Parallel Lives in Different Worlds

Speaking of living one's life over again, have I mentioned Jo Walton's novel MY REAL CHILDREN before? Having reread it last week, I'm impressed anew by its unusual approach to alternate history, possibly unique. At least, I don't remember encountering anything else like it. The British protagonist's personal timeline splits into two at the end of her Oxford education, and the story follows both of her lives in two separate worlds from that point in early adulthood to her old age.

The prologue introduces the elderly Patricia in a nursing home. As the nurses often note on her chart, she's Very Confused. She remembers her life as Tricia, in which she accepted Mark's proposal at the crucial point of divergence, but also her life as Pat, in which she refused him. Did she have four children plus multiple miscarriages and stillbirths, in an emotionallly abusive marriage from which she escaped in middle age, or three children in a fulfilled, mostly happy life with love, travel, and success as a writer? After the prologue, chapters alternate episodes from the timelines of Tricia and Pat, each helpfully labeled with the years covered in that chapter.

Interestingly, neither of her worlds corresponds to the history we know. Therefore, the reader can feel no temptation to prefer either timeline as "real." Both alternate Earths are more scientifically and technologically advanced than ours, having colonies on the Moon by the 1990s, at the end of Patricia's life. In one history, there's a multi-national research station; in the other, two mutually hostile lunar military bases confront each other. In the latter world, President Kennedy died from an assassin's bomb; in the former, he served out his term and declined to run for reelection in 1964. In one history, international chaos, local wars with a constant threat of nuclear holocaust, and repressive political systems even in advanced Western nations plague the world. The other timeline, although of course not perfect, enjoys prosperity, widespread freedom, international cooperation, and relative peace.

In the novel's most intriguing twist, Pat leads her fulfilling life in the dystopian world, while Tricia suffers through her miserable marriage in the much better world. Suppose she could relive the decisive conversation with Mark and make one timeline definitively real. Which would she pick? Ordinarily, I snarl in frustration at novels that leave the reader hanging at the end. This book's "Lady or the Tiger?" conclusion, however, strikes me as perfect. What alternative does Patricia choose? What SHOULD she choose? Leaving that question open makes the ideal culmination for this thought-provoking narrative.

Margaret L. Carter

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

Do-Overs

A vintage short story that was filmed as a TWILIGHT ZONE episode features an elderly millionaire who wants to relive his life, with his memories intact, for the thrill of making his fortune all over again. He stikes a deal with a demon and is duly returned to his home town in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, the past turns out to be less golden than he imagined, and, most important, he forgets to specify having his youth restored. Therefore, he suffers a heart attack and dies for lack of modern medicine. As he faces death, the demon taunts him about his request that he keep his memories: "Can we help it if your memory is lousy?"

The hypothetical question often arises, "Would you live your life over again, knowing what you know now?" Occasionally pondering that fantasy, I definitely would not accept a do-over from childhood or even my early teens. Go through all that again, with the added horror of being treated like a dependent child while having the mind and memories of an adult in my seventies? No, thanks! In the movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, a middle-aged woman reverts to her high-school self with her memories intact, faced with the decision of whether or not to repeat the choices that led to marrying her present-day husband, from whom she's currently separated. After reliving part of her senior year (spoiler), she reawakens to her reasons for loving her husband and, upon returning to the present, decides to stay with him.

Would I repeat my life starting from, say, my marriage at the age of eighteen? In T. Kingfisher's latest horror novel, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES, the narrator returns to her grandmother's house (now her mother's), where she lived for part of her childhood and teens. Upon waking up in her old bedroom on the first morning, she experiences a disorienting moment of terror that her entire life since the age of ten has been a dream, and she'll be condemned to repeating high school, college, and graduate school—and writing her PhD dissertation all over again. I can identify with that nightmare. I'm not sure I'd have the stamina to struggle through all my university courses and the rewriting of my dissertation from scratch, although I might perform better in my advancement-to-candidacy oral exam with the memory of my previous blunders. On the other hand, I would have a fair chance to avoid most if not all of the worst mistakes and wrongdoings of my first lifetime. And yet, knowing I'd have to relive some painful events that are outside my control, would I want to face them again?

