Changing the Past

I've recently finished the latest book by S. M. Stirling (best known for alternate history SF), a time-travel adventure, TO TURN THE TIDE, first volume in a new series. Partially inspired by L. Sprague DeCamp’s vintage novel LEST DARKNESS FALL (but Stirling's book is better), TO TURN THE TIDE transports a Harvard professor of history and four graduate students to central Europe in 165 A.D., era of the Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius. They know they've made a one-way trip, since the time machine is stationary instead of a vehicle like the one in H. G. Wells's classic, so they decide to use the literal ton of supplies sent with them as planned by the inventor of the machine (who accidentally fails to come along as he'd meant to). They set out to change history for the better, beginning with simple improvements, e.g, sterile medical procedures and wheelebarrows, and building on their early successes. In this first installment of the series, their innovations consist of “Type A” changes, things the inhabitants of that era and locale can implement with available tools and materials once they’re given the concepts. “Type B” developments, those that require inventing the tools to make the tools to construct the new things, will come later.

In fiction, altering the past in an attempt to improve the future produces a wide range of effects. At one extreme, we have Ray Bradbury's story of a tiny, accidental change with disastrous results, when a visitor to the age of dinosaurs crushes a butterfly, thereby generating a future worse than the one he originally came from (yet unrealistically similar, but, then, it's a short story with no real pretense of scientific rigor). At the other extreme, some of Heinlein's fiction, notably THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, postulates that any alteration you make in the past isn't a real change at all. You're just doing whatever you did in the first place but weren't aware of in hindsight until after you went back and did it. (Is your head spinning yet?) Likewise, in one of the Harry Potter books, the actions of Harry and Hermione when using the time turner simply cause things to happen just as they had all along, previously unknown to the characters. In Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series, Claire (the traveler from the 20th century to the mid-18th) and Jamie strive to prevent the 1745 Jacobite rising and Bonnie Prince Charlie's invasion of Scotland. Although not completely powerless, they find their major goals unattainable. After the war unfolds on schedule, culminating in the catastrophic battle of Culloden despite their strenuous efforts to influence the course of events, they realize they can make only minor changes. It's as if the flow of time resists any significant alterations.

Time travel seems to work similarly in Connie Willis's series about mid-21st-century historians from Oxford. The transporting device can't send them anywhere close to a major historical event. If they deliberately or inadvertently aim for a critical nexus point, the traveler is simply bounced to a different nearby location. Thus the timeline corrects itself, smoothing out any ripples the characters create. Or so they believe -- this postulate is tested in the two-volume World War II epic BLACKOUT / ALL CLEAR, in which the historians fear they may have triggered disastrous changes in the original history.

The major theoretical issue with trying to improve the future -- one's own present -- by altering the past is what happens if you succeed. You would have had no reason to go into the past in the first place, and therefore you couldn't have peformed the actions that result / resulted / will or would result in achieving your goal. Many time-travel authors simply ignore this paradox. Some stories work on the premise that the travelers exist in a sort of bubble, in which only they remember both the original timeline and the new one, while everybody else is oblivious that anything has changed. The most logical solution is the outcome Stirling implies: The paradox makes it impossible to reshape one's own original history. Instead, the chrononaut's actions generate a new timeline branching off from the point of intervention. The protagonist of TO TURN THE TIDE can never find out whether that's what happens in the history he and his friends are creating, but the question is moot anyway. In the future they left, every person and thing they knew and loved has almost certainly been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Their hope is to spawn a new future without that apocalyptic destruction, even though they'll never know whether they've succeeded.

Although the "branching timelines" model makes the most rigorous sense, I do enjoy stories in which the protagonist achieves positive change by tweaking the past and returns home to enjoy the fruits of his or her efforts.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Time Travel as a Curse

If you've read Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, you know it's a highly unusual approach to time travel. In fact, I haven't come across any other science-fiction or fantasy novel quite like it. Henry, the traveler, bounces through time uncontrollably and at random. Most often, he lands in moments related to his own life, but not always. Visiting points in the past and future in no particular order, he arrives at each destination disoriented, nauseated, and naked, for he doesn't take anything along on the temporal jaunts. Even tooth fillings, since they aren't technically part of his body, don't stay with him. He has multiple encounters with his wife, Clare, in the past (from his viewpoint on his timeline, after they're married) when she's between the ages of six and eighteen. On one visit, he tells her which dates he will appear on, and she writes them down. Later, when the two of them meet earlier in his timeline (for him at that age, the first time), she gives him the written list, which thereby becomes the source of his knowledge of their predicted meetings. So how does this list exist? As Clare says, it's a mysterious "Mobius" loop. Similarly, Henry appears to his younger self when child-Henry makes his first time leap, into a museum. Adult-Henry knows he'll need to teach child-Henry the rules of time travel because he remembers a friendly stranger doing that for him when he experienced his first leap.

HBO is airing a new series based on the book, starting last weekend. Judging from the first episode, it's going to follow the novel closely. The book's chapters have helpful headings that state the year and how old each character is on his or her timeline in that encounter. The TV program, likewise, has captions at the beginning of each scene to indicate the ages of Henry and Clare at that point. Otherwise, viewers could get hopelessly lost.

I've never encountered another story that portrays time travel as a disability rather than a superpower (although TV Tropes mentions a few). Henry has no way of knowing whether he'll bounce back to his point of origin within minutes or remain stranded for days or more. He has to steal to survive. He frequently gets beaten up, in addition to the hazards of bad weather and the risk of landing in the middle of a street or railroad track. Small wonder that, at the age of twenty, the first occasion in his timeline when he meets Clare, he's a bit of a self-centered jerk. It takes her love, reinforced by her knowledge of the man he will become, to transform him. One of the saddest features of the novel consists of the multiple miscarriages Clare suffers because her unborn babies inherit Henry's mutant gene and spontaneously time-leap out of her womb. Another inevitable source of sorrow for Henry is knowing when he'll die and keeping that information a secret from her.

Unlike some fictional chrononauts, Henry has no problem being in the same time slot more than once. He can and often does meet other versions of himself. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTING, the Germans who come forward from World War II into the present can't jump into a moment where they already exist, a restriction that plays a critical part in the novel's climax. Connie Willis's Oxford-based time travelers (in DOOMSDAY BOOK, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, etc.) have the same limitation. Whatever force controls the space-time continuum won't allow them to overlap themselves, just as it prevents them from getting too close to any critical historical events they might alter. For Henry, on the other hand, there's no worry about altering the past. Whatever he does in any moment he travels to is simply what he has already done. As in Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, whose protagonist also has the ability to have two of himself in the same spatio-temporal location, anything you "change" in another time period doesn't really change the outcome but causes it to happen the way it was/is supposed to all along. While THE DOOR INTO SUMMER ends happily, with the narrator using a time machine to bring about the optimal conclusion, Heinlein's "All You Zombies—", in which every major character is the same person, whose life endlessly loops upon itself, concludes with a cry of existential despair.

The more one thinks about it, the more this aspect of Henry's time travel seems like a reason for despair. If his life is locked into a preset pattern dependent on events he has already experienced, whether in the past or in the future, what happens to free will? Yet Niffenegger manages to conclude the story on a note of love and fulfillment rather than futility.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Hanging from a Cliff

How do you feel about cliffhanger endings in novels? I've just finished reading the second book in a thrilling, very inventive dark fantasy series. (I suspect it will be a trilogy, but that hasn't been announced as far as I know.) While the first novel ended with an intriguing hook for the continuation, this new one concludes with an outright cliffhanger in the final sentence. Now we have to wait a year for the resolution! That sort of thing bugs me a little, because devoted fans will read the next installment regardless, while the author risks annoying readers less deeply invested. On the other hand, in this particular case it's hard to see how the story could have ended without leaving the audience in suspense. I can't go into details, of course, because of spoilers.

A classic example in pulp SF comes from one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' early John Carter adventures, THE GODS OF MARS. On the last page, Princess Dejah Thoris is trapped with a couple of other people in a revolving chamber designed to open only once a year. The villain is preparing to kill her as the hero watches the tableau vanish into the depths of the temple. Fortunately for me, I read that series many decades after its publication, so all I had to do was find the next volume on my grandfather's bookshelves.

I have a vivid memory of my frustration with THE MIRROR OF HER DREAMS, by Stephen R. Donaldson. In fact, after all these years I don't recall much else about it, not even what the cliffhanger ending consisted of. I do remember that by the time the sequel, A MAN RIDES THROUGH, became available, I'd forgotten so much about the first novel that I no longer felt any enthusiasm for returning to the story.

It was a jarring shock when I read BLACKOUT, Connie Willis's time-travel novel about England in World War II, and reached the last page to discover that it just—stopped. I felt like yelling, "Where's the rest of it?" That sharp break wasn't the author's fault, though. She'd written the duology of BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR as a single work, but it turned out much too long for one volume, so the publisher released it as two books. Happily, they made us wait only a few months for the second half, not a whole year.

