"The Boat of Millions of Years"

The above phrase on the opening page of Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates links this book with the title of Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years as we have previously said here. Anderson's novel features slower-than-light interstellar travel by a small group of immortals whereas Powers refers directly to Egyptian mythology:

"'...the twelve hours of the night...

"'It's the course through the Tuaut, the underworld, that the dead sungod Ra follows every night on his dark voyage from sunset to sunrise. Darkness becomes solid there, and hours are a measurement of distance, like sailing on an uncoiled clock face.'"

-The Anubis Gates, 10, p. 337.

Hours as distance: travel through time. Doyle replies that he has already travelled along such a river. 

Time as a river is a major image in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. See The River Of Time. Ra makes a big appearance in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Unique?

Is Poul Anderson unique in addressing both causality paradoxes; certainly in the comprehensiveness of his treatment of both? (Thinks: it is safer to frame this kind of proposition as a question than as a factual assertion.)

In the preceding post, with Anderson as our axis, so to say, we also referred to time travel works by:

SM Stirling (the series has to continue)

Audrey Niffenegger (we hope for a sequel)

HG Wells (whatever happened to the Time Traveller?)

Robert Heinlein

Tim Powers

- and we know that there are others. What an outstanding list of authors! This literary sequence will continue as long as there are authors and readers with intellects and imaginations.

Some Time Travel Comparisons

(i) Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series and SM Stirling's Make The Darkness Light series are opposite answers to the question whether to change history. (Assuming that you can, of course.)

(ii) Anyone who is just starting to time travel cannot know whether their timeline is mutable or immutable. Anderson's Jack Havig tries to prevent his father's death before he learns not to try. All the evidence indicates that Audrey Niffenegger's Henry DeTamble also inhabits an immutable timeline. However, wanting to be sure that he will always return to the future in which he is married to Claire, DeTamble takes extra care not to do anything that might change the course of events. Stirling's American time travellers have to find out what kind of timeline they are in. Recruits to Anderson's Time Patrol are told as part of their training.

(iii) Both HG Wells' The Time Machine and Anderson's There Will Be Time, the latter featuring Havig, describe events rushing past a time traveller.

Thus, we compare Anderson with Stirling, Niffenegger and Wells. Anderson's comprehensive treatment of both time travel paradoxes, causality violation and circular causality, makes his works a pivotal point of comparison with other time travel authors.

Now consider a time travel conundrum in Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates. I could have discussed this on the Logic of Time Travel blog but far fewer people would have read it there. In fact, I have tried to redirect readers from that blog to this one: see About Time Travel. We will find that issues raised by Powers have already been addressed in (i) or (ii) above. 

Trapped inside a burning tent, Doctor Romany can escape only by jumping through time:

"...he tried to decide what time to jump to. Sometime in the future? No, not when it meant leaving tonight's debacle as established history. Better to jump into the past, fix things up so that the situation tonight's aborted effort was supposed to remedy never would have arisen in the first place."

-Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (London, 1986), 9, p. 274.

Romany, thinking in terms of (i), does not yet known that he is living in an immutable timeline as in (ii). Nevertheless, it is sensible, from his point of view, to travel into the past when he can use his knowledge from the future to try to counteract the effects of the situation that he had wanted to remedy. You can do a lot in the past as the hero of Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer learns.

Also in The Anubis Gates, in 1810, Brendan Doyle finds a hand-written volume recording events on 4 February, 1684. On the endpaper, in his own handwriting although faded with age, he reads:

"IHAY, ENDANBRAY, ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?" (8, p. 258)

Needless to say, later in the novel, Doyle visits 1684 and writes this mocking note to his younger self.

If I knew at what point to start writing a circular causality narrative, I would do it.

"It's Not As Simple As That!"

Nothing is ever simple, is it? The previous post, Identities, left out complexities in all three of the novels cited. In particular, another way to duplicate the consciousness of a person is simply to duplicate the person. If a living duplicate of an organism duplicates the organism's neural states, then it also duplicates that organism's mental states: not A thinking that he is B but two people thinking that they are A. See Poul Anderson's "Symmetry" and the magically generated duplicates called "ka's" in The Anubis Gates where a duplicate Lord Byron has entertainment value - and might be based on reports of a double of Byron according to the quotation at the head of Chapter 8.

Of course, a time traveller can at least temporarily duplicate himself by coexisting with his younger or older self (see A Case In Point) or maybe by initiating a divergent timeline containing an alternative version of himself.

That is enough about that, I think.

Identities

Neuronic events generate mental events. This has become a cliche but in fact is a very recent scientific discovery. Electrically firing neurons generate sensations which would not otherwise exist. Complicated electrochemical interactions between electrically firing neurons generate thoughts and personalities which would not otherwise exist.

(i) If person A's brain duplicated the interactions in person B's brain, then A would think that he was B, complete with B's memories, motivations etc. 

(ii) If an artificial neural network duplicated B's neuronic interactions, then that network would reproduce B's consciousness and sense of identity.

(iii) If some other technology exactly duplicated the effects of neuronic interactions, then that technology would generate self-conscious individuals maybe thinking that they were living on Earth in a particular historical period. 

(i) happens in Tim Power's The Anubis Gates. 

(ii) happens in Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars.

(iii) happens in Anderson's Genesis.

In The Anubis Gates, a character seeks immortality by repeatedly projecting his personality into someone else's body while at the same time displacing that person's personality into his own abandoned and soon-to-die body. 

The idea that personalities can be generated and duplicated in these ways links these three novels.

Time Travel Scenarios

Returned from the Viking Festival, where a guy at a stall blew through a tube to make small pewter Thor's hammers, we resume rereading Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates which remains fascinating although it really belongs on the Logic of Time Travel blog which, however, has effectively transferred its functions here, to the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog. See About Time Travel.

Meanwhile, SM Stirling's The Lords Of Creation, Volume III, The Lords Of Creation, should be en route via eBay. "Poul" and other sf writers have their says at the beginning of Volume I or II as far as I can remember without being able to check the text momentarily.

Contemporary fiction has a single premise: that the contemporary world exists as it does because history occurred as recorded. Sf varies its premises. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol would be unnecessary in The Anubis Gates. How would the Patrol respond to the events of SM Stirling's To Turn The Tide? As a matter of fact, in the Patrol timeline, there is not, as far as we know, any world-wide nuclear war in 2032. Therefore, the Patrol would prevent such a war from occurring and would also, of course, try to prevent any time travellers from changing history in the second century CE.

Good guys in one scenario are bad guys in another.

Doyle And Ashbless

See:

Three Other Time Travel Novels 

A Case In Point

Brendan Doyle, time traveller, knows that, on a particular day in 1810, the poet, William Ashbless, arrived in London where he entered the Jamaica Coffee House at 10:30 and then wrote his poem, "The Twelve Hours of the Night," while seated in the coffee house. Wanting to meet and befriend Ashbless, Doyle arrives in the coffee house on time. However, Ashbless does not show up so Doyle writes the poem from memory, then remains in the nineteenth century as Ashbless...

There is more to the story than that but I have summarized the paradox and am now going to bed. Life is busy here: Robin Hood (a version of) this evening; more authentic Vikings tomorrow. It is nearly midnight.

Street Life

Poul Anderson shows us street life in Centauri on Avalon in the Domain of Ythri during the period of the early Terran Empire. Among many other details, a gaunt man shouts of some obscure salvation. Later in the Technic History, Anderson describes the towers of Archopolis, capital city of the Terran Empire, and Dominic Flandry's upper level apartment but not any of that city's street life. But we need to read more of every aspect of a real or fictional city's life. An interstellar, multi-species civilization will be multivarious but we can get a hint of that on Earth now.

Today, a group of Muslim men had come all the way from Birmingham to hand out free Korans on a street in Lancaster! They happened to stand right next to a group of left-wing newspaper sellers with whom they exchanged friendly greetings and literature.

Meanwhile, we reread Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates which presents nineteenth century London street life, involving both aristocrats and beggars although principally the latter.

All human life is here as it should be in all fiction and literature.

Take to the streets!

Two Surrenders

A scene from Poul Anderson's Technic History and a scene from SM Stirling's Make The Darkness Light series come together in one readers' mind although their settings could not be more dissimilar: a future history and an alternative history. A Merseian steps from a wrecked building and waves a white flag. A hand waves olive branches from behind rubble. Two symbols of surrender. Hastening into town on a Saturday, I leave it to blog readers to locate these references. This evening, a Robin Hood play in Williamson Park. Tomorrow, a Viking Festival in Heysham Village. We walk through legend and history.

A Case In Point

There is a particular kind of time travel paradox that is characteristic of narratives set in immutable timelines. Robert Heinlein presents this paradox very well in "By His Bootstraps" and The Door Into Summer and Poul Anderson in The Corridors Of Time, There Will Be Time and The Dancer From Atlantis as we have discussed here before but there are other examples.

In Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, thief lords, banqueting in a subterranean grotto beneath nineteenth century London, are surrounded by shabby men and boys and, beyond them, derelicts who will fight for the left-overs afterwards. The Gypsy King, Doctor Romany, is furious when a very old and disfigured man laughs madly and mocks something that he, Romany, has just said.

"'Can't you put this wretch out of his misery, Horrabin?' [Romany] asked quietly.

"'You can't because you didn't!' cackled the ancient man."

-Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (London, 1986), 4, p. 105.

Horrabin merely has the man removed but, as he is being carried away, this ancient human wreck winks at Romany and stage-whispers:

"'Look for me later under different circumstances...'" (ibid.)

- then again laughs crazily.

The alert fan of time travel sf might guess (correctly) that, later in this narrative, Romany will time travel to a very remote past date, will live for a very long time, will become so disfigured as to be unrecognizable and will, of course, mock his much younger self at the thieves' banquet.

We can appreciate it but we can't all write it.