A further concern: If I repeated my life from my wedding day on, we might end up without all the children we've had in this timeline. Alternate history novels often include real people from the primary world but in different roles from the ones they played in our version of history. Although that's an entertaining trope I enjoy reading, in fact it's a vanishingly remote possiblity. A minor change in the timing of a sexual act could more likely than not result in the conception of a different individual. A difference of a month would, of course, definitely do so. Given a point of departure in the 19th century—say, the familiar scenario of the South winning the Civil War—virtually none of the people alive today, at least in this country, would ever have been conceived. On a lesser scale, the same result would happen in a family after a point of departure in one couple's married life. In Jo Walton's novel MY REAL CHILDREN, the protagonist faces a moment of decision in early adulthood when she decides whether or not to marry the man whom she's been dating. That decision splits her life from then on into two separate timelines, one in which they marry and one where they don't. In her final years, she remembers both lifetimes and families she's had. One interesting aspect of this novel, by the way, is that neither timeline is our own history. One alternate world turns out worse, the other better; in a further intriguing twist, the protagonist's personal life is happier in the dystopic world than in the optimistic one.

So if a genie offers to grant me a wish to re-do my adult life, I think I'll turn it down. That scenario would hold too many risky variables.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alternate Timelines

One of my favorite authors, S. M. Stirling, recently launched a new alternate-history series with BLACK CHAMBER, published in July of this year. His website has begun displaying sample chapters from the first sequel, due in spring of 2019. Reading them started me thinking about the effects small or large changes might have on the historical timeline. The POD (point of departure) for the Black Chamber universe—the moment when it diverges from our reality—occurs in 1912, when President Taft dies prematurely and Theodore Roosevelt returns to the White House (instead of Woodrow Wilson becoming President). With no constitutional term limits for the presidency at that time, Roosevelt has free rein to shape the nation according to his principles. Not only the circumstances of U.S. involvement in World War I but the direction of the entire twentieth century will change. The main story line of the novel begins in 1916.

If you could go back in time and alter the twentieth century for the better, what single action would you take? Killing Hitler before he can do any damage immediately springs to mind, of course. However, aside from the ethical problem of murdering a person who hasn't yet committed evil deeds, killing Hitler never works. TV Tropes even has a page on this topic, "Hitler's time-travel exemption." One example: In an episode of the later incarnation of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, a time traveler from the future installs herself as a servant in the household of Hitler's parents. She finally manages to kill baby Adolf along with herself. The nursery maid, however, is so terrified of Herr Hitler's probable reaction to the loss of his son that she substitutes a look-alike infant taken from a beggar woman. So history still plays out with an Adolf Hitler, just not the original one. Nonviolent ways of eliminating Hitler might work, such as preventing his parents from meeting, kidnapping the baby and having him adopted by a nice English couple, or giving young Adolf a scholarship to art school. Would forestalling his political career actually prevent the war, though? Some authors speculate that, given the conditions of post-World-War-I Europe, the Nazi Party would come to power anyway with a different, possibly worse tyrant in charge.

Arguably, the most productive single thing you could do to avert the catastrophic events of the twentieth century would be to go to Sarajevo in 1914 and arrange for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car to be re-routed so the assassin would never have a chance to shoot him. But would the erasure of the assassination definitely prevent the Great War? The nations of Europe, with their weapons development and entangled alliances, had been building toward that conflict for decades. It's not unlikely that some other spark would have set off the conflagration anyway. Various speculative fiction authors disagree about the ease of altering the timeline. Do we embrace the "Great Man" theory, where the removal of one person makes all the difference? Or do we lean toward Heinlein's position that "when it's time for railroads, people will railroad"? In Stephen King's novel about a time traveler who tries to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, saving Kennedy creates a major disruption in the flow of history, but not for the better.

Jo Walton's fascinating novel MY REAL CHILDREN takes a unique approach to the theme. The protagonist, as an old woman in a nursing home, remembers two different lives in two worlds (neither of them our own timeline). In one, the more prosperous and peaceful version of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she suffers through an unhappy marriage. In the other timeline, which verges on dystopia, she has a generally happy life. If she has the power to make one of them definitively "real," which should she choose?

In most of Heinlein's time-travel fiction, he reveals that no change actually occurs, because the traveler's actions simply bring about what was destined to happen anyway. The past as we know it already includes whatever input we contribute—as in, for instance, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER. Some other writers postulate that history inevitably tries to repair itself when "damaged." Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series illustrates the elasticity of the timeline. Claire (a visitor to the eighteenth century from the twentieth) and her husband Jamie can make small changes, but all their attempts to prevent or mitigate Bonnie Prince Charlie's disastrous 1745 campaign fail. The ultimate example of this principle may be "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester. The time traveler assassinates a series of successively more important personages without ever managing to make a permanent mark on the past.

