol timecycles and their occupants merely disappear and (re) appear. In Responses To Time Travel, I wrote:

"It is not logically impossible for a five minutes older version of me to appear and then to coexist with me for five minutes before I disappear. In other words, I would have time travelled five minutes into the past."

 However, this event can be described non-chronokinetically, i.e., without reference to time travel: a duplicate of me with prescient memories is created five minutes before I am annihilated. Futureward time travel is even easier to account for: I am annihilated and later re-created.

Bon voyage.

The Other Blog

If a post is about a time travel work by Poul Anderson, should it be published on this Poul Anderson Appreciation blog or on the Logic of the Time Travel blog? Because the latter blog has been neglected, I have added an explanatory post to it. See here.

Responses To Time Travel

Do I think that time travel is logically possible? Yes, although not all of its supposed consequences are. It is not logically impossible for a five minutes older version of me to appear and then to coexist with me for five minutes before I disappear. In other words, I would have time travelled five minutes into the past. Do I think that anything like that is likely to happen? No. Such events do not happen and there are strong grounds for believing that they are physically impossible. So what should be the response of a fictional character who finds that, in his experience, such events do happen?

We know in advance that a text that we are about to read is classified as fiction, even as science fiction, and we probably also know from the title, blurb etc that it is about time travel. So we are not surprised when Jack Havig's mother, suddenly hearing a baby crying in the next room, walks through carrying her baby and is so surprised at seeing an identical baby that she drops her baby only to see it disappear in mid-air... We just think about it and work out what must have happened but meanwhile the unfortunate mother is freaked to say the least...

I think that such events are logically possible but not that there is the slightest possibility in any other sense that they will happen.

Religions Real Or Fictional II

Starfarers, 7.

(I have just been out to our Zen group and back.)

Before eating, Captain Nansen pauses for those who want to bless the meal.

Being nominally Reform Catholic, he crosses himself as does Ruszek.

Zeyd bows his head.

Mokoena folds her hands, looks down and whispers.

Yu and Sundaram become meditative.

Kilbirnie, Brent, Dayan and Cleland wait respectfully.

That is everyone on board accounted for.

(I have heard a Buddhist equivalent of "grace before meals" but have not committed it to memory.)

A very strong unifying factor in society is that, except for a few sectarians, everyone attends weddings and funerals of friends and colleagues irrespective of denomination or tradition. The crew accept that, in different circumstances, they would attend a Reform Catholic church for their captain's wedding or funeral - but what practices will they find on Earth after ten thousand years? (This question is answered later in the novel.)

Religions Real Or Fictional

Starfarers.

Hanny Dayan debunked Cosmosophy. 

(I have just been reading about Theosophy and how Krishnamurti transcended it.)

"'[Mamphela Mokoena's] parents are ministers in the Samaritan Church.'" (6, p. 44)

(A Christian organization named after a branch of Judaism?)

Alvin Brent's mother was in the New Christian Church.

(That can mean anything, as we know.)

Zeyd is an adherent of the Ahmaddiyah Movement.

(This is real. Here.)

"Sundaram sat on the ground, on a bank of sacred Ganges..." (8, p. 69)

I identify with Sundaram.

As Long As It Lasted

Mirkheim.

Chee Lan says:

"'We enjoyed the trader game as long as that lasted.'" (XXI, p. 291)

She speaks for the readers if we have read the volumes in chronological order. First, the title of Trader To The Stars is self-explanatory. The title character is Nicholas van Rijn but he paves the way for the others. Second comes The Trouble Twisters about David Falkayn's ascent from apprentice to Master Merchant. The "Trouble Twisters" of the title are the trader team of Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan. Van Rijn cameos to initiate the team. Thirdly, Satan's World features all four characters. Fourth comes Mirkheim! We think that that is the end but then The Earth Book Of Stormgate presents eight more instalments about these characters or about other merchants of the Polesotechnic League. We enjoy the trader game as long as it lasts, then read the later periods of the Technic History. 

Going Home

We have quoted a certain passage from Mirkheim before but we now do so again in order to compare it with a similar-sounding passage in Starfarers.

Chee Lan:

"'We can't go home to what we left when we were young; it may still be, but we aren't...'"

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp 1-291 AT XXI, p. 290.

Captain Nansen:

"'We can never return home. When we come back to Earth, we will necessarily come as foreigners, immigrants.'" 

-Starfarers, 7, p. 59. 

Chee Lan cannot return to what she left because decades of life, work and experience have changed her. Nansen's crew cannot return home because ten millennia of history will have changed their home out of all recognition. Thus, they are saying not the same thing but the opposite. 

James Blish's Earthman, Come Home ends with its characters on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud but also with the realization that Earth is not a place but an idea. We cannot go home but, on the other hand, home is where we are.

Crew Members III

Starfarers, 7.

Before the Envoy has departed, Brent glowers, interrupts, protests to his superior, Yu Wenji, slams an object on a table, explodes, calls his fellow crew members "freaks" and refers sarcastically to Yu's "'...precious Chinese culture...'" (p. 55) He obviously should not have been included and should now be expelled even at this late date.

Ajit Nathu Sundaram, linguist and semantician, the only non-physical scientist on board, is fine-featured, rises and bows to Yu, addresses her as "'Engineer Yu...,'" (p. 56) looks happy and says that he is but adds that:

"'A few of our friends are less fortunate.'" (ibid.) 

He had been sitting thinking, although not productively as he puts it, and offers Yu a game of chess.

This contrast is a bit too pronounced. Clearly, Ajit is an asset on any exploratory expedition to another civilization and Brent is a liability.

At last, all ten are on stage. Ajit is not introduced until they are all on board. He is the most famous person in his fields.