Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Of course, the question remains open whether, or to what degree, a fictional narrative is a fully determined universe, and whether, either in fiction or reality, any distinct observation of deterministic lines is possible or even imaginable. Such questions are especially pressing within alternate universe stories, which literalize their means (here, a Crosstime ship and a “unique signal” on a gauge) for creating and observing multiplicity and contingency, just as a time travel paradox story like Silverberg’s or Moorcock’s literalizes its means for creating narrative lacunae or historical precedence. In this sense, Niven’s story is very much like a quantum theorist’s thought experiment in which hypothetical conditions of observation (or “measurement”) are constructed and played out—a “Schrödinger’s cat” of narration, literally depicting both the radical epistemological ambiguity of narrative alternates and the aesthetic means of their final collapse into genre.

  Let us be quite precise about what is at stake in the ontological game Niven plays here. In one of the responses to Hugh Everett’s “relative state” or “many-worlds” thesis, which I mentioned above, John Wheeler notes that Everett’s formulation of quantum theory has the effect of eliminating any possibility of a useful “external observer” for whom “probabilities are assigned to the possible outcomes of a measurement,” and who could therefore determine which result, or “line,” is the most likely consequence of an observed event.38 The status of observation in quantum theory is of course a matter of extensive analysis, and nothing to be taken for granted. However, as Wheeler suggests, the traditional Copenhagen interpretation does still posit an “ultimate” determination of that outcome “by way of observations of a classical character made from outside the quantum system”39—in brief, the system “collapses” onto a definite state when measured. Everett’s model differs: “Every attempt,” as Wheeler asserts, “to ascribe probabilities to observables is as out of place in the relative state formalism as it would be in any kind of quantum physics to ascribe coordinate and momentum to a particle at the same time.”40 Indeed, Everett’s theory has the effect of further exposing the arbitrariness of the imputation of “some super-observer” who is seemingly required, within the more canonical Copenhagen interpretation, to correlate, with one of the myriad possibilities prompted by a quantum event, a single measurement of that event in the physical world, taken with “classical” equipment.41 In a nutshell, Everett’s “relative state formalism” or, more broadly, the “many-worlds” interpretation overall, contrives to describe the full range of myriad possible outcomes of an event, but declines ever to offer an ontological basis for adjudicating or “collapsing” them42—declines, in other words, to offer what Niven offers (at first) his fictional Crosstime pilot, that “unique signal” for separating and distinguishing the various potentially observed lines, and for selecting which of them to narrate as actual. In a sense, Niven’s “signal” literalizes what the Copenhagen interpretation demands but Everett’s formulation prohibits: a pragmatic means of super-observation, and therefore of finally deciding how the story is supposed to go or was supposed to have gone.

  Ultimately, therefore, the interesting thing about alternate universe fiction is that, unlike the actual spacetime continuum (or perhaps more like it than we realize), it does offer “unique signals” for adjudicating lines of possibility, in the form of conventions of narrative structure. Among these is the vague conglomeration of half-conscious generic rules out of which both writer and reader form the sense of an ending, rules that conventionally call for guns to be fired or crimes to be solved. Although the three final lines of Niven’s story are ontologically simultaneous, their specific concrete sequence in the text, and therefore their diachronic order in the plot, is nonetheless fairly strictly constrained by genre. One of the lines, namely the one that appears last on the physical page of the story, is its de facto ending: Gene Trimble blows off the top of his head. The sequence of noir detective elements that leads to this generically consistent conclusion is in turn governed by broader structural rules that tend to favor melodramatic escalations of violence near the climaxes of detective fictions. The explanation of why this should be the case might require us to traverse the entire oeuvre of structuralist narratology, with a healthy portion of genre history appended. I necessarily touch on only a small, but I hope significant, portion of that literary-theoretical landscape in this book. In a very powerful sense, the story ends as an illustration of itself, a visual diagramming rather than a telling of its possible outcomes. In my final two chapters, I discuss at length how and why time travel and alternate universe stories become “visual” in this way, depictions rather than narrations of their own fabulas. That discussion will involve, among other things, taking far more seriously and literally than narrative theorists sometimes do the structural and physical attributes of the odd term “viewpoint.”

  For the moment, given the specific philosophical apparatus of quantum mechanics and observability that Niven’s story confronts, we may pursue this question narrowly by inquiring further about the free-indirect narrative observer who tells the tale, and whom the text itself exposes for severe critical scrutiny. For the quantum theorist, of course, the matter of who observes, and from what position or frame an observation is made, can never be mere postulate but must enter directly into both the calculations and the theorization of the event itself.43 In the many-worlds interpretation, an observation remains rigorously within the system at hand, never outside of it, which is to say it remains precisely what it is to begin with in the history and aftermath of the quantum event: a physical fact rather than a hypothetical position or act. Hence, within the rigorously physical interpretation of quantum formalism provided by Everett and his followers, there is no possibility of a free-indirect viewpoint that could compare and contrast different lines of probable event-histories. Such a viewpoint would be precisely as unphysical as any other posited means of “collapsing” the possibilities onto a single measurement.

  The unphysical “super-observer” who would (hypothetically) be capable of determining which event-histories are more probable than others, and, ultimately, which history is the correct description of the event, corresponds to the godlike viewpoint depicted in Leibniz’s description of a determined universe: from its perspective, only a degree of unclarity about the sufficient reasons for events, an unclarity from which the super-observer alone would be exempt, creates the illusion that more than one line is possible. In the metaworld of all possible worlds, into which presumably only a god has a fully clear vista, the “unique signal” of each worldline shines out with the singular exactitude of logic itself, on an infinitely discernible continuum of possibility. But, to ask a question that anticipates my later discussion, how close is such a god to the entirely mundane position we describe as the narrator’s point of view—how necessary, therefore, might such a god’s perspective be to the telling or viewing of any story? The fact that the metaworld of the god’s-eye view may be unphysical44—indeed, the fact that its inhabitation is rigorously excluded by the same philosophical framework that Niven adopts in order to construct a time travel or multi-universe story, the implications of which he finds so “horrible”—does not in the least prevent him from narrating the story from the viewpoint of that metaworld, in which the story of all stories, as it were, may be transmitted. “All the Myriad Ways”—and not just it, but finally any story that juxtaposes the fictional to the historical, the alternate to the real—is essentially a “super-observation” of multiple worlds, and (usually) a set of decisions about when and how to collapse them.

  Contexts, methods, directions

  I wish to mention briefly some of the fields of inquiry in which the problem of time travel has especially been of interest, and at the same time some of the contexts for the cross-disciplinary synthesis I intend to fashion in the chapters to follow.

  There are two popular genres in which time travel has long played a significant role, science fiction and the romance nove
l. In modern romances, the time travel plot is almost exclusively a transportation medium: the hero or heroine is carried to or from a particular future or historical past, or is visited by a counterpart from that other time; some (usually) heterosexual liaison ensues. Because neither technologies of time travel, nor historicity per se, nor problems of narrative, tend to be immediately at stake in this highly regularized fiction, I will have little occasion to discuss it here, despite its considerable theoretical interest in other domains of literary studies.45 By contrast, science fiction writers—at least after a certain historical point, as I shall detail shortly in Chapter 1—tend much more often to emphasize, over and against a political or erotic agenda, the mechanisms and significance of time travel itself, as well as its psychological, narratological, and historiographical implications. This is the case even though the viability or acceptability of time machines within the genre has been a fraught topic from at least the advent of “hard” science fiction in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Science fiction authors are divided over the generic and/or aesthetic question of whether time travel counts as proper science fiction or as “mere” fantasy, and critics have perhaps too quickly followed suit, continuing to debate whether time travel plots are legitimately “hard” or realistic.46 Robert Silverberg himself writes in 1967:

  Among some modern science-fiction writers, stories of time-travel are looked upon with faint disdain, because they are not really “scientific.” The purists prefer to place such stories in the category of science-fantasy, reserved for fiction based in ideas impossible to realize through modern technology.47

  For reasons that should become clear in my brief mention of current physics to follow, as well as in my longer discussion of the origins of time travel fiction in nineteenth-century utopian romance in Chapter 1, I am not very concerned with debates over the putative hardness of time travel stories, debates that seem to me both inconsequential and obsolete alongside what I perceive to be time travel fiction’s potential contribution to narratological study. The essence of time travel fiction, for the purposes of narrative-theoretical work, lies in its specific methods of constructing and juxtaposing narrative registers, layers, or lines. These methods may or may not correspond to the subgeneric or sub-subgeneric classifications of time travel stories and their paradoxes that enthusiasts (I include myself) are inclined to contemplate or dispute. Leaving such debates aside for now, the literary-critical scholarship dealing directly with time travel in science fiction is sufficiently finite to permit a summary here. I am aware of only two comprehensive books on the topic, Bud Foote’s The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction and Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, along with a number of more brief but superbly illuminating discussions by literary and film critics such as Katherine Hayles, Stanislaw Lem, Constance Penley, Brooks Landon, Vivian Sobchack, Garrett Stewart, and several others whom I will mention when their work bears on my analysis.48

  In general, literary theorists have been relatively indifferent to time travel fiction, even where their interests unmistakably verge on the sorts of narratological questions I have attempted to raise in my three examples above. As I mentioned initially, such a dearth of attention may turn out, in future retrospect, to have been somewhat surprising. For one thing, the basic question of “fictionality,” or of storytelling as “world-making,” is at least as old as the theory of narrative itself, if not considerably older; similarly inveterate is the poetic conception that narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, recoup or recover past time through a kind of cerebral or conceptual “travel.”49 One might also argue that certain theoretical problems in literary modernism—for instance, Proustian rechercher as an immanent theorization of the structure and psychology of storytelling,50 or Joycean and Woolfian experimentation with the spatial and temporal rearrangement of narrative forms—might have encouraged academic literary theorists to notice generic time travel fiction as an opportunity or a challenge. Of course, such notice would also require a broader shift in the object of academic literary study, from canonical texts to wholly popular and even pulp texts. This type of adjustment is proceeding apace in the academy, particularly in light of the multiplex and ironic temporalities of postmodern fiction, but is still relatively nascent, and more so in literary than in film studies. Nonetheless, it is possible to catalog, at least loosely, a series of contemporary narrative-theoretical problems that touch directly on the question of time travel, even where that question is not yet fully explicit—for instance, the problem of fictionality (Thomas Pavel, Wolfgang Iser), the problem of possible worlds and counterfactuals (Ruth Ronen, Lubomír Doležel), the problem of worldmaking and metafiction (Kendall Walton, Mieke Bal), the problem of modality and virtual reality (Marie-Laure Ryan, Monika Fludernik), and the problem of the relation between textuality and visuality (W. J. T. Mitchell, Garrett Stewart). All the theorists mentioned in these parentheses are allied with longstanding traditions of literary narratology, traditions that are in turn traceable to the formalist and structuralist underpinnings of nearly all contemporary literary theory; a continual benchmark is the work of Gérard Genette, itself grounded in both structuralism and Russian formalism. However, it may be telling that when contemporary narrative theorists refer to specific influences on their theories, such influences are often likely to come not from either literary theory or structural anthropology and linguistics but from analytic philosophy and logic.

  In analytic philosophy, time travel has enjoyed a cachet it lacks among literary theorists. Philosophers interested in problems of time, causality, and philosophical realism have very often invoked time travel scenarios as cogent thought experiments. I will have occasion to examine the technics of a few of these experiments, particularly where time travel fiction itself raises philosophical or quasi-philosophical questions of causality or paradox. For now, I will note that analytic philosophers have made use of time travel to elucidate a number of canonical problems in metaphysics and logic: causality and temporal direction (Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson), personal identity or continuity through time (Daniel Dennett, Arthur Danto), causality and realism (W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam), and counterfactuals and possible worlds (Nelson Goodman, David Lewis).

  An amenable touchstone for analytic philosophy is, of course, theoretical physics. Particularly with respect to questions of philosophical realism, a number of the philosophers just mentioned are directly concerned with theories of time and causality in quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and thermodynamics. Recently, however, philosophical speculation within physics itself has tended to outstrip strictly disciplinary philosophy, as a result of a burgeoning of speculations about time and causality following the work of Stephen Hawking in the 1980s and continuing with contemporary research into multiverse cosmologies and, among other topics, quantum computing. Thus, within physics itself, the once-benighted “fantasy” of time travel has experienced a surprising renaissance, and is now widely considered to be both a valuable logical exercise and a potential physical experiment. Such legitimacy is in turn reflected in science fiction, to the degree it tends to follow the lead of scientists. Where theoretical physics touches on questions of time travel and narrative, I will reference canonical work by Einstein, Bohr, Gödel, Heisenberg, Everett, and Hawking. And I will also have occasion to refer to certain more current lay depictions of physical theory, written mainly by physicists, that consider time travel both as an immediately pressing issue in itself and as an access to fundamental physical problems, for instance the interpretation of causality and the direction of time (Igor Novikov, Kip Thorne) and the feasibility of parallel universe or multiverse models (Richard Gott, David Deutsch, Brian Greene).

  Genre history

  I wish briefly to anticipate the unconventional, even slightly eccentric history of time travel fiction that I will be assembling alongside my analyses of specific theoretical problems within time travel stories.
The development of time travel fiction has an internal trajectory that proceeds somewhat independently from science fiction overall, in keeping with its relatively iconoclastic relationship with that larger genre. As I have begun to do in this Introduction, throughout the book I will be construing time travel fiction as a certain variety of self-conscious narratological self-depiction—what I will sometimes describe as a literalization of structuring conditions of storytelling, and eventually as a diagramming or even a “filming” of such conditions. In this specific sense, time travel fiction posits or projects its own culmination—which is not the same as saying that it ends—at the formal extreme to which such a narratological self-depiction might be pushed. Indeed, in my second “Historical Interval,” between Chapters 2 and 3, I suggest that it would already be possible to view the “closed loop” or “time loop” story, a form of paradox fiction that peaks in the early 1940s, as this culmination. I am far less concerned with the strict correctness of this revisionist historical claim, or of the watershed moment it posits, than I am with the assistance it might provide in delineating key theoretical problems within distinct periods or phases of time travel fiction. The configuration of these phases also has consequences for the way I organize my chapters in the book, so I want to sketch it briefly in advance. More detailed discussions of its implications will follow, especially in the first few chapters and “Intervals.”

  In each of its three phases, time travel fiction is influenced and even defined by specific developments in the popularization of science. The first phase I identify is that of “evolutionary” utopian travel, or of the “macrologue,” a term I explicate in the first chapter. It runs from the late 1880s to approximately 1905. This first phase commences with the rapid burgeoning of utopian romance following Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and concludes with the almost equally abrupt decline of utopianism around the turn of the twentieth century. During this phase, time travel is always a subsidiary narrative device, utilized in reaction to certain aesthetic and conceptual demands placed upon utopian fiction by the widespread popular reception of Darwinist models of social and political development. As I argue in my second “Historical Interval,” this subsidiary status is apropos even of the most famous time travel story of the period, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. The prominence of Darwinism, and of biology generally, impels a general shift toward specifically temporal models of sociopolitical extrapolation: plausible utopian futures must be directly “evolved” from actual present-day conditions, not merely envisaged or conjectured as potential replacements. Under such pressures, time travel framing narratives become a valuable, possibly indispensible means for writers to link present and future realistically, and thereby to legitimize social prognostications under the rubric of evolution. In my first chapter, I examine how and why time travel becomes the default frame for evolutionary utopian narratives, and I analyze the peculiar and fruitful narrative pitfalls created in the process.