by Rob Latham;
Only when the first phase of time travel as utopian macrologue is coming to an end, just after the turn of the twentieth century, does the time travel story per se begin to emerge as an autonomous type. Even so, for a long while time travel remains more fallout than innovation, an orphaned remainder of utopianism, stripped of its rationale as a bolster for evolutionary realism in romance fictions. Thus, even with its new independence, time travel fiction persists as a minor, somewhat frivolous adventure story type, often a mere comedic offshoot of scientific romance. In my first “Historical Interval,” between Chapters 1 and 2, I suggest an obscure, derivative, and entirely minor work as the exemplar of this somewhat inauspicious generic origin: Harold Steele Mackaye’s 1904 novel The Panchronicon.51 And I propose that we consider the early stages of the autonomous time travel story as an “interregnum,” awaiting a new governing cultural or scientific paradigm to replace the one lost with the waning of evolutionary utopia.
Such a paradigm arrives with the popularization of “the Einstein theory” of relativity in the 1920s, and hence the beginning of a second phase in the history of time travel fiction. What relativity physics provides, mainly, is a repertoire of new plot possibilities: temporal dilation or reversal, physical access to one’s own past or future (or alternate presents), viewpoints encompassing many or all possible worlds, “narcissistic” or “oedipal” meetings, and so on. With such narrative innovations, time travel stories start to focus intensively on the multiplication or recombination of narrative lines and worlds, a focus that was nascent in earlier time travel fiction but hardly ever indulged. Time travel now becomes, above all, a literature about the forms and mechanisms of storytelling itself, or what I have called a narratological laboratory. Noticeably, also, much of the sociopolitical motivation of earlier time travel fictions is sacrificed to this intensive concentration on form and narrative structure.
When time travel writers begin fully to embrace these narratological opportunities, the already self-conscious or quasi-parodic attitude toward plots that had characterized the early genre progresses toward a certain splendid excess. The result is what is sometimes called the “time loop” or “closed causal loop” story, an invention of 1930s pulp writers in which it is impossible to determine whether a cause precedes or follows its effect; such stories become standard fodder in the pulps by the early 1940s. Overall, I identify this second period of time travel fiction as its “paradox story” phase, and discuss some primary examples of its development in the second chapter, from the early use of “the Einstein theory” in G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s mid-1920s fiction to its culmination in the loop stories of the 1930s and 1940s.
The third phase of time travel, which is comparatively amorphous, I designate with the deliberately broad term “multiverse/filmic.” It encompasses a range of story subtypes that follow upon the advent and triumph of paradox fiction in the midcentury. Some of these subtypes are revisionist or parodic versions of the loop story; others are quite serious forays into the psychological or narratological implications of paradox fiction; still others attempt to pursue more current physical theory, from quantum gravity to ekpyrotic cosmology. The variety of thematic and narrative concerns that occupy time travel writers roughly in the postwar period and up to the present are the subject of the final four chapters of the book, as well as the “Theoretical Interval” between Chapters 4 and 5. Let me only briefly note two of the crucial aspects of this period: first, the growth of popular time travel film and television, which has flourished more than ever in the past couple of decades, and, second, the recent scientific legitimization and popularization of multiverse physics and cosmology, which has revitalized both time travel paradox stories and alternate or multiple universe stories. The second half of my book is substantially concerned with time travel within visual media, and especially with time travel fiction’s capacity to represent, or even intrinsically to theorize, problems of visual perspective and viewpoint in narrative fiction and film. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 offer readings of, respectively, an illustrated text of Samuel Delany’s novella Empire Star, several episodes of the Star Trek franchise, and the film Back to the Future. The “Theoretical Interval” briefly discusses what I assert is the primacy of the visual in time travel narrative.
Finally, the Conclusion offers a series of suggestions about a possible “last time travel story,” intended to hypothesize the trajectory of both time travel fiction itself and the narrative theorizations that follow in its wake. My final reading—a closing complement to the three readings I offer in this Introduction—is of Harlan Ellison’s short story “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty,” along with the new exegetical layers generated by its adaptation for the 1980s Twilight Zone television series, and by Ellison’s own DVD commentary. The fact that time travel fiction lends itself to such hybrid textual/visual reconfigurations is no coincidence; indeed, time travel’s inherently intermediated composition is among its most provocative theoretical characteristics.
Notes
1. Robert Silverberg, Up the Line (New York: Ballantine, 1969), pp. 186–87.
2. Of course, I am momentarily ignoring the story’s other extraordinary event, Jud’s liaison with his own ancestor. I will revisit the significance of such oedipal or quasi-oedipal encounters espe- cially in Chapter 6.
3. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009), p. 217.
4. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans, Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980), p. 35.
5. Jonathan Culler offers a useful survey of the varieties of this distinction in structuralist theory and narratology, as well as of its basis in Russian formalism (see The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001], pp. 169–87).
