Microworlds

his grandmother. In the course of an altercation he kills his grandfather before his father has been engendered. Thus the time traveler cannot then come into the world. Who, therefore, in fact killed the grandfather, if the murderer has not come into the world at all? Herein lies the contradiction. Sometimes an absentminded scientist, having left something in the past, which he has visited, returns for the lost object and encounters his own self, since he has not returned exactly to the moment after his departure for the present, but to the time point at which he was before. When such returns are repeated, the individual is subject to multiple reproduction in the form of doubles. Since such possibilities appear to be pointless, in one of my stories about Ion Tichy (the “7th Journey”), I maximized “duplication” of the central character. Ion Tichy’s spaceship finds itself in gravitational whirlpools that bend time into a circle, so that the spaceship is filled with a great number of different Ions.

The loop motif can be used, for instance, in the following ways. Someone proceeds into the past, deposits ducats in a Venetian bank at compound interest, and centuries later in New York demands from a consortium of banks payment of the entire capital, a gigantic sum. Why does he need so much money all of a sudden? So that he can hire the best physicists to construct for him a thus far nonexistent time vehicle, and by means of this vehicle go back in time to Venice, where he will deposit ducats at compound interest… (Mack Reynolds, “Compounded Interest” [1956]). Another example: in the future someone comes to an artist (in one story to a painter, in another to a writer) and gives him either a book dealing with painting in the future or a novel written in the future. The artist then begins to imitate this material as much as possible, and becomes famous, the paradox being that he is borrowing from his own self (since he himself was the author of that book or those pictures, “twenty years later”).

We learn, further, from various works of this sort how the Mesozoic reptiles became extinct thanks to hunters who organized a “safari into the past” (Frederic Brown), or how, in order to move in time in one direction, an equal mass must be displaced in the opposite direction, or how expeditions in time can reshape historical events. The latter theme has been used time and again, as in one American tale in which the Confederate States are victorious over the North (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee [1952, 1953]). The hero, a military historian, sets out for the past in order to investigate how the Southerners gained victory near Gettysburg. His arrival in a time machine throws General Lee’s troop formations into disarray, which results in victory for the North. The hero is no longer able to return to the future, because his arrival also disturbed the causal chain upon which the subsequent construction of his time machine depended. Thus, the person who was supposed to have financed the construction of the machine will not do this, the machine will not exist, and the historian will be stuck in the year 1863 without the means to travel back into the original time. Of course here also there is an inherent paradox — just how did he reach the past? As a rule, the fun consists in the way the paradox is shifted from one segment of the action to another. The time loop as the backbone of a work’s causal structure is thus different from the far looser motif of journeys in time per se; but, of course, it is merely a logical, although extreme, consequence of the general acceptance of the possibility of “chronomotion.” There are actually two possible authorial attitudes, which are mutually exclusive: either one deliberately demonstrates causal paradoxes resulting from “chronomotion” with the greatest possible consistency, or else one cleverly avoids them. In the first instance, the careful development of logical consequences leads to situations as absurd as the one cited (an individual that is his very own father, that procreates himself), and usually has a comic effect (though this does not follow automatically).

Even though a circular causal structure may signalize a frivolous type of content, this does not mean that it is necessarily reduced to the construction of comic antinomies for the sake of pure entertainment. The causal circle may be employed not as the goal of the story, but as a means of visualizing certain theses, e.g., from the philosophy of history. Antoni Slonimski’s story “Time Torpedo”[10] belongs here. It is a belletristic assertion of the “ergo ness” or ergodicity of history: monkeying with events that have had sad consequences does not bring about any improvement of history; instead of one group of disasters and wars, there simply comes about another, in no way better.

