Friday 12 June 2020

Time travel

(Version control by Dexter Palmer, The future of another timeline by Annalee Newitz, and Recursion by Blake Crouch)

Who would have thought that there would still be so much life in the time travel story, after so many years, and so many books?

It's easy to understand why time travel stories are still being written. We all have regrets about some of our past actions, we all wonder "what if". So much of our every day lives, so much of our current world seems very contingent on chance, on arbitrary choices, on circumstances.

But 125 years after H.G. Wells, is there really anything new to say?

Version control, The future of another timeline, and Recursion each try to do so in their own way.  And amazingly, on some level each of them succeeds.  They all feel fresh.

Future is the most conventional of the three novels...or rather, it has the most conventional take on time travel. Like Zelazny's Roadmarks, it posits the existence of a class of time-travellers who go back and forth in time, altering what they find, remembering pasts that no longer exist, and meddling in events in an attempt to align 'reality' with their memories. Unconventionally, and in complete contrast to Zelazny, the heroine is not a loner, is not a flaneur.  The heroine is a member of a revolutionary feminist cadre whose meetings always begin "I remember a time when abortion was legal in the United States".

Version control reads more like literary fiction than genre fiction.  Perhaps it's because Palmer deals with themes not typical to SF (such as how everyday life feels to millennials).   But it's a time travel story: one protagonist is a physicist who is researching and attempting to build a "causality violation device" (NOT a TIME MACHINE, so sensational. Seriously!)  The twist is that in the world of the novel, if the past changes, everyone's memory of the past changes too.  Somehow Palmer manages to stay in the POV of characters immersed in this world, while making it clear to the reader what's happening.  Very skilfully told.  Ah, also with insights borrowed from past SF greats. As per Octavia Butler, why would a black American want to travel into the past?  As a black person, are you going to enjoy visiting 1850s Mississippi?  Or 1950s Mississippi for that matter? The present is challenging enough.

In Recursion, time travel is performed using a special secret device.  You can only travel into your own past, by accessing particularly vivid memories that you have mapped ahead of time. Twist: you must die in the present to send your consciousness into the past, and then you must live your life forward from that moment to the time of your death. You are free to change the world. You do not die again when you reach the point in time where you "died" to return to the past.  BUT: everyone remembers the original past, all of the original pasts, when you once again reach the moment of your death.  So if you flee to the past on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to prevent the Twin Towers from falling....you might succeed. But at 9:41 am on Sept. 11, 2001 everyone across the world will suddenly simultaneously remember their fall, while seeing the buildings still standing and everyone who died in them still living.  Yes, this is disturbing.  If you change the past in ways that only affect your personal life and personal connections, the woman you didn't marry might remember the child she didn't have, and might even commit suicide as a result.  But when you change history...well, society doesn't react well to millions and billions of people having dual memories.

I recommend all of these books.  Each of them is an engaging, well-written story.  But they are all of them interesting too for what they say about society, about human nature, and about memory.


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