6. Genette, pp. 35–47; see also Bal, pp. 82–88.
7. Genette describes the sacrosanct position of the fabula in “classical” narrative, a type that he considers opposed to post-Proustian modern narrative, as “domination” by fabula. Speaking of instances in Proust in which “the time of the story ... regains its hold over the narrative,” Genette writes, “It is in fact as if the narrative, caught between what it tells (the story) and what tells it (the narrating, led here by memory), had no choice except domination by the former (classical narrative) or domination by the latter (modern narrative, inaugurated with Proust)” (pp. 156, 156n).
8. Note that John Brunner suggests a similar theme in his novel Times Without Number (New York: Ace, 1969): “[T]here were three zones of history which had exercised an obsessive fascination on temporal explorers ever since the Society was founded. One, inevitably, was the beginning of the Christian era ... but access to Palestine of that day was severely restricted for fear that even the presence of non-intervening observers should draw the attention of the Roman authorities to the remarkable interest being generated by an unknown holy man, and cause Pilate to act earlier than the Sanhedrin, according to the written record, had desired” (p. 145, Brunner’s ellipsis).
9. Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man (New York: Avon, 1968), pp. 26–27.
10. Ibid., p. 49.
11. White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23.1 (1984): pp. 1–33; the quotation is from p. 29. White is partly quoting Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
12. Moorcock, p. 135.
13. Ibid., pp. 145–46.
14. In an earlier book, I discuss a similar historiographical problem in the context of the forma- tion of philosophical canons and histories, and argue that critics and philosophers construct, through revisionist rereading techniques, histories of philosophy that must be seen as simultan- eously retroactive and proleptic, essentially texts with “no present.” See Wittenberg, Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001), especially Chapters 3 and 4 and the “Interlude.”
15. Laryry Niven, “All the Myriad W
ays,” in All the Myriad Ways (New York: Del Rey, 1971): pp. 1–11; the quotation is from pp. 6–7.
16. See Hugh Everett III, “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function” and “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” in in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, edited by Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973), pp. 3–140 and 141–9.
17. Bryce S. DeWitt, “Quantum Mechanics and Reality,” in Many-Worlds Interpretation, pp. 155–43; the quotation is from p. 161.
18. Niven, “All the Myriad Ways,” p. 7.
19. For an excellent discussion of incompleteness and fictionality, see Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Narrative Theory (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp.114–43. Also see Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmics: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), who usefully cites a number of sources in analytic philosophy for this definition of fictionality (pp. 22f).
20. Niven, “All the Myriad Ways,” p. 7 (Niven’s ellipsis and punctuation).
21. Niven, “Preface” (to “All the Myriad Ways”), in N-Space (New York: Tor, 1990), pp. 71–80; the quotation is from p. 70.
22. Ibid.
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (New York: Cambridge UP, 2001), p. 194.
24. Niven, “Preface,” p. 70.
25. Niven writes elsewhere that “a writer who puts severe limits on his time machine is generally limiting its ability to change the past in order to make his story less incredible” (“The Theory and Practice of Time Travel,” in All the Myriad Ways [New York: Del Rey, 1971], pp. 110–23; the quotation is from p. 111).
26. Niven, “All the Myriad Ways,” p. 7.
27. This question of simulacra is not entirely a common motif in time travel stories, but one that is occasionally invoked both in highly philosophical instances and in highly popular ones—or in some cases both. In the popular vein, compare Michael Crichton’s Timeline (New York: Ballantine, 2003):
“The person didn’t come from our universe,” Gordon said....
“So she’s almost Kate? Sort of Kate? Semi-Kate?”
“No, she’s Kate. As far as we have been able to tell with our testing, she is absolutely identical to our Kate. Because our universe and their universe are almost identical.” (p. 180)
28. Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 100.
29. Niven, “All the Myriad Ways,” p. 7.
30. This problem is cleverly elaborated in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons entitled “Time and Punishment”: Homer, upon returning in a time machine to a present that clearly diverges from the one he left—for instance, his family members now all have forked tongues—exclaims, “Ah, close enough.”
31. Keith Laumer, Assignment in Nowhere (New York: Berkley, 1968), p. 51.
32. Niven, “All the Myriad Ways,” p. 7.
33. Tzvetan Todorov discusses the difficulty of establishing any such “smallest narrative unit” (Introduction to Poetics, trans. Richard Howard [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981], pp. 48f). See also Eugene Dorfman, The Narreme in the Medieval Romance Epic: An Introduction to Narrative Structrues (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969), passim.
34. Niven, “All the Myriad Ways,” p. 10.
35. Ibid. (all ellipses Niven’s).
36. Ibid., p. 11 (Niven’s ellipsis). In the reprinted version of the story in Niven’s collection N-Space, the concrete arrangement of these lines on the page is altered:
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.
(“All the Myriad Ways,” in N-Space [New York: Tor, 1990], pp. 71–80; the quotation is from p. 80 [Niven’s ellipsis]).
37. See G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, in Philosophical Texts, trans. R.S. Woodhouse and Richard Francks (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), §60–62 (pp. 276–77).
