Time Travel Fiction

Most new time travel fiction is at worst incoherent or at best unoriginal.

Incoherence
I have discussed illogicalities in time travel fiction here, here and here. It is pointless to readdress such issues at length every time they recur. The Mammoth Book Of Time Travel SF contains a four page story which I read to the end only because of its brevity. The surprise ending was that the story described an impossible time travel scenario only because its narrator was insane! Thus, this story is not sf. (But how many of its readers thought that it was making sense?)

If a time traveler departs now to change an event in my past and succeeds, then he generates a divergent timeline in which that event happened differently and in which I now remember it differently but I do not, in the original timeline, continue to remember the first version of the event only to discover that the event has "now" been changed so that it did not occur as I remember it!

Unoriginality
It is insufficient merely to (re)state the circular causality paradox although The Time Traveler's Wife demonstrates that it remains possible to present new and surprising implications of that paradox, as Poul Anderson had done in his three independent time travel novels.

It is necessary to spell out, preferably briefly, precisely which version of a divergent or multiple timelines scenario an author is using but not, of course, to present the mere idea as if it were a novelty. Anderson's Time Patrol series presents an extremely subtle mutable timeline theory which, I think, contains incoherencies as stated by the characters but which nevertheless warrants careful study and also makes for intriguing and haunting stories.

Facts And Opinions

Some of the following numbered statements are facts.
Others are my opinions.
The status of each should be obvious.

(i) Poul Anderson is a major successor to HG Wells.

(ii) In particular, the Time Patrol series and There Will Be Time are conceptual sequels to The Time Machine.

(iii) There are perhaps half a dozen literal sequels to The Time Machine.

(iv) None of these is by Anderson (fact) and none is any good (opinion) - except The Space Machine by Christopher Priest which is more of a sequel to The War Of The Worlds.

(v) Some authors do not do sequels.

(vi) Wells did connect a few of his works but does not seem to have considered sequels to his major novels.

(vii) The disappearance of the Time Traveler, like the loss of the Cavorite sphere, was intended to complete and close a narrative, not to open the possibility of a continuation.

(viii) The nature of time travel suggests that, since the Time Traveler did not return immediately, he does not return period.

(ix) The Mammoth Book Of Time Travel SF (see here) includes "The Truth About Weena" by David J Lake.

(x) This title implies a literal sequel - although I also thought that The Time Traveler's Wife did.

(xi) I will read this newer (1998) story and possibly comment.

(xii) However, I need a lot of convincing that a new time travel story, whether or not it is a literal Time Machine sequel, is a good idea. (Either do it really well or don't do it.)

Later, on "The Truth About Weena": I would not have done it that way but then I cannot write fiction. My two attempts are here and here. For some ideas on a sequel to The Time Machine, see here.

Wellsian And Andersonian Time Travel

Jack Havig in There Will Be Time is like the Time Traveler without the Time Machine. (see also here.)

In The Corridors Of Time, time travel is technological but through literal corridors rotated onto the temporal axis, not on or in temporal vehicles, although the latter are developed later. There is a future period divided between urban Rangers and rural Wardens (see also here) but also a further vision (see also here) beyond that period - plus well realized past periods. See also here.

The Dancer From Atlantis has a temporal vehicle moving not only backwards in time but also around the Earth rather than remaining stationary in space.

In "Flight To Forever," as in The Time Machine, a modern man with a temporal vehicle travels far enough forward to be able to discern the future history of mankind.

"The Nest" and "The Little Monster" are Wellsian in their technological approaches to time travel and in their realizations of the periods visited.

The Time Machine And The Time Patrol

(i) HG Wells' Time Machine is an elaborate contraption hand built by its single inventor in the nineteenth century whereas Poul Anderson's timecycles are streamlined high tech machines mass produced in the far future. Travelers sits on, not inside, both.

(ii) Wells' Time Traveler witnesses the universe fast forwarding, then rewinding, whereas Anderson's Time Patrolers experience no duration between departure and arrival. (Anderson's Jack Havig shares the Time Traveler's experience in this respect.)

(iii) In The Time Machine, the single Time Traveler makes one round trip to the future, then disappears, whereas the Time Patrol is an organization routinely moving through history and prehistory.

(iv) The Time Machine merely hints at "...curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion..." whereas the Time Patrol polices temporal paradoxes.

(v) Humanity devolves into Morlocks and Eloi or evolves into Danellians.

(vi) The Time Machine is a single, complete work whereas the Time Patrol is a growing, increasingly elaborate series that is partly an update and partly an alternative conception of time travel.

A Reading And Viewing List

Because of Christmas and birthday presents, my reading and rereading of Poul Anderson's works now competes with:

Sebastian Faulk's James Bond novel;
a new illustrated story by Neil Gaiman;
Tolkien's Beowulf (see also here);
the two Sin City films;
the films of the three Stieg Larsson novels;
the third and fourth Modesty Blaise novels;
a Modesty Blaise film;
the fourth and fifth Smallville seasons;
The Mammoth Book Of Time Travel SF.

This last item contains no Anderson! But it does feature Gregory Benford and Robert Silverberg who were mentioned on this blog because they had contributed to Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds, edited by Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois.

I will read the time travel anthology and comment either here or on the Logic of Time Travel blog or both. I expect, of course, to make comparisons with Anderson's major time travel canon to which I had thought of returning in any case.

Meanwhile, each installment of Anderson's major future history is like a window onto Technic Civilization. Any background detail of a particular story may be relevant to the History as a whole. For example, the fact that, in the very first Nicholas van Rijn story, the Borthudians had been armed by unscrupulous Technic traders showed that this aspect of the decline of the Polesotechnic League had already been evident at this early date and this in turn made me realize that the Rise of the League had occurred in a still earlier period that is not in fact covered by any of the stories in the series.

Brains II

"'...what's really to the point, the degree of brain activity more or less independent of the other nerve paths. That is, whether the animal is thinking.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 590.

Here is the philosophical mind-body problem in a nutshell. Someone is thinking. He is conscious of the subject-matter of his thoughts which could be anything, for example the novels of Poul Anderson. Someone else is observing the thinker, using scientific instruments. The scientific observer is conscious of detectable cerebral processes.

Thus, there is a single process of thinking. However, there are also two qualitatively distinct perspectives on this single process. My account of what I thought about Anderson's novels and a scientist's account of the neurological interactions detectable inside my brain seem to be accounts not only of different processes but even of qualitatively different kinds of processes.

There is a difference between the questions, "What did I think?" and "How did I think it?" However, the second question has two kinds of answers: certain neurons interacted and certain ideas interacted. Some terms like "data" bridge the gap but only partially. Sensory inputs, including, e.g., the sight of a printed page, are cerebrally processed and meanings are recognized. However, there remains a qualitative difference between the recognition of meaning, which we all experience whenever we read a familiar word, and a technologically detectable exchange of electrical or chemical impulses between neurons in a brain. I think that we have to say that the cerebral event causes the mental event.

Mental events involve or at least refer to consciousness - even though, paradoxically, there can be unconscious mental processes. "Meaning," "recognition" and "experience" assume consciousness whereas "electrical or chemical impulses" does not although the impulses seem to be the causes of consciousness. My best attempt to explain the emergence of consciousness is to suggest that naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was quantitatively transformed into conscious sensation.

"Conscious sensation" is tautologous because "sensation" is another of those words that assume or imply consciousness. However, I write "conscious sensation" in order to differentiate this psychological process from organismic sensitivity which is not necessarily conscious. Consciousness, as soon as it did exist, was naturally selected because pleasure and pain have survival value. "Psychological" means "of consciousness." Any attempt to define consciousness either assumes it or leaves it out. Thus, I think that it is impossible to write, "X is ---," then to fill in the blank in such a way that readers of the sentence say, "X is consciousness," unless the blank is filled by one or more synonyms of "consciousness."

Causes and effects are neither identical nor interchangeable. A quantitative difference between wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation causes a qualitative difference between colors as perceived by sighted organisms whose eyes are sensitive to those particular wavelengths. For a longer discussion of "Minds and Brains," see here.

When Did Problems Start In The Polesotechnic League?

See here.

Very approximately:

the Polesotechnic League was founded some time in the twenty third century;
the Council of Hiawatha was held at the end of that century;
the Mirkheim crisis was a hundred years later, when Nicholas van Rijn was eighty;
the first van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," is set perhaps forty years earlier? - although, in that story, van Rijn thinks of himself as "...aging..." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 147);
thus, "Margin of Profit" is set perhaps a hundred years after the founding of the League?

Five major problems in the League were:

(i) cartels;
(ii) oppression of primitive races;
(iii) the plight of races lacking the capital to enter Technic civilization;
(iv) Merseian resentment of that civilization;
(v) unscrupulous traders arming backward races.