The opposite approach postulates that the slightest change will have vast consequences—the "butterfly effect." Appropriately, Ray Bradbury provided the classic example of this theory in "A Sound of Thunder," when a member of a tourist group traveling to the age of the dinosaurs alters his own future by accidentally killing a butterfly. The trouble with this story, alas, is that if a small change that far back could shift the entire direction of history, by the traveler's present day the alterations would have snowballed to such an extent that his native time would become unrecognizable, not just subtly distorted toward a dystopian outcome. On the same principle, consider the many alternate-history stories whose authors introduce famous people from the past in different roles from their real-life ones. Actually, depending on how far back the POD occurs, random alterations in meetings, matings, and conceptions would ensure that most if not all of those people would never be born. But what fun for writers and readers would that be?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

ChessieCon 2018

As we do every year at Thanksgiving, my husband, our youngest son, and I spent the weekend at ChessieCon (formerly Darkover), just north of Baltimore. Guest of Honor was Jo Walton, author of FARTHING, TOOTH AND CLAW, AMONG OTHERS, MY REAL CHILDREN, a trilogy in which Athena tries to create Plato's Just City as envisioned in the REPUBLIC, and other great books. Walton read a chapter involving the exorcism of demons from her forthcoming novel LENT. On the basis of that selection, I'm looking forward to the book.

At the Broad Universe rapid-fire reading, I read a short scene from my humorous ghost story "Haunted Book Nook," recently published in the new anthology SWORD AND SORCERESS 33. Les (my husband) appeared on two panels, on military SF versus the real-life military and on the advantages of writing a series versus stand-alone books (including how to handle a stand-alone piece in an ongoing series). I led a discussion session on STEVEN UNIVERSE. Although the group was small, the conversation was passionate, and someone brought doughnuts. If you're not familiar with this animated series about a half-human boy and his guardians, the Crystal Gems (alien life-forms who are literally sentient gemstones, their humanoid bodies being essentially solid holograms), do check it out. At first, it looks like a typical children's cartoon, but as the series progresses, layers upon layers of depth unfold. Next, I participated in a panel on "Good Art, Problematic Artist," a fraught topic with much potential for conflict. Fortunately, we had an excellent moderator, and everyone who spoke (both panel and audience) addressed the subject with intelligence and sensitivity. Whether a creator's abhorrent attitudes or evil actions can be separated from appreciation of his or her art depends on many situational factors and is a nuanced question each person must decide individually. Is the artist alive or dead, recent or classic? If alive, does he or she benefit from our consumption of the art? Do reprehensible attitudes or opinions make themselves visible in the work or not? How much should authors and other artists from previous eras get a pass on their prejudices for being "of their time"? Naturally, we mostly discussed writers, and, not surprisingly, H. P. Lovecraft came up. However, we did touch upon problematic performers, mainly Bill Cosby.

Les and I took part in the group signing on Saturday evening. We had some nice chats with people passing by and actually sold a few books. I like that system (as opposed to individual book signings) because we get to see what other writers have to offer, and with all of us in one place at the same time, we lesser-known folks have the advantage of being seen by readers who come to check out the higher-profile authors.

If we didn't know better, we might think the hotel was getting tired of us, judging by the conditions this year. One elevator remained out of order the whole time. More critically, because of renovations in progress the heat didn't work right. The main downstairs corridor, the restrooms, and most of the meeting spaces didn't have any. Fortunately, the chill didn't extend to the guest rooms. On the plus side, it did seem that the speed of service in the dining room had marginally improved. We noticed evidence of under-staffing, though. Con attendance seemed to be down, judging from the low numbers of people in many sessions. Nevertheless, discussions were lively. The former members of Clam Chowder sang highlights from their repertoire, as usual, and the Saturday evening concert featured a pagan-inspired group called Kiva. From what I watched of their performance, I especially liked their version of the Yuletide folk song "Soul Cake." The musical guest of honor was filk musician Mary Crowley.

Happily, the ChessieCon tradition will continue next year. The Guest of Honor will be Charlie Jane Anders. You can read about the con here:

ChessieCon

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt