Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Niven’s alternate universe story belongs to a class that arises directly from the reception by popular fiction writers of the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics first proposed by Hugh Everett III in his 1957 Ph.D. dissertation and floated as a controversial hypothesis among physicists through the 1960s.16 In Everett’s interpretation of quantum theory, as Bryce DeWitt explains it in a 1970 gloss:

  This universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous number of branches, all resulting from the measurementlike interactions between its myriads of components. Moreover, every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies of itself.17

  Consistent with this interpretation, the branching worlds of Niven’s story are, as his title suggests, also “myriad,” because the pivotal incidents that give rise to them are as indeterminately numerous as the virtually countless number of quantum events. At every moment, this theoretical model suggests—although we cannot take for granted, particularly at the quantum level, that we know even in a general sense what such a “moment” consists of—alternate histories are possible, and if possible then also real. Thus any palpable difference between two nearby branching worlds might be, from the relatively coarse perspective of a Crosstime pilot’s perception, vanishingly minute: “The latest vehicles could reach worlds so like this one that it took a week of research to find the difference. In theory they could get even closer.”18 Nothing but another story, for instance another “week of research,” would be sufficient to distinguish them.

  From a narrative-theoretical viewpoint, it is quite interesting to contemplate two worlds that are declared, theoretically or in the abstract, to be different, but between which no concrete or practical difference can be discovered. The positing of such a pure narrative simulacrum suggests that Niven is interested (even if not fully explicitly) in theorizing the narrative event as such. He is asking, in essence, precisely what are the formal, aesthetic, and/or ontological markers of the event that could constitute a moment of narrative difference—the markers, perhaps, of fictionality, or of what analytic philosophers sometimes call “incompleteness,” as a means of distinguishing between the real and its alternates.19 Niven, in order to allegorize the ambiguity of narrative differences encountered by the Crosstime pilot who tries to return to his own worldline, continues to borrow freely from quantum theory’s model of events as uncertain across a probability continuum:

  There was a phenomenon called “the broadening of the bands.” . . .

  When a vehicle left its own present, a signal went on in the hangar, a signal unique to that ship. When the pilot wanted to return, he simply cruised across the appropriate band of probabilities until he found the signal. The signal marked his own unique present.20

  In a Crosstime ship, the signal that marks the pilot’s “unique present” is a clear-cut electronic manifestation, for instance a reading on a meter or gauge, or a visual or audible blip. Thus, in the science-fictional world of vehicles that use this sort of convenient technology, the pilot is able to identify straightforwardly (“simply cruise”) his or her own present via the unambiguously legible mechanism of this unique marker, a positive signifier, so to speak, of the continuous and self-identical reality to which he properly belongs, his home world. However, because such signifiers in the non-fictional world are neither so present nor so unique, we are perhaps invited to be suspicious of the very idea of a signal or device that could assure one of a return to one’s own reality, especially once the possibility of an infinitely divergent set of alternates has been introduced by the story itself or by the underlying physical theory upon which the story is based. Where, in the real world, could we look for signals that would distinguish an original worldline from some alternate one, or an actual one from a fictional one? Where is the signal for the originality or self-consistency of the real world?

  Niven is quite cognizant of the profound problem that his fictional signal exposes concerning the artificiality and arbitrariness of narratives about reality once time travel is given free rein. Indeed, he gives the impression of being appalled by the “horrible multiplicity” that results.21 In a later preface written for the story, Niven complains, presumably with his tongue half in cheek:

  I spent time, sweat, effort, and agony to become what I am. It irritates me to think that there are Larry Nivens working as second-rate mathematicians or adequate priests or first-rate playboys, who went bust or made their fortunes on the stock market. I even sweated over my mistakes, and I want them to count.22

  Without presuming that Niven has read Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, this is nonetheless a close counterpart to Nietzsche’s earliest formulation of the doctrine of eternal return, presented as a thought experiment about moral decisions under the burden of an infinite proliferation of real presents: would you still choose precisely the life you are now living, even were it to be repeated throughout eternity, given your knowledge of the myriad possibilities you might have chosen instead—or, in light of such a choice, would the suddenly immense question of your decision cripple you, cause you to “gnash your teeth and curse”?23 Like Nietzsche, Niven observes the moral crisis into which the scenario of infinitely multiplied choice plunges the conventions of narrative, which appear generally to presume that certain choices are more plausible or acceptable than others, lending themselves to stories that give at least the impression of logical or natural bias. Alternate universe stories, in their role as ontological thought experiments, effectively undercut that presumption, introducing the disturbing possibility that there is no natural criterion for preferring certain lines over others: “[E]very time you’ve made a decision in your life, you made it all possible ways,” Niven writes; “I see anything less than that as a cheat, an attempt to make the idea easier to swallow.”24 Thus at least one ethical upshot of the alternate universe story is the death of narrative significance itself or, at the very least, the exposure of the “cheat” required to keep it alive.25 If all narrative lines are equally possible, then the logical or naturalistic basis for realism, in the most general sense, can no longer be used to distinguish better from worse narratives, or even to pick out specifically narrative lines from mere amalgamations of coincidence.