A diametrically opposed hypothesis is incorporated into Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952). In an excellently written short episode, a participant in a “safari for tyrannosaurs” tramples a butterfly and a couple of flowers, and by that microscopic act causes such perturbances of causal chains involving millions of years, that upon his return the English language has a different orthography, and a different candidate — not liberal, but, rather, a kind of dictator — has won in the presidential election. It is only a pity that Bradbury feels obliged to set in motion complicated and unconvincing explanations to account for the fact that hunting for reptiles, which indeed fall from shots, disturbs nothing in the causal chains, whereas the trampling of a tiny flower does. (When a tyrannosaur drops to the ground, the quantity of ruined flowers must be greater than when the safari participant descends from a safety zone to the ground.) “A Sound of Thunder” exemplifies an “antiergodic” hypothesis of history, as opposed to Slonimski’s story. In a way, however, the two are reconcilable: history can as a whole be “ergodic” if not very responsive to local disturbances, and at the same time such exceptional hypersensitive points in the causal chains can exist, the vehement disturbance of which produces more intensive results. In personal affairs such a “hyperallergic point” would be, for example, a situation in which a car attempts to pass a truck at the same time that a second car is approaching from the opposite direction.

As is usually the case in science fiction, a theme defined by a certain devised structure of occurrences (in this instance pertaining to a journey in time) undergoes a characteristic cognitive-artistic involution. We could have demonstrated this for any given theme, but let’s take advantage of the opportunity at hand.

At first, authors and readers are satisfied by the joy of discerning the effects of innovations still virginal as far as their inherent contradictions are concerned. Then, an intense search is begun for initial situations that allow for the most effective exploitation of consequences that are potentially present in a given structure. Thus, the devices of chronomotion begin supporting, e.g., theses of history and philosophy (concerned with the “ergodicity” or nonergodicity of history). Then, grotesque and humorous stories like Frederic Brown’s “The Yehudi Principle” (1944) appear: this short story is itself a causal circle (it ends with the words that it began with: it describes a test of a device for fulfilling wishes; one of the wishes expressed is that a story “write itself,” which is what just happened). Finally, the premise of time travel serves frequently as a simple pretext for weaving tales of sensational, criminal, or melodramatic intrigue; this usually involves the revival and slight refurbishment of petrified plots.

Time travel has been used so extensively in science fiction that it has been divided into separate subcategories. There is, for example, the category of missent parcels that find their way into the present from the future: someone receives a “Build-a-Man Set” box with “freeze-dried nerve preparations,” bones, etc.; he builds his own double, and an “inspector from the future,” who comes to reclaim the parcel, disassembles, instead of the artificial twin, the very hero of the story; this is William Tenn’s “Child’s Play” (1947). In Damon Knight’s “Thing of Beauty” (1958) there is a different parcel — an automaton that draws pictures by itself. In general, strange things are produced in the future, science fiction teaches us (e.g., polka-dotted paint as well as thousands of objects with secret names and purposes not known).

Another category is tiers in time. In its simplest form it is presented in Anthony Boucher’s “The Barrier” (1942), a slightly satiric work. The hero, traveling to the future, comes to a state of “eternal stasis,” which, to protect its perfect stagnation from all disturbances, has constructed “time barriers” that foil any penetration. Now and then, however, a barrier becomes permeable. Rather disagreeable conditions prevail in this state, which is ruled by a police similar to the Gestapo (Stapper). One must be a slightly more advanced science- fiction reader to follow the story. The hero finds his way immediately into a circle of people who know him very well, but whom he does not know at all. This is explained by the fact that in order to elude the police he goes somewhat further back in time. He at that time gets to know these very people, then considerably younger. He is for them a stranger, but he, while he was in the future, has already succeeded in getting to know them. An old lady, who got into the time vehicle with the hero when they were fleeing from the police, meets as a result her own self as a young person and suffers a severe shock. It is clear, however, that Boucher does not know what to do with the “encountering oneself motif in this context, and therefore makes the lady’s shock long and drawn out. Further jumps in time, one after another, complicate the intrigue in a purely formal way. Attempts are begun to overthrow the dictatorial government, but everything goes to pieces, providing in the process sensationalism. Antiproblematic escapism into adventure is a very common phenomenon in science fiction; authors indicate its formal effectiveness, understood as the ingenious setting of a game in motion, as the skill of achieving uncommon movements, without mastering and utilizing the problematic and semantic aspects of such kinematics.

Such authors neither discuss nor solve the problems raised by their writing, but, instead, “take care” of them