July bukes

[realthog]

I haven't finished writing up my notes the books read this month, and it'll be some days before I can do so. I don't know if I'll hold my notes on the five books concerned (four nonfictioners, one truly excellent novel) over until next month or do a mid-month update: I suspect this is a matter of supreme indifference to all.

There's lots, so it's



The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire (2008) by Matt Taibbi

The case that Taibbi makes in this book is that our national politicians have, quite deliberately and in their own self-interest, corrupted the process of government to such an extent that, not only has it lost any characteristics of a representative democracy responsive to the needs of the people, it can -- more importantly in his and our context -- no longer be described using the tools of rationality. Small wonder, then, that the response of many of the effectively disenfranchised population is to resort to equal irrationality. When the George W. Bush aide famously said that, in effect, we make our own reality now, he was -- in the unwitting fashion of the terminally stupid -- opening the floodgates for anyone to make their own reality. And countless US citizens took him at his word and did exactly that.

Taibbi thus spends about half his time observing the craziness being perpetrated by politicians of all stripes as they go through the motions -- if they bother even doing that -- of democratic government (Rep. Joe Barton gets plenty of attention as exemplar of the completely bought-out Congresscritter who no longer even troubles to produce convincing lies as to his status and purposes), and about the other half reporting on his successful infiltration of the fundamentalist Cornerstone Church in Texas, part of the John Hagee Ministries; there were times when I was hard-pressed to know if a particular passage was describing Barton or Hagee. It was largely because of his experiences among the Fundies that Taibbi developed the thesis noted above. For a man of Taibbi's fearsome reputation and savage ability with words, he is surprisingly sympathetic toward the friends he made among the devout; although they may on occasion subscribe to philosophies that are hateful, vicious and bigoted, in reality they are far more victim than aggressor, having been fed with an indoctrinating concentration of misinformation and bogus reasoning, and having taken a decision to use obedience to authority rather than rational thinking as their cognitive modus operandi. It is pointless even thinking to explain to such people that what they are being told about matters like climate change, the invasion of Iraq and evolution is hogwash, because if you put the evidence plain-as-day in front of them you would simply be offering, in terms of the cognitive process they've chosen to adopt, an irrelevance: if Pastor Hagee has said one thing this means God has said it, so the mere truth is impotent.

Taibbi also points out the importance of self-interest among the faithful. He recounts how, on occasion, Hagee or a catspaw try to get across the church's political message du jour, that Israel must be supported and Iran detested; each time the flock applaud politely but without conviction, clearly wanting to get back to the good stuff about personal damnation, cursing, self-bolstering hatred of liberals or gays, individual salvation, and the notion that God is taking a very special personal interest in YOU.

It would be equally pointless, Taibbi indicates, to try to persuade any of the Cornerstone Church devoted that the philosophy they've been told is Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Christ as recorded in the Gospels:

From here Hagee went into a long spiel about the difference between the Christ of the Gospels and the Christ of Revelation. This is an important point for people who are not fundamentalist Christians and want to understand them. The Gospels Christ is basically a long-haired touchy-feely hippie who goes around being nice to people. The Christ of Revelations is built like The Rock and roams the universe braining sinners with lead pipes. Fundamentalists clearly prefer the Revelation Christ. (p136)

It doesn't take much guesswork to realize that The Great Derangement is often extraordinarily funny, yet often astonishingly depressing; unless there's some kind of root-and-branch re-evaluation, and pretty goddam soon, our distance up the fabled creek is likely to be too great for any chance of return. And, writing as he was in the early days of the 2008 electoral cycle with the primaries still underway, Taibbi shows remarkably prescience, as for example about the famed hopy-changey Democratic Revolution changing in fact very little, like all the other changes of government there've been in the past three decades or more: even the few scraps that have been cast down to us from the masters' table, like healthcare reform, have been so adulterated by special interests operating among corrupt lawmakers as to be only slightly better than worthless.

Excellent.


The Legion of Time (1938/1961) by Jack Williamson

University student Denny Lanning is startled out of his daily round by the appearance before him of a beautiful young woman, Lethonee -- or, at least, a projection thereof -- who pleads with him that he in some ill defined way preserve the existence of her far-future civilization, Jonbar, rather than that of the wicked tyrannical warrior queen Sorainya. Denny promises to do his best, although his resolve falters when he encounters Sorainya (again in projection), whose crimson chainmail garb cannot fully disguise her "womanly curves"; his lust cools when he realizes she's trying to get him eaten by a shark.

Years pass, and in due course Denny, fighting against the Japanese in China, gets killed . . . only to be revived aboard the the timeship, the Chronion, that has been built by his old college buddy and genius physicist Wil McLan. But how McLan has changed! He fell for Sorainya's lures and spent a decade in her torture chambers; now he is a broken old man, although the spirit within him still burns bright. A figure vaguely reminiscent of Verne's Robur the Conqueror, McLan is mustering a sort of temporal Dirty Dozen to fight against Sorainya and her vile minions such that her reality never comes into existence, but Lethonee's does. The men he gathers, each snatched out of their timestream in the moments before death (I wonder if this is where John Varley got the idea for his 1977 story "Air Raid"?) are all from the early decades of the 20th century and all white, but they do display the kind of classy dialogue that literary novelists use to subtly indicate different ethnic origins:

"Gott im Himmel!" rumbled Emil Schorn at his side. "Der thing we must recover is in that castle, nein? It looks a verdammt stubborn nut to crack!" (pp102-3)

or

"My word!" gasped the British flyer, Courtney-Pharr. "When we meet that she-devil, she'll account for all this. Rather!" (p108)

or even

The little cockney, Duffy Clark, came presently with a covered tray.

"Cap'n McLan?" he drawled. "Why, 'e's lookin' inter 'is bloomin' gadgets, tryin' to find where that she-devil and 'er blarsted hants got 'old of that magnet."

"Any luck?" demanded Lanning.

"Not yet, sor." He shook a tousled head. "Wot with hall spayce and time to search for the spot. And the woman an' her blarsted 'igh priest is arfter us, sor, in a black ship full of the bloomin' hants!" (p134)

The speech of this chrononautical Dick Van Dyke is effin' slow and difficult to type, as I've just been discovering. This may be why he plays a fairly minor role in subsequent proceedings; and, when he does appear, retains a certain sprightly cockney taciturnity, the bleeder.

There's lots of derring-do as our heroes battle Sorainya's troops, who are giant gun-wielding ants. Matters aren't made easier by the fact that McLan's own early experiments with time had, as a by-product, the effect of increasing the probability of Sorainya's world's existence. In between all the fighting, it emerges that the crucial fork in time, the nexus determining whether Lethonee's or Sorainya's future would be reified, is when a boy in the Ozarks in 1921, John Barr, is wandering home one evening and picks up either a magnet or a pebble he spots lying by the way: if it's the magnet, it'll spark off an interest in science that in due course will affect the course of world events such that, centuries down the line, Jonbar will emerge. Sorainya's rotten lot, naturally, want him to pick up the pebble, so they filch the magnet. Can the Legion get it back in place before the boy reaches it? You bet they can.

There's quite a lot of differently good writing in this book, like

Lanning never laughed at superstition -- few fliers do. But his lean face smiled in the darkness. (p38)

and

"Please forgive my voice, Denny," his hoarse whisper came at last. "But once in the dungeon, when I was nearly dead with thirst and begging for anything to drink, Sorainya had molten metal poured down my throat." (p56)

and

"They found us on the ledge," breathed the voiceless man. (p131)

but there's also a lot that's very appealing, not just the central conceit, which was highly original in its day, of future realities warring to be reified. Here, for example, is Lethonee's explanation of the nature of time:

"The world is a long corridor, from the beginning of existence to the end. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.

"Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And always, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the dark." [. . .]

"You, Denny Lanning," she went on, "are destined, for a little time, to carry the lantern." (pp25-6)

Less evocative but conceptually perhaps more interesting is this bit of infodumping from McLan:

"There is a law of sequence and progression, I found at last, operating along a fifth rather than the temporal dimension, which imposes inexorable limits. It is that progression which actually creates reality out of possibility. And it is that higher law which prohibits all the trite absurdities met with in the old speculation about travel in time, such as the adventurer in time who returns to kill himself. The familiar logic of cause and effect is not abolished, but simply advanced to a higher dimension." (p65)

Literature The Legion of Time ain't, and I confess that all the action sequences are a bit of a homogenous blur in my memory already, but it's an astonishingly fast read and in places plenty of fun.


Project Pendulum (1987) by Robert Silverberg

For mankind's very first time travel experiment, the identical twins Eric (a paleontologist) and Sean (a physicist) are sent on a sort of oscillating path through time, spending short periods in eras that are each exponentially farther into the future or past than the last; thus, when Eric is at a point 5 x 10⁷ minutes into the future, Sean is at a point 5 x 10⁷ minutes into the past; next, Sean will be 5 x 10⁸ minutes into the past and Eric 5 x 10⁸ minutes into the future; and so on. Why this bananas need for temporal symmetry? It's never properly explained, but there's a stab at it:

Sean had brought home a pile of theoretical papers about it. Explaining how the phase-linkage coupling of a minute black hole, identical to those that are found all over interstellar space, and its mathematical opposite, a "white hole," created an incredibly powerful force that ripped right through the fabric of space-time -- and how that force could be contained and controlled, like a bomb in a basket, so that it could be used as a transit tube for making two-way movements in time. (p136)

Children, do not use phrases like "phase-linkage coupling of a minute black hole" when the teacher's around. It will only cause misunderstanding and get you into trouble.

But there are other dumbnesses in what it pains me to say is a pretty dumb book. The reason identical twins have been chosen for the experiment is that the two "packages" involved must be of exactly the same mass, right down to the milligram, to maintain the symmetry; otherwise everything will go bang. The very obvious fact seems to have occurred to Silverberg, after setting this up, that it's just as difficult to get the weights of adult identical twins exactly the same as it would be for any other two adults, and there's a certain amount of panicky fudging over the issue. It's lucky one of them didn't have to take a pee during their temporal adventure -- very lucky indeed, as arch-boffin experimenter Dr Ludwig explains in that typically dispassionate way scientists have:

He looked ready to explode. "The past is fluid! The future is yet unborn! Anything can be changed! Anything! Who knows what will befall the entire history of the world, if anything happens to you? Who knows?" (p159)

So don't so much as sneeze, d'you hear, or you'll change your body mass and screw up the symmetry and everything will go kerfluie and then you'll be sorry. Even a fart could be risky.

Another thing that irritated me was that, as the twins go on bigger and bigger hops through time, their arrival points move laterally across the face of the planet, yet they always emerge standing on solid ground -- even if that solid ground is at the bottom of a mesa or in a subterranean maze of tunnels. What stops them from emerging into a new epoch in midair? Or in the middle of the ocean? It's obviously a logical dilemma faced by many other time travel novels, and most of the time we don't think about it; but here, because of the unexplained (and in plot terms surely unnecessary) geographical slippage in the twins' arrival sites, it becomes particularly glaring.

And Eric meets aliens. They are a particularly daring imaginative creation:

They were cone-shaped beings eight or nine feet high, with brilliant orange eyes the size of platters and rubbery blue bodies. Clusters of scarlet tentacles dangled like nests of snakes from their shoulders. They walked in an odd gliding, lurching way on suction pads that make a peculiar slurping sound as they clamped down and pulled free again. (pp195-6)

It's difficult not to find oneself musing that, if the employment situation becomes grim in the aliens biz, this lot could always get jobs with The Muppet Show.

Silverberg has always been one of science fiction's more intelligent practitioners. It's difficult to conceive why he should be writing such stuff. Maybe it was a flat-fee commission and his heart wasn't in it. Or something.


Trips in Time: Nine Stories of Science Fiction (1977) edited by Robert Silverberg

A slender but by and large well chosen anthology of time travel stories. In a few instances, including the editor's own story, it was hard to understand why items had been selected for inclusion, but I was more than compensated by the imaginativeness displayed in some of the other choices. Probably about half the stories I'd read before, but so long ago that, with the exception of the Christopher Priest piece, it was like coming to them for the first time. Here are the stories I particularly enjoyed:

Christopher Priest's "An Infinite Summer" (1976) movingly tells of a young man isolated from the woman he loves by the actions of tourists from the far future who, for reasons inscrutable, "freeze" tableaux of incidents that catch their fancy, the hapless participants being both frozen in time and rendered invisible to their contemporaries. At unpredictable moments, the tableaux – or parts thereof – "erode", releasing the participants into a state of being that doesn't properly belong to any time.

Part-ghost story, part-sf, Peter Phillips's "Manna" (1949) sees the spirits of two 12th-century monks, one of whom is a veritable Newton, haunting a modern food-processing plant and using arcane physical principles to transport cans of Miracle Meal^TM back to the needy of their own time.

The idea behind Poul Anderson's "The Long Remembering" (1957) is that the human mind is an attribute of the individual's worldline; since the worldline can be traced back beyond the individual's birth all the way through his ancestral lineage, it's possible to send someone's mentality temporarily into that of a forebear: "Your mind will be in the brain, or scanning the brain, of some ancestor [. . .] But you will not be aware of [. . .] any separate identity. On arousal – return – you will remember what went on, as if that other person had been you." A man who spends time in a prehistoric man's mind returns to find he's fallen in love with his Cro-Magnon wife, out of love with his real-time one.

"Try and Change the Past" (1958), one of Fritz Leiber's stories building upon the idea of the Change Wars, explores some ramifications of "the Law of the Conservation of Reality". The Doubleganger of a man who has been recruited into the Snakes shortly before being murdered by his wife travels back in time in an attempt to avert his own death. In his first attempts, the fatal 32-calibre bullet somehow manages to end up hitting him between the eyes, just as history dictates. When finally he succeeds in avoiding this, his other self looks out the window and is promptly hit between the eyes by a meteorite that just happens to leave a hole the size a 32-calibre bullet would. At that point the Doubleganger gives up and accepts his fate as a Spider recruit. "So how's a person going to outmaneuver a universe that finds it easier to drill a man through the head that way rather than postpone the date of his death?"

Like Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Roger Zelazny's "Divine Madness" (1966) centres on a reversal of time's flow: a man journeys backward to undo the argument he and his wife had before she left in a fury to die in a fatal car crash. Reader and protagonist alike are left to wonder if this really happens or is an illusion born of the protagonist's post-bereavement mental breakdown. It's a nicely subtle tale, and perhaps – even though just a dozen pages long – the most effective of these three in its use of the time-reversal device.


The Time Patrol (1991) by Poul Anderson

Collected herein are the nine stories -- one is of short-novel length and most of the rest are novelettes/novellas -- in Anderson's famous series; missing is the 1990 novel The Shield of Time, but this is already a very long book: 458 pages may not seem so much, but the pages are large and the type is small, and a lot of the prose is pretty soporific, lurching haphazardly between a sort of relentless drab utilitarianism, an affected cod-epic poesy, and a clumsy impressionism. I recall reading some of this material in the very much earlier (and shorter) collection Guardians of Time (1960), 'way 'way 'way back when, but, though I recall it being surprisingly dull -- for this reader at least, it's quite difficult to make a time-travel story dull -- I don't recall the writing being quite so rotten. Maybe part of the dullness is that, while Anderson gives us great slodges of political and military history, there's almost zero evocation of the various ages in which the stories are set. Since there's no real sensawunda either -- the time cops ride around on their sort-of-motorbikes in a very business-as-usual way -- and since it's difficult to care too much about the fates of characters who are, with very rare exceptions, little more than named cyphers . . . well, I kept glancing at the copy of Robert Cowley's The Collected What If? (2005) on my shelves and wondering if I'd have more fun reading that instead.

What of the stories themselves? "Time Patrol" (1955) is not much more than a sort of setter-upper for the series. In the mid-20th century Manse Everard answers a job ad and gets hired as a time cop. Time travel will be invented centuries in the future; untold centuries beyond that mankind has evolved into a species called the Danellians, who persuaded the early time travellers to set up the Time Patrol with the aim of protecting all of time from any alteration by interfering temponauts that might risk the Danellians' existence. Manse's first mission is to go back to the late 19th century to correct the circumstances that led to the appearance of an anachronistic item in an old burial mound; the case has baffled even Sherlock Holmes (unnamed, but clearly identified through description). It's easy to get the impression that Anderson's initial aim was to make Everard a sort of time-travelling Holmes -- he gives him the pipe to go with the role -- but changed his mind. As it is, all through the series of tales there are offhand references to matters Holmesian. Manse earns the right to be an Unattached Agent of the Patrol: rather than being limited to any particular era, he can roam the timeways at will and with a considerable degree of autonomy.

The second tale, "Brave to Be a King" (1959), is easily the best. A Time Patrol friend of Manse's, Keith, has gone missing in 6th-century Iran, and Keith's wife begs Manse to go find him. Trouble is, Manse has always had the serious hots for the wife, despite her somewhat whiny voice, so it's very tempting not to try very hard -- to assume that Keith has landed on his feet and is happy where he is, sort of thing. But his honourable self knows better. He discovers Keith has been forced to adopt the persona of Cyrus the Great; rescuing him while preserving the course of history proves to be a far more tortuous business than one might imagine. What makes this story so good is that two of the characters -- Keith and his 20th-century wife Cynthia -- are actual characters, and for once Anderson has sufficient understanding of them that, rather than make their reunion at story's end a joyous affair, he shows Keith having second thoughts and more about having given up a life of constant challenge and a wife who was a true companion (not to mention the harem of which she was a part) in order to spend the rest of his days in a cramped Manhattan apartment with ghastly decor and a wife with a whiny voice.

"Gibraltar Falls" (1975) is the shortest piece in the book, and the worst. Anderson wanted to show us what must have been the most remarkable spectacle of known prehistory, the collapse of the isthmus at the Gates of Hercules and the inundation of the basin that is now the Mediterranean Sea by the waters of the Atlantic, but didn't really bother constructing a story to go with it. In "The Only Game in Town" (1960) Manse and a friend manage to head off the Chinese colonization, pre-Columbus, of the Americas. In "Delenda Est" (1955), another fairly good entry, Manse and a friend return from a holiday in the Pleistocene to their own time, only to discover it considerably changed; clearly there's been an unauthorized change to history. Eventually they trace it to an incident during the Punic Wars, which incident made it possible for Hannibal to defeat Rome. They succeed in reversing the change, but know that in so doing they're wiping out all the people they've befriended in the alternative 1950s. They succeed, though, in saving the laughing-eyed Hoirish colleen whom Manse's friend has fallen for.

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" (1983) is set in Tyre during the time of Solomon and Hiram and sees the introduction of the Exaltationists, the 23rd-century cult whose obsessive pursuit of hedonism renders them unimpressed by the effects their vicious power-and pleasure-seeking could do to the timestream, including the possibility of their wiping the existence of their own culture out of history. The story is held together by the character of Pummairam, a youth who takes Manse under his wing when first the patrolman arrives in Tyre, and who engineers much of the tricksterism Manse must use to thwart the baddies. In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" (1983) Manse for once takes something of a back seat. Here a history prof, Carl Farness, has allowed himself to become the personification of the god Odin to a 4th-century tribe of Goths; he has also allowed himself to become far too personally involved with the people whom he's there to study, marrying one of them (with the knowledge of his 20th-century wife) and keeping an eye on the usually somewhat messy fates of his children, grandchildren, etc. Manse gets involved because incarnations of gods are the kind of thing that cause history to be altered; in fact, as Carl points out, all kinds of Goth tribes were convinced they'd been visited by various deities, and their stories were usually quickly dismissed as myths, then forgotten. Still, he must extract himself from the situation with care.

"Star of the Sea" is, I suppose, technically a short novel, but there have been plenty of stories published as full-length novels that have been shorter than this. (Certainly seemed so, anyway . . .) Europe in the 1st century, and various peoples, led by the likes of Civilis, are rebelling against corrupt Roman rule -- with the violence continuing even after it becomes clear that an honourable peace could be struck. A major factor keeping them at war is the zeal of a visionary/prophetess called Veleda, who for reasons unknown has had a far greater and longer influence in a revealed timeline than she had in the known history of the period. Manse and a historian called Floris, who becomes his first real love, manage to sort out the situation.

Finally, The Year of the Ransom (1988), published originally as a standalone illustrated volume, is a prequel to The Shield of Time, featuring, as well as Manse, that novel's heroine Wanda Tamberley. Here her Uncle Steve, living among Pizarro's brutal conquistadors at the time of the ransoming of Atahuallpa, is attacked by the Exaltationists and then abducted into a very distant past by a quick-witted Spanish soldier who believes him to be a demon. Manse and Wanda to the rescue, of course.

At an early moment in the story "Time Patrol" Anderson casually sideswipes the pretensions of Heinlein's "All You Zombies" and Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself: "You could not be your own mother, for instance, because of sheer genetics. If you went back and married your former father, the children would be different, none of them you, because each would have only half your chromosomes" (p7). And there are some moderately elegant avoidances of time-paradox issues:

In the case of a missing man, you were not required to search for him just because a record somewhere said you had done so. But how else could you stand a chance of finding him? You might possibly go back and thereby change events so that you did find him after all -- in which case the report you filed would "always" have recorded your success, and you alone would know the "former" truth. It could get very messed up. No wonder the Patrol was fussy, even about small changes which would not affect the main pattern. (p38)

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came near failing. Only the energy and genius of Lenin pulled it through. What if you traveled to the nineteenth century and quietly, harmlessly prevented Lenin's parents from ever meeting each other? Whatever else the Russian Empire later became, it would not be the Soviet Union, and the consequences of that would pervade all history afterward. You, pastward of the change, would still be there; but returning futureward, you'd find a totally different world, a world in which you yourself were probably never born. You'd exist, but as an effect without a cause, thrown up into existence by that anarchy which is at [time's] foundation. (p420)

And some that are, er, less elegant:

Don't ask me why they weren't "always" wiped out; why this is the first time we came back from the far past to find a changed future. I don't understand the mutable-time paradoxes. We just did, that's all. (p113)

Among my favourite phrases were these:

Everard finished a night's sleep and a breakfast which Deirdre's eyes had made miserable by standing on deck as they came in to the private pier. ("Delenda Est")

The floor had been given a deep-blue covering that responded slightly to footfalls, like living muscles. (The Year of the Ransom)

An ongoing irritation with the text, aside from the problems I have with the writing style, as mentioned above, is a frequent palavering about the difficulty the English language, like all other ordinary languages, has with the tenses required to talk about events along timelines -- like those of era-hopping Time Patrollers -- that don't match the world's standard timeline. Often enough someone will interrupt their own narrative to bewail the difficulty they're having expressing past and future in English, and what a good thing it is that the Time Patrollers' own invented language, "Temporal", has extra tenses to deal with this sort of stuff. The trouble is, it's baloney: yes, occasionally writers of time-travel stories have to choose their words carefully, but it isn't a major problem, and in a milieu where time travel was common listeners would have even less difficulty understanding what was going on. And, just to cope with those rare cases where there might be difficulties of comprehension, people would soon enough invent ways of getting around them -- in effect, would introduce those new tenses to their native tongue. They wouldn't have to learn a whole new blasted language to deal with the problem. (Of course, there are other good reason why Time Patrollers from different cultures and eras should have a common language to use; my point is that the tenses problem isn't one of those reasons, yet Anderson is tiresomely insistent that it is.)

I'd initially planned to read The Shield of Time immediately after this book, but in the event I couldn't face it. I decided to have a break from Anderson for a while. My deadline for this essay is fast approaching, though, so I can't put off The Shield of Time too much longer. Gulp.


The Summerhouse (2001) by Jude Deveraux

Three women who met on their shared 21st birthday while waiting forever at the DMV to pick up their new driving licences decide to get together for a weekend in the wilds of Maine to celebrate their 40th. Would-be supermodel Madison is now a gaunt and wretched woman, having sacrificed her life to an abusive, crippled husband who threw her over as soon as he regained his facilities; she rues her decision, long ago, not to ditch him in favour of moody genius physician Thomas. Would-be ballet dancer Leslie threw it all over to marry her childhood sweetheart, who, like her kids, treats her as a doormat while probably having an affair with his PA, Bambi; should she instead have listened to the entreaties of sensitive dynamo Hal? Would-be artist Ellie abandoned her career to be supportive of her husband, a brilliant musician with failure stamped all over him, who squandered the money she earned when she became a megabestselling author and then, through a combination of lies and judicial corruption, ripped her off something rotten in the divorce; the consequent binge-eating has transformed her from sylph into sofa.

The three tell each other their tales, then discover they've each mysteriously come into possession of the business card of one Madame Zoya, who claims to be able to send people back into their own pasts so that for three weeks they can try to do things differently, then thereafter choose which life they'd prefer to have led, the original or the new one created through their choices. Returned to the present, the three women solve their problems and heal their hurts in different ways, one by selecting the new life while having the memory of the original wiped out, one by selecting the new life while retaining the memory of the original, and one by selecting to stick with her original life yet with the consciousness that it's up to her to remould it.

The first 50 pages or so of this book really creak, and I had my sneers ready (e.g., around p25 Ellie's attention is caught at the DMV by the faces of the other two, but then we discover they've had their backs to her; on p41 Ellie says something under her breath yet the other two hear her), but after that things look up very considerably, as if it took a while for Deveraux to get into her story and then later she couldn't be bothered to polish the early sections. I was impressed by the way she wove her various narrative strands together, neatly avoiding any repetitions of treatment as the three pairs of lives unfolded. And, of course, this is at its heart not just a time-travel tale but a variant of the "Little Shop" story, the home of Madame Zoya standing in for the magical Little Shop that's no longer there when you try to find it again; since I've always been a sucker for both tropes, it could hardly fail. That said, I have no huge urge to rush out 'n' buy the sequel, Return to Summerhouse (2008), which I gather is little more than a not-as-good retread, and nor am I likely to read the other romantic time-travel novels I see that Deveraux has produced. There's a kind of ostentatious reverence for wealth and inherited privilege that's a bit offputting (even though Deveraux does make limp attempts to introduce some counterweights, as it were). Still, The Summerhouse was, to my pleased surprise, quite fun while it lasted.

Oh, I could hardly not mention some bizarre comments Deveraux (via the character Ellie) makes about the way the modern publishing industry works: apparently writers don't need agents, and can do just as well on their own. Deveraux might like to explain this thesis to all the commercial publishers who have a public policy of refusing to consider anything that isn't offered to them through an agent.


The Time Travelers (1985) edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg

A quartet of novellas, all well known, on the theme of time travel.

I'd forgotten how good Isaac Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy" (1958) is. Scientist Hoskins has devised a technique not of travelling through time but of creating "Stasis" pockets into which physical objects from the past can be imported and which can be accessed by people from the present; although people who've entered the pockets from the present can exit them again without palaver, to bring a past-originating item out of the pockets can only be done with truly extraordinary energy costs -- indeed, just maintaining an historic item within the pocket uses a great deal of energy/expense. The triumph of Hoskins's experimentation is the plucking of a Neanderthal boy out of the past. The scientist hires a middle-aged professional child-carer, Edith, to look after the boy, whom she names Timmie; despite Timmie's extraordinary ugliness, she grows inordinately fond of him, and discovers he's as intelligent as any Homo sapiens child. Yet the day comes when simple economics decree he must be returned to his own era . . . where he'll be vulnerable through having been long separated and reared in a different world . . . The tale of Edith's and Timmie's growing love, and of her attempt to save him from this fate, is startlingly moving -- not an attribute one would generally expect to find in an Asimov tale.

The way that Stasis works is interesting: "We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. Mesons reach backward under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we must analyze the reflections" (p19). So in a sense Timmie isn't so much really there in the Stasis pocket as constructed holographically from interference patterns of "mesons". (Substitute tachyons, as Asimov would undoubtedly have done had he been writing a couple of decades later, and you get a pretty workable idea!) There's more, as Hoskins explains:

"[. . .] In Stasis, time as we know it doesn't exist. Those rooms [the Stasis pockets] are inside an invisible bubble that is not exactly part of our Universe. That is why the child could be plucked out of time as it was."

"Well, wait now," said the gentleman from the News discontentedly, "what are you giving us? The nurse goes into the room and out of it."

"And so can any of you," said Hoskins matter-of-factly. "You would be moving parallel to the lines of temporal force and no great energy gain or loss would be involved. The child, however, was taken from the far past. It moved across the lines and gained temporal potential. To move it into the Universe and into our own time would absorb enough energy to burn out every line in the place [. . .]" (p33)

In this story, Asimov declines to ascribe to the "Bradbury scenario" whereby the tiniest change in the past can have huge consequences for the present; rather, the effects of alterations to the past tend to damp down fairly swiftly: "Take that chalcopyrite from the Pliocene. Because of its absence for two weeks some insect doesn't find the shelter it might have found and is killed. That could initiate a whole series of changes, but the mathematics of Stasis indicates that this is a converging series. The amount of change diminishes with time and then things are as before" (pp45-6).

The Asimov story is a hard act to follow, and the next two tales in the book disappoint by comparison. Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time" (1934) shows a world afflicted by a sort of time dissonance: different areas around the globe are "contemporaneously" undergoing different eras. Much later the same (inherently silly!) notion was realized much better by Fred Hoyle in his novel October the First is Too Late; in Leinster's tale, though, the mechanism differs:

"Then these shiftings of time-paths -- well -- they're the result of something on the order of tidal strains? If another star got close to the sun, our planet would crack up from tidal strains alone. You're suggesting that another closed space has gotten close to our closed space in hyperspace . . . It's awfully confused, sir."

"I have calculated it," said Minott harshly. "The odds are three to one that space and time and universe, every star and every galaxy in the skies, will be obliterated in one monstrous destruction when even the past will never have been! But there is one chance in four, and I planned to take full advantage of it. I planned -- I planned --" (p135)

This Minott is a genius mathematician stuck in a low-grade job in a lower-grade university somewhere even lower-grade than that. Because he's a genius, he worked out in advance that this disruption was likely to happen, and recognized that it represented an opportunity for a low-grade academic, with the aid of a seven-strong posse of his students, to make himself the master of a virgin world . . . and of a presumably virgin female student, this being a part of the, er, master plan. ("You will marry," he explains to one of the girls when she says that, y'know, all in all, she'd like to go home. "Then you won't mind" [p93].) After he and his band have lots of adventures among various hostile primitives, six of the students find a way back to the world they knew, leaving Minott and one especially impressionable lass to forge whatever future they can for themselves somewhere across the unbridgeable gulf of time, or whatever. What would anyway have been a reasonably long novelette is bumped out considerably, to short-novel length indeed, by lots of irrelevant background colour -- scenes of ocean-going liners encountering craft from a different era, etc. This is widely described (including in Silverberg's Introduction to this book) as an important classic of time travel, but I'm afraid it's never spoken to me.

And neither has John Wyndham's "Consider Her Ways" (1961), although I enjoyed it far more this time than when I first encountered it decades ago. A woman from our own time, Jane, finds herself locked into the body of a far-future woman whose function is to be one of the breeders -- the Mothers -- in an all-female society; men were wiped out centuries earlier when a stratagem to eliminate the brown rat went horribly wrong. Slowly, slowly our heroine's memories return to her: she was a young medic, widowed tragically early, who volunteered herself to test an experimental drug, chuinjuatin, based on a narcotic that shamans in Venezuela have used since time immemorial to set their spirits free to roam anywhere in space and time. Well, it's certainly worked for Jane. The only trouble is that, so far as anyone else within this future society is concerned, it's not so much that they have a visitor from the past, more that one of the Mothers has gone nuts. She does eventually prevail, however, sort of -- although there's a long and entertaining (for us) section during which a historian explains sternly to her all the mistakes Jane's making in her descriptions of her and our present: the historian, being after all a professional, Knows Better. Eventually Jane's consciousness does get back to now, and she does her best to scupper the research into the rat-extermination project.

As I implied, I was pretty dissatisfied with this story when I read it in my teens or twenties, and was expecting to dislike it this time round; instead, I quite enjoyed it.

The final tale in the book is rightly a classic: Lawrence O'Donnell's "Vintage Season" (1946). This is one of those stories it's difficult to say much about, because all I really want to do is point at it and say, "Go read." The story is itself: description can't add to it, qualify it, enlighten it. But . . .

There are strange people in town, and a trio of them want to rent rooms in Oliver Wilson's house for a few weeks for an extraordinary fee -- a sum of money that could obviate the need for himself and fiancee Sue to wait months and years before getting married. Sue would actually prefer him to sell the house for the fortune that a different group of the strange people are offering, but by then he's given his word . . . and anyway has fallen for the allure of one of his tenants, Kleph; the two of them drift through their days drinking the exotic tea she brews, listening to the bizarre, disturbing "music" of the composer Cenbe, and making wild, dreamy love. Slowly Oliver discovers that the strange people are tourists from the far future, here as part of a package trip that will take them also to such spectacles as the coronation of Constantine the Great. And it dawns on him that something truly dreadful might be about to happen, but by then he has been so immersed in Kleph's corrupting decadence that he hardly cares . . .

And in the end the composer Cenbe, whose works are parasitic upon past grief and catastrophe, explains:

"Yes, the past can be changed, but not easily. And it changes the future, too, necessarily. The lines of probability are switched into new patterns -- but it is extremely difficult, and it has never been allowed. The physiotemporal course tends to slide back to its norm, always. That is why it is so hard to force any alteration." He shrugged. "A  theoretical science. We do not change history, Wilson. If we changed our past, our present would be altered, too. And our time-world is entirely to our liking. There may be a few malcontents there, but they are not allowed the privilege of temporal travel."

Oliver spoke louder against the roaring from beyond the windows. "But you've got the power! You could alter history, if you wanted to -- wipe out all the pain and suffering and tragedy --"

"All of that passed away long ago," Cenbe said.

"Not -- now! Not -- this!"

Cenbe looked at him enigmatically for a while. Then -- "This, too," he said.


Behold the Man (1968) by Michael Moorcock

I read the novella version of this in 1966 when it appeared in New Worlds and, as a moderately Christian teenager, was awestruck that anything could quite so astonishingly blasphemous. As a boring old atheist fart, I find fascination and a sort of intellectual teasing out rather than straightforward blasphemy in this enormously impressive novel.

Karl Glogauer, a man for whom the term "negativity" might have been created, is befriended by the erratic inventor of a time machine. Haunted by rather than prideful of his Jewishness, he has for a long time been fascinated by the figure of Christ and the symbol if the Crucifixion; the chance to travel back to witness the event seems too good to be true. Unfortunately the machine is irremediably damaged on landing in the desert, and Karl's condition is little better; he is nursed back to health by the Essenes and is befriended by their spiritual leader, John the Baptist. John is keen to find a Messiah figure around whom -- or, if necessary, around whose martyrdom -- he can foment a revolution against the hated Roman oppressors and their toady, Herod. Karl tells John the man he wants is Jesus of Bethlehem, but when he goes there he finds that Jesus is an imbecile and is seduced by Jesus's nymphomaniac mother, Mary; he discovers it's the town joke that only a simpleton like Joseph would have believed Mary's tale of having been impregnated by an angel. It takes Karl some while to realize that John is grooming him for the role, and when he does so he accepts this resignedly as his inevitable fate.

Moorcock doesn't tell the tale linearly. The strand set in the months leading up to the Crucifixion is interwoven with numerous linked cameos from Karl's life in our own times, with a focus on the long string of disasters that make up his enormously promiscuous bisexual love life -- itself almost an exercise in flagellation, an expression of a masochistic narcissism. The overall effect of this narrational style is of a chaotic unstoppable tumbling, ever accelerating toward Karl's inescapable -- and horrific -- destiny on the Cross. In the strangest of ways, for all its rationalization of the supposedly miraculous, the novel is not so much a detraction from as a powerful extension to the Christian myth. This, however, is not how I imagine it is seen in the Vatican . . .


The Time Machine (1894-5/1895) by H.G. Wells

The version I read was in the Ernest Benn-published The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells (1927); it reproduces the text of the 1895 book publication rather than the 1894-5 serial publication in New Review, and thus omits the completely extraneous scene "The Grey Man" (accessible at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Grey_Man) which New Review's editor, W.E. Henley, had insisted Wells add.

The tale is well known. None among a group of friends believes the Time Traveller when he tells them of his latest invention, and they're almost equally dismissive even after he returns battered and exhausted from a hazardous adventure into the far future and tells them at very considerable length of his adventures -- their scepticism barely dented by the pair of withered flowers, of a species unknown to us, that he has inadvertently brought back with him. The only person who comes close to crediting his account is the Writer, who is also the last to see him before he sets off once again for the unknown worlds that are yet to come . . .

The Time Traveller's account is the bulk of this novella. Arriving in the year 802,701, he finds himself among a race of pretty, small, airheaded lotus-eaters, the Eloi, capable of only the most rudimentary syntax; he learns their simple language with little difficulty. One of them, Weena, becomes devoted to him when he saves her from drowning; he soon comes to love her as a father might a child. It is evident that these are our hopelessly, although happily, devolved descendants; the race of humankind is heading for a whimprous end. Yet all is not as straightforward as it seems, for he discovers that there is a second, subterranean species of humanity, the light-fearing Morlocks, who, slugbelly white as they tend their underground machines, regard the Eloi as food animals. The Traveller hypothesizes that in some past era the working classes were confined underground so the world's wealthy socialites wouldn't have to see all the grit and grime necessary to support their effete lifestyle; later the tables must have turned. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the Traveller abhors the Morlocks almost before he's caught sight of one; since they're manifestly intelligent (aside from the fact that they have a technological civilization of sorts, they are curious enough to try to capture him for further investigation . . . or possibly just for parlay), one would have expected him to gravitate towards them. Whatever: The Traveller's main excursion from his landing site is, with Weena in tow, to the Palace of Green Porcelain, an edifice he has espied from afar and which proves to be a crumbling museum. On their way back at night, he and Weena are attacked by a band of Morlocks; he escapes with his life, but she is missing, presumed dead.

Fleeing from the year 802,701, the Traveller visits the end days of the world, when the planet is tidally locked to a dying sun (oddly, there are still complex lifeforms in evidence); as a sign of the state of science at the time Wells was writing, world's end is seen as being a mere 30 million years in the future.

The great genius of The Time Machine is that all this is only the beginning of the Time Traveller's tale: that there is a vastly larger further narrative which no one will ever hear because he failed to return from his second expedition, and, unless dead, is presumably still questing among the distant timeways. The only way we can learn that further narrative is to construct it in our own imaginations. This is, I think, why so many readers have found the tale to have an impact far beyond the events recounted, sensational enough though these may be.


The Space Machine (1976) by Christopher Priest

As will be evident to all, I'm a great fan of Priest's work. I read this novel many years ago and, while I enjoyed it on its own terms, felt it to be the weakest of his books. Rereading it recently confirmed both of these senses to me: the fact that his writing has gone from strength to strength in later novels makes The Space Machine seem even flimsier, yet I enjoyed the romp even more this time around. That said, I was more irritated this time by the constant stream, most especially in the earlier chapters, of arch knowingness on sexual matters and narrator Edward Turnbull's astonishing innocence of them; that aside, though, this was lots of fun.

Essentially this is a sequel to Wells's The Time Machine and a complement to the same author's The War of the Worlds. Edward, a travelling salesman and part-time inventor, encounters Amelia Fitzgibbon, the beautiful young ward of and assistant to famous inventor Sir William Reynolds, who proves to be the character known only as the Time Traveller in Wells's book. With a few drinks inside them and Sir William away on business, the young pair drunkenly experiment in his Richmond laboratory with the time machine, which -- as Amelia tells us -- is also a space machine, in that it moves in all four dimensions and not just the temporal one. When they manage to stop the device, they find themselves on Mars, with no immediate hope of return. There they discover a society ruled by the ruthless, soulless, near-immobile monsters of The War of the Worlds, who are creatures bred into existence from themselves centuries ago by the Martians, who are normally humanoid; the reason for developing these "thinking machines" was to tackle the problem of Mars's rapidly depleting resources, a problem the monsters have decided to solve by taking over the earth. Beneath the monsters in Martian society are the techs and slavemasters, and beneath those are countless slaves, who serve also as food animals for the monsters, who must feed regularly on human blood. After many adventures, Edward and Amelia find themselves in the cockpit of the first of the mighty projectiles fired at earth as the monsters mount their invasion. Landing near Richmond, they encounter H.G. Wells, who informs them that Sir William departed years ago aboard the time machine (whose automatic Snap Home feature returned it from Mars to the inventor's laboratory, without him being aware it had ever been gone) and has never been heard of since. The trio, in Sir William's home, build a second, more primitive version of the time machine, employing its space-machine capabilities to mount a resistance against the Martian conquerors . . .

While I was reading it occurred to me that, with The Space Machine, Priest must have more or less invented the recursive Steampunk novel. The only other one I can offhand think of that's of similar vintage is Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates, but that was published quite a few years later, in 1983. Hm. Checking in the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction I find it mentions also Michael Moorcock's The Warlord of the Air which, published in 1971, predates The Space Machine. As with Colin Greenland -- another extremely literary writer -- being the one to trigger the great Space Opera Revival with his Take Back Plenty (and I can remember disbelieving him, a couple of years before that, when he told me he thought Space Opera was due for a comeback), it seems an unexpected matchup. All power to Priest's elbow that it should be so.


Timescoop (1969) by John Brunner

Industrial magnate Harold Freitas wants a publicity stunt that will devastate his competitors when he launches his company's Timescoop capability, and so he decides to organize a family reunion -- the other family members being distinguished ancestors of his hauled out of the past by the Timescoop technology. What he doesn't realize is that the genealogist advising him on the distinction of his ancestors has done as all genealogists do in such situations: he gave a flattering depiction of the ancestors in question. So Freitas finds himself trying to limit the damage cause caused by a motley crew of psychopaths, sexual deviants and sleazebags. This is all rather reminiscent of the kind of lightweight, modestly entertaining, moderately amusing novels Robert Silverberg used to write way back in his early days, although to be honest is not as good.

The way that Timescoop works is of more interest, though. The chronon is (for the purposes of the tale) the smallest possible duration -- the unit of time. If you excise a chronon-thick layer (as it were) out of something's or someone's timeline, no one could ever notice, the gap between the two bits of the timeline being substantially smaller than an instant. Thus you avoid any possibility of a pesky time paradox, because you've left the past to all intents and purposes exactly the way you found it. Once you have the "cross-section" back in your 21st-century laboratory, you can simply let it behave the way nature intended: continue to exist along the time dimension as well as, of course, in the three spatial ones. "[R]ight here, in the shape of this statue, is proof that it can be done, and even though we saw it -- uh -- grow in the Timescoop lab this morning, it is in every possible respect the original which we located in Praxiteles's own workshop and cross-sectioned just before its dispatch to the temple it was commissioned for." (p11)

It's depressing that the man responsible for such significant novels as Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, who with The Shockwave Rider effectively invented cyberpunk years before anyone knew what it was, probably earned himself a better hourly rate churning out -- quite probably in his sleep -- such dreary, supposedly funny, instantly forgettable, wholly unnecessary crap as this. Them's the commercial imperatives of the book trade, ain't they?