  I will return, at certain moments in my argument, to the question of narrative ethics, if that’s what this precipitous opening of narrative possibility really amounts to, as well as to the narrative-theoretical question of fictionality. But to continue first with the more basic epistemological quandary that the apparatus of Niven’s story has broached: I have been asking, what would ever correspond to a “unique signal,” one that could allow one to identify one’s own subjective present, one’s “line,” as the proper or primary world, as opposed to the branching one? What signal could enable us to call one history real and another a fiction or fantasy, even before we arrive at the apparently ethical question of many possible or plausible narrative sequences? The time travel story permits Niven to pose such questions in an especially elegant fashion. Continuing from the quotation above:

  The signal marked his own unique present.

  Only it didn’t. The pilot always returned to find a clump of signals, a broadened band. The longer he stayed away, the broader was the signal band. His own world had continued to divide after his departure, in a constant stream of decisions being made both ways.26

  This pilot, returning from another cross-time world, encounters, in practical terms, precisely the same quandary that the narratologist or philosopher encounters in theoretical terms. Confronted with a “clump” of signals, the pilot implicitly asks what remains of the unique difference that constitutes the identity of his world, the one he left, or, more exactly, the one he is still ostensibly in, as a temporally coherent and continuous subject. At best, he is now living in a world-simulacrum, effectively or pragmatically the same as his original world only because he does not yet know how to tell the story
that would distinguish them.27 Yet the pilot’s quandary represents that of any reader who “travels” to alternate worlds while remaining a subject within the home world of the drama of reading, and whose reliance upon the spatiotemporal coherence and consistency of that home world helps him or her to distinguish fact from fiction, reality from mere plot. There are those of us who don’t make these distinctions as easily or automatically, and who may have trouble either inhabiting or discarding a supplemental story about the act of interpreting “the real,” for instance the small child, the schizophrenic, the psychoanalyst, the skeptical fact-checker, or the everyday dreamer. For these more incredulous types, the seemingly natural assumption that either a subjective or objective self-identity—what Philip K. Dick calls the “inner conviction of oneness [that] is the most cherished opinion of Western Man”28—will survive the act of differentiating between any “real” narrative world and a hypothetical or fantastical one is not nearly so certain an assumption as we, in our narratologically coherent waking lives (or fantasies), would generally like to believe.

  In essence, Niven’s Crosstime pilots disclose a situation in which the arbitrary and tenuous conditions of the ostensible coherence of our “normal” world are quite literally exposed:

  Usually it didn’t matter. Any signal the pilot chose represented the world he had left. And since the pilot himself had a choice, he naturally returned to them all.29

  The worlds in proximity to the one to which the pilot returns are similar enough to his home world to render the difference between them—for there is always some difference, or else there would be no question of describing them as “alternates”—pragmatically indistinguishable.30 Again one can ask, what is the criterion for this pragmatic indistinguishability? That is to say, precisely when would the difference between this and that narrated world be of no pragmatic consequence—like “two worlds that differ by only the disposition of two grains of sand on a beach,” as Keith Laumer suggests, “or of two molecules within a grain of sand”?31 We can only use narrative theory, either explicit or tacit, to answer this question, for the consequence of the difference constituted by a divergent narrative line is determinable only by the participant within yet another story, a participant who notes that difference and whose own further narrative of the history of difference has therefore altered his or her relation, as subject, to the events in which he or she participates.

  Niven gives a single dramatic instance of such a narrated difference, one of a type that is virtually canonical within time travel literature, for reasons I will have occasion later to discuss:

  There was a pilot by the name of Gary Wilcox. He had been using his vehicle for experiments, to see how close he could get to his own timeline and still leave it. Once, last month, he had returned twice.32

  Here is a difference sufficiently dramatic to expose a pragmatic narrative discrepancy: two Wilcoxes in the same worldline. We might therefore call the Crosstime pilot Wilcox himself a type of “laboratory narratologist”—and, indeed, Wilcox has been conducting something like field research in narrative theory, using his vehicle to try to determine the precise interval between two different worldlines, the minimum quantum of difference required to establish a pragmatic distinction. In Niven’s words, he is trying to find out “how close he could get to his own timeline and still leave it.” But what Wilcox seeks is basically what Tzvetan Todorov, summarizing the research of earlier structural narratologists, calls the “smallest narrative unit,” or what Eugene Dorfman even more pithily calls “the narreme,” the minimum divergence that could be identified as proper narrative variation.33