Ideally, a series that includes a book with what amounts to an abrupt break in the middle of the story should have its installments released in quick succession over a span of a few months. I realize that's not always feasible with either the author's or the publisher's schedule, though. But I still think the typical traditional publishing gap of a year between books is more apt to discourage than to intrigue a casual reader (as opposed to a devoted fan).

A similar trick that does exasperate me in the extreme is ending a TV season on a cliffhanger, especially if renewal isn't definite, but even if it is. That device strikes me as disrespectful to the established audience and unlikely to attract new viewers. As far as the latter are concerned, how many people will start watching a new season of a long-running series if they're aware they don't have the necessary backstory to understand what's going on? Veteran fans, on the other hand, will tune in to the next season anyway without that kind of irritating manipulation.

As a reader and author, my advice would be that if you're going to end a novel on a cliffhanger, be very careful. One would hope for at least a partial resolution—as the book mentioned at the beginning of this post does in fact offer—so readers won't feel their trust has been abused.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Book-Love in a Time of Cholera

That's the title of Brian Attebery's introduction to the latest issue of the JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS. He discusses how a reader's experience of literature changes under the influence of real-life circumstances, offering a different angle on the topic of my previous post. Attebery remarks that reading in the shadow of COVID-19 feels "rather like getting messages from an alternate timeline in which people still. . . count on health, employment, and a predictable future." He reminds us that whenever we reread a text, in a sense we're reading a different book, because "works of literature are never merely or entirely themselves" but instead "products of an interaction between text and reader."

The pandemic has inevitably brought Stephen King's THE STAND to the forefront of many readers' minds. Someone on a list I subscribe to recently said of COVID-19, "This isn't Captain Trips." All SF and horror fans would instantly recognize that allusion. Even though King's novel is decades old, current events give it fresh resonance and meaning. Some readers may find a similar relevance in Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK, in which the heroine time-travels from mid-twenty-first century Oxford to the time of the Black Death in fourteenth-century England. Although she gets stranded in an alien era, surrounded by the ravages of the plague, she and the reader know the hope represented by the distant future from which she comes. Even the worst disasters don't last forever.

Paul Tremblay's SURVIVOR SONG, published in July of this year, seems eerily appropriate to the current crisis. Given the lead times in traditional publishing, however, it must have been written well before the pandemic became known. Here's the first paragraph of the novel's summary on Amazon:

"In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a terrifyingly short incubation period of an hour or less. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Hospitals are inundated with the sick and dying, and hysteria has taken hold. To try to limit its spread, the commonwealth is under quarantine and curfew. But society is breaking down and the government's emergency protocols are faltering."

The story maintains a tight focus on a small group of characters trying to get one of them, a pregnant woman in labor, to a hospital that has room for her to give birth. Along the way, we witness the near-total breakdown of social norms surrounding islands of refuge, such as hospitals and clinics, where people struggle frantically to provide aid in the midst of chaos. In an odd way, this story offers the comfort—like DOOMSDAY BOOK—that we aren't anywhere nearly so bad off as THAT. Also, the epilogue, set years later, portrays a society that has completely recovered. Tremblay's virus, unlike COVID-19, doesn't produce a "slow catastrophe." Because of the violent symptoms and short incubation time, its epidemic flares up and burns out quickly.

As Attebery's essay points out, events such as the present crisis may also evoke new meanings from fictional works that seem on the surface to have only a tangential resemblance to real-life circumstances (e.g., stories of isolation).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Holiday Stories of Connie Willis

If you feel in the mood for winter-holiday-themed stories, pick up A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS (2017), by Connie Willis. This volume is an expansion of her earlier collection MIRACLE AND OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES (1999). The twelve selections include five new pieces. Since three of them are longish, in my opinion they're worth buying the newer book for even if you've read the earlier one. Humor abounds, and in the manner of most good humor, the incidents are serious to the characters even though funny to the reader. In the majority of the stories, you can count on satisfying but not sappy endings.

My favorite pieces are two novellas that weren't in the old edition: Thousands of radio re-playings of multiple covers of "White Christmas," augmented by the stubborn insistence of a prototypical Bridezilla that she MUST have snow for her Christmas Eve wedding, spawn a worldwide blizzard in "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know." Snow even falls in locations that have never seen it before in recorded history. My other favorite novella in the book, "All Seated on the Ground," features the narrator's experience on a committee tasked with a first contact project. Aliens have landed. The extraterrestrial visitors don't behave hostilely, but they don't speak or otherwise give any indication of their purpose in coming to Earth. Until they're taken to a mall, where they hear Christmas carols—and respond to the line "All seated on the ground" by suiting their actions to the lyrics. Only the narrator, with the help of a high-school choir director, notices this reaction and manages to decipher its meaning. Hilarious, but as in all Willis's work, the humor arises from characters and situations portrayed with her usual dry, incisive wit, not mere one-liners.

Some other highlights: In "All About Emily," a cynical veteran Broadway actress reluctantly befriends a prototype android who has developed a burning ambition to become a Rockette. The protagonist of the bittersweet "Epiphany," a minister weighed down by depression in the bleak post-holiday atmosphere of January, responds to an enigmatic sense of a call by abandoning his routine duties and taking to the snow-covered highways in search of—what? The Second Coming? The narrator of "Newsletter" becomes convinced that aliens have invaded because everybody is acting too nice in the midst of the pre-Christmas rush. During the bustle of a church Nativity play rehearsal, the protagonist of "Inn" tries to cope with a lost, obviously poor young man and his pregnant wife, who don't speak either English or Spanish. You know where this one is going. The contrasts between the idealized portraits in the Bible illustrations and the bedraggled, bewildered couple and between the spirit of good will toward all and the minister's concern about homeless people stealing the Communion silver lend this moving story the sharp edge we'd expect from Willis.

A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS includes an introduction by the author about the challenges of writing Christmas stories, plus appendices listing her personal recommendations for Christmas-centered fiction and poetry, movies, and TV episodes.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Happy New Year

2017 is almost upon us (while I've barely gotten used to writing 2016, a symptom of growing old, no doubt). Do you make New Year's resolutions? As I've probably mentioned before, I gave up that concept a long time ago. I think more in terms of goals, plans, and hopes. Some goals for 2017 include: finishing the paper I have to deliver at a conference in March (a task I can't avoid unless I want to show up at the session with a rough draft!); submitting stories to two annual anthologies in which I've occasionally been included in past years; and completing a short novel I started several months ago but haven't worked on lately because of holiday prep, proofreading a re-released novel, and typing up my usual annual vampire fiction bibliography update.

The current issue of RWR (the Romance Writers of America members' magazine) includes an article about planning. It highlights the virtues of paper planners and discusses some advantages of mapping out long-term and short-term plans on paper instead of just relying on an electronic schedule. Brain research has shown that writing by hand is uniquely helpful in making material "stick" in the mind. While I haven't tried a planner, I do like making tangible lists. The older I get, the more I need the confidence of having things written down in order to remember them.

Along with some good things—my husband and I celebrated our 50th anniversary in September, with all our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren present, along with some other relatives and friends—2016 also brought some negative events for me. My two principal publishers closed this year, leaving most of my works "orphaned." Another publisher is picking up the books from Amber Quill, but of course it will take a while before everything becomes available again. I'm still considering what to do with the books and stories from the other closing publisher, so another project will be self-publishing a few of those pieces. Recently we've had illness and other trouble in our extended family. In the public sphere, we've witnessed the loss of iconic figures such as Leonard Cohen, John Glenn, and Carrie Fisher. And then there's the American presidential election, a source of "comfort and joy" to almost 50 percent of our population, but a cause of disappointment and anxiety for me.

On Christmas Eve our priest preached on Hope—as distinct from optimism, a feeling of confidence (whether substantiated or not) that things are inevitably getting better. Looking around at the world, we see many factors to undermine optimism. As one of my favorite carols, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," laments, "Hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on Earth, good will to men." All the more reason to practice the cardinal virtue of Hope.

Loosely quoting Colonel Potter from a New Year's episode of MASH, "Here's to the new year. May she be a durn sight better than the last one."

By the way, on the subject of the holiday season, which doesn't officially end until January 6 (Epiphany), I've just finished rereading Connie Willis's collection MIRACLE AND OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES, as well as her two long stories not in that volume, "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" (the cumulative effect of all those thousands of playings of "White Christmas" generates an unprecedented worldwide weather anomaly) and "All Seated on the Ground" (aliens land, and nobody can figure out what they want until they hear Christmas carols at a mall). Willis's keen wit infuses all the stories with her unique brand of humor-in-seriousness. Highly recommended!

Wishing happiness to all in 2017!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt