Objections

An sf writer presents an idea. Readers perceive objections to it. The characters immediately discuss and reply to at least some of these objections. We are usually satisfied with this. All we ask is a minimum of plausibility and credibility. This includes the characters saying at least some of what we would have said in those circumstances.

(In this post, I am trying to focus on HG Wells and Poul Anderson but I have just remembered an excellent example from Neil Gaiman. I told my friend, Kevin, that some of Gaiman's characters were stranded in the Inn of the Worlds' End by a reality storm. Kevin remarked that a reality storm sounded like something out of Star Trek. I was able to tell him that one of the characters remarked that that sounded like something out of Star Trek. Kevin's response to the text was already incorporated into the text. The many realities represented in the Inn include our reality where Star Trek is a universally recognized work of fiction frequently referenced in other works of fiction.)

The model Time Machine disappears. The Time Traveler is uncertain whether it has gone into the future or the past. The Psychologist says that, if it had gone into the future, then it should still be visible. The outer narrator says that, if it had gone into the past, then it should have been visible when they entered the room and on every previous Thursday when they had been in that room. The Time Traveler's (completely inadequate) reply is that the presentation of the model is diluted. Each of its seconds is, as it were, stretched through one of our minutes so that it makes correspondingly less of an impression. (I have added the word "stretched" to try to make better sense of what is being said. The notion that the model is traveling faster through time when nothing is moving in that direction makes absolutely no sense.) The Psychologist points out that we cannot see a spinning wheel or a flying bullet but we would certainly feel them if we got in their way yet he passes his hand through the space where the model had been and laughs as if this proves his point.

When, like the model Time Machine, Jack Havig disappears:

"The chair stood empty. [Robert Anderson] felt, and no form occupied it."

-There Will Be Time, IV, p. 36.

 

Robert Anderson feeling the space that had been occupied by Jack Havig exactly parallels the Psychologist feeling the space that had been occupied by the model Time Machine.

 

Havig has to stop time traveling in order to breathe whereas the Time Traveler does not encounter this difficulty.

 

Robert Anderson asks why, if the time-traveling Havig can neither breathe nor touch anything and can neither be touched nor seen, he can nevertheless see, albeit feebly. Havig hypothesizes that the force which moves him has an electromagnetic component and that the field catches and carries along a few photons. That is a sufficient explanation. The question has at least been asked and some sort of answer has been offered.

Havig says that the force operates in at least four dimensions. This is the only indication in this text that more than four dimensions might be involved. The Time Machine manages with only four dimensions except for one single passage suggesting that, if the Time Machine occupied the same space as another object, then the resulting chemical reaction or explosion might blow it out of all possible dimensions and into the Unknown. Havig's immutable timeline involves only a single temporal dimension but who knows what else might be possible if the force that moves him does operate in more than four dimensions?