GENESIS And Time

Poul Anderson's Genesis, especially in its opening paragraph, is like a culmination of the author's works and also of a science fiction tradition beginning with Frankenstein and exemplified particularly by The Time Machine. Genesis opens:

"The story is of a man, a woman and a world. But ghosts pass through it, and gods. Time does, which is more mysterious than any of these."

-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), PART ONE, I, p. 3.

The references to ghosts and gods remind us that Anderson wrote fantasy as well as sf.

In sf, "time" variously implies time travel, time dilation, billions of years or galactic epochs. In Genesis:

billions of years elapse but some post-organic entities remain conscious and active throughout all that time;

there are "emulations," conscious AI simulations, of historical periods and alternative histories (like more allusions to previous works);

some individual human beings are technologically resurrected so that they not only remember their former lives but also, like the Time Traveller, experience what, in relation to those lives, is a remote future.

The passage of time both in individual lives and across longer periods is, of necessity, a major theme in all literature in any case. In a novel by Dornford Yates, characters entering old age after World War II remember a man that they had known who had lived in the reign of William IV, thus a pre-Victorian. My grandparents were born in the late nineteenth century. My granddaughter's contemporaries are having children who should live into the twenty-second century and should meanwhile have children and grandchildren of their own. That seems like a very long period of time to be linked by a single person, in this case me - but the same applies to everyone.

Poul Anderson captures both a time traveller's experience of time and an ordinary person's experience of it in a single sentence:

"In awe he felt a sense of that measureless river which he could swim but on which she could only be carried from darkness to darkness."

-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), IX, p. 98.