38. John A. Wheeler, “Assessment of Everet’s ‘Relative Space’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” in Many-Worlds Interpretation, pp. 151–53; the quotation is from p. 151.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid, 152.
41. Ibid.
42. Wheeler, responding to Everett, states: “The word ‘probability’ implies the notion of observation from outside with equipment that will be described typically in classical terms. Neither these classical terms, nor observation from outside, nor a priori probability considerations[,] come into the foundations of the relative state form of quantum theory” (p. 152).
43. Again in Wheeler’s words: “The model has a place for observations only insofar as they take place within the isolated system. The theory of observation becomes a special case of the theory of correlations between subsystems” (p. 151).
44. There may be interpretations in which the inhabitation of a metaworld is not “unphysical,” albeit in precise and limited senses. In Chapters 3 through 5, I allude at greater length to the physical model of a metaverse, which in certain aspects parallels the metaworld imputed within the metaphysics of Leibniz’s Monadology. In “All the Myriad Ways,” Niven calls it a “megauniverse of universes” (p. 1).
45. For instance, see Diane M. Calhoun-French, “Time Travel and Related Phenomena in Contemporary Popular Romance Fiction,” in Romantic Conventions, edited by Anne K. Kaler and Rosemary Johnson-Kurek (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1999), pp. 100–12, on contemporary romance time travel; see Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991), for a more general discussion of the significance of the romance genre.
46. Paul J. Nahin, in Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), exhibits such a bias in his book on time travel, which, despite its admirable expansiveness, begins by severely limiting the possible domain of the study of time travel fiction: “In this book we are interested in physical time travel by machines that manipulate matter and energy in a finite region of space.... In addition, the machine must have a rational explanation” (p. 18, Nahin’s emphasis). Thus Nahin excludes, for instance, any story that uses “mind travel,” “dreams,” “drugs,” “freezing and sleeping [into the future],” “channeling,” “accidents” (as in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee), “illness” (as in Octavia Butler’s Kindred), “time portals that look like green fog,” “psi powers,” any technology lacking an “explanation” or a basis in “rationality and science,” and so on. Needless to say, such criteria preclude a great many narratives, time travel or otherwise, from critical scrutiny. Nahin’s bias, a quite common one in the context of “hard” science fiction, emerges most clearly in his tendency to equate “interest” with “hardness”: “More interesting—that is, more rational...” (p. 16); “...interesting to us because they are rational” (p. 21); “Interesting, yes, but it isn’t physics...” (p. 16), and so on. The canonical “hard” science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in Report on Planet Three, and Other Speculations (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), makes the point in a similar way, listing and judging the following catalog of “scientific” possibilities for fiction: “immortality, invisibility, time travel, thought transference, levitation, creation of life. For my part, there is only one of these that I feel certain (well, practically certain!) to be impossible, and that is time travel” (p. 173). Gregory Benford, an equally “hard” author who does write time travel, claims that “a science fiction writer is—or should be—constrained by what is, or logically might be” (“Exposures,” in In Alien Flesh [New York: Tor, 1988], pp. 231–47; the quotation is from p. 247). I discuss the applicability and
the limitations of a logical constraint on time travel narratives in Chapters 4 and 5. For useful historical discussions of the advent of “hard” science fiction, see Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), pp. 66–91, 99ff; and Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 74–91.
47. Robert Silverberg, “Introduction,” in Voyages in Time, edited by Silverberg (New York: Tempo, 1970), p. x.
48. See N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984), especially pp. 111–37; Stanislaw Lem, “The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring,” Science Fiction Studies 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 26–33; Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia,” in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, edited by Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991), pp. 63–83; Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1991), pp. 223–305; Brooks Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethnking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), especially 74–83; Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), pp. 122–63. I can mention in passing that there are, perhaps surprisingly, also a fairly large number of works dealing with supposedly actual time travel, either as something already accomplished or as soon forthcoming—usually with little basis in either science or literary theory, although sometimes with ties to various pseudosciences and to New Age metaphysics. For the most part, I deliberately decline to distinguish subtypes of the genre of science fiction here, for instance “hard” science fiction, new wave, cyberpunk, and so on, with the understanding that the genre of time travel fiction evolves relatively independently of these types, and to a great degree in an uneasy tension with the larger sociocultural history of science fiction. Some sense of this tension may be gleaned by noting the relative absence of discussions of time travel fiction as a distinct story type within excellent critical studies of science fiction such as Bould and Vint’s Concise History of Science Fiction, Luckhurst’s Science Fiction, or Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008). These critics mention time travel, for instance, as a “framework” for addressing other themes or sociopolitical issues (Luckhurst, p. 195; Luckhurst’s approach is relatively consistent with Suvin’s foundational understanding of science-fictional structuring as “cognitive estrangement”), or as a narrative means to permit “a conscious mortal being [to] return to its origins” or to imagine “the permeability of history” (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., pp. 