(i)-(iv) were well developed by the time of the Mirkheim crisis but (v) was already happening in "Margin of Profit." I think of the first nine installments of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization as "the Rise of the Polesotechnic League" and the second nine as its Decline. The "Rise" is so called because it includes three pre-League stories, one story about Adzel as a student, one about Falkayn as an apprentice, another about Falkayn as a journeyman and two about van Rijn maybe "aging" but not yet as old as in Mirkheim!

However, the real Rise period was before the Council of Hiawatha, thus before van Rijn's birth, and unfortunately, there are no stories set in that period.

Brains

"'Suppose they got brains in their bellies...'
"'...that's hardly believable. Neural paths would get too long...Every animal I know of, if it has a central nervous system at all, keeps the brain close to the principal sense organs: which are usually located in the head.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 582.

If there is a head, of course. Are there animals, mobile organisms, without central nervous systems? Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers have a brain protected within the body with no head but an eye and a mouth/hand at the end of each neck/arm.

In one of Niven's Draco Tavern stories, a dialogue goes something like: "Do you have a central nervous system? Is it at the top?"

Science fiction writers need to be very imaginative about the shapes of alien bodies. See here.

Space Races

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, Terrestrials were the first race to develop the hyperdrive in their immediate volume of space. This single discovery in the Solar System generated several interstellar realms: Terran, Merseian, Ythrian, Gorrazanian. However, the hyperdrive had also been independently discovered nearby:

"It may be a nonhuman craft... Our intelligence reports, interrogation of prisoners, evaluation of explorers' observations, and so on, all indicate that three or four different species in this region possess the hyperdrive."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 567.

Contact with technologically advanced civilizations is so frequent that Nicholas van Rijn can issue the order:

"'Get them on the telecom and develop a common language. Fast!'" (p. 569)

Although he is no scientist - no one can do everything -, van Rijn must of necessity be better acquainted with scientific principles and discoveries than any of his capitalist predecessors. Thus, when he is told that the Cainites:

"'...don't sweat...There's a complicated system of exo- and endothermic reactions in the blood to regulate temperature.'"
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 284.

- van Rijn is able to reply:

"'Sweating is not so common on cold terrestroids...Always you find analogs to something you met before, if you look long enough. Evolution makes parallels.'" (ibid.)

It is to be hoped that planetary environments supporting complex organisms are common enough that generalizations like this will be made. However, I expect that we will have to look a very long time to find parallels. On the other hand, if two species with interstellar capacity both want to communicate, then hopefully a common language will indeed be developed quickly.

I have just heard a radio documentary about the world economy:

globalization;
technological innovation;
emergence of China and India;
increasing extremes of wealth and poverty.

It sounds like the Polesotechnic League.

Hiding Place

In Poul Anderson's "Hiding Place," the viewpoint character, Captain Bahadur Torrance, is a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacemen whereas, in Anderson's earlier story, "Margin of Profit" (see here), Captain Rafael Torrens was a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacefarers. However, no doubt "spaceman," "spacefarer" and "astronaut" are interchangeable English translations of a comparable Anglic word (or words). By the time of the Mirkheim crisis, the Brotherhood will have been merged or amalgamated into the United Technicians.

Torrance wears "...the Ship-and-Sunburst of the Polesotechnic League." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 558) I do not have a relevant passage to hand right now but it sounds as if the Terran Empire is going to adopt the symbol of the League?

Torrance is from Ramanujan as, in a later period, is Dominic Flandry's friend, Chunderban Desai. Ramanujan is one of the planetary battlefields in the Solar Commonwealth's first civil war. Torrance is captain of Nicholas van Rijn (see here and here)'s space yacht, the Hebe G.B. The next few posts might focus on some aspects of their singular journey which has already been partly discussed here and here.

For example, in the Technic History version of hyperspace, astronauts attached to the hull of a ship are enclosed in its force-field and therefore are carried along through hyperspace although:

"Without compensating electronic viewscreens, the sky was weirdly distorted by aberration and Doppler effect, as if the men were already dead and beating through the other existence toward Judgment." (p. 571)

If there is a postmortem Judgment (which I doubt), then we are beating toward it right now, even before entering "...the other existence..." I think that Anderson's words imply this. He writes "...as if..." (this is hard sf) but leaves us with the image of men under a strange sky bound for their final Judgment. To read a fantasy in which a magician entering the City of Dis comments that he and his colleagues have been making this journey all their lives, see James Blish's The Day After Judgment.