  Niven, whose tale is largely premised on his own mistrust both of time travel conventions and of alternate universe stories generally, characteristically recounts Wilcox’s experiment with overdramatic bravado: the Wilcox who returns twice commits suicide, as do large numbers of other people after the establishment of Crosstime, Inc. In reality (if we may continue to speak this way), the difference between narrative lines could be dramatized by events much more subtle than the return of two Wilcoxes or their suicides. In fact, it could be dramatized by any minimal event that failed to coincide with the “normal” narrative that keeps coherent, without threat of hypothetical otherness, the thread of a narrating subject. If Wilcox someday discovered, after his return, that his memory of some specific episode differed minutely from his wife’s or commander’s memory of it, or that some empirical fact he had always assumed to be true was now false, or that some person at the fringes of his acquaintance now failed to recognize him, we would have, in less melodramatic terms than Niven’s but in terms no less philosophically significant, the same quandary, the same divergence between a subject’s putatively self-identical narrative world (or “band” of indistinguishable “nearby” worlds) and a world in which a new history has been commenced and must now be renarrated. Ultimately, what Niven offers is a description of the epistemological conditions of any act of narrative, which commences at the moment in which the divergence between the subject’s own world, on the one hand, and the hypothetical or alternate world constituted by a concrete divergence, on the other hand, must itself be renarrated.

  It is therefore to his credit that Niven ends his story, not with the rather pallid psychological insight that an infinity of moral choices is equivalent to no choice at all, or is an impetus for suicide, but instead with a narratological complication that casts his plot into a kind of interworld limbo, fundamentally unfixable with respect to the specific worldline it asserts as primary, or with respect to the specific narrative closure for which it therefore opts. At one point in the story, the narrator, Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, recalls that “they’ve found a world line in which Kennedy the First was assassinated,” suggesting, of course, that the history of the present story is already an alternate one, in which there exists such a figure as “Kennedy the First.”34 Niven uses this brief reference to alternate political histories in order to engage in some slight humor about the 1960s American fascination with the Kennedys and their pseudoroyal “Camelot,” a joke that obliquely alludes again to the prehistory of time travel literature in the sociopolitical fictions of utopian and scientific romance. In the late 1960s of Niven’s story, Kennedy (the king, not the president) is still alive, and with tongue in cheek Niven declines to consider whether that alternate set of facts makes any real difference. But the brief reference to “Kennedy the First” alerts the reader to a basic uncertainty in the story concerning the precise relationship between fictional and nonfictional elements. In turn, this uncertainty anticipates a curious denouement in which a series of multiple and logically incompatible narrative lines are offered side by side:

  Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.

  Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not? . . .

  And he ran out of the office shouting, “Bentley, listen! I’ve got the answer . . .”

  And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the answer, and it wasn’t any good. The suicides, murders, casual crimes would continue. . . .

  And he suddenly laughed and stood up. Ridiculous! Nobody dies for a philosophical point! . . .

  And he reached for the intercom and told the man who answered to bring him a sandwich and some coffee. . . .35

  Narrative rules, even clichés, govern whatever aesthetic or ethical choices remain to be made between the various lines juxtaposed here, even if, strictly speaking, cause-and-effect does not. For instance, in at least one of the lines, the loaded gun that appeared earlier in the story must be fired; in another, the crime gets solved. So in the story’s end—if that’s what it is—the criterion that determines the choice of closure is purely a narrative rule or a generic convention, even as the epistemological relationship between narrative lines and worldlines is be
ing radically reinterpreted:

  And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close to this one. . . .

  And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head and

  fired. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  fired. The gun jerked up and blasted a hole in the ceiling.

  fired. The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp. took off the top of his head.36

  With neither epistemological nor ontological grounds for preferring one set of events over the others—because all are equally real within the story’s myriad alternatives—we can, finally, rely only on narrative means to select at least one of them or to place them all in a plausible order. The ontological equivalence of several contingent possibilities here comes up against the necessity of positing a sufficient aesthetic reason for preferring one possibility over the others. This is an old philosophical problem. As Leibniz beautifully expresses it, the seeming contingency of such myriad possible events, their apparent equivalence or homogeny, is only an artifact of an observer’s continued “confus[ion]” about the full set of causes leading to the single one of them that will, in the end, have remained plausible—which is to say, in a truly “sufficient” world, possible.37 In any fully determined (and fully transparent) universe, were it only “distinct” to us, one worldline alone would retain sufficient reason to exist, and therefore only one ending could result from the infinitely interwoven arrangements of events and causes that preceded it in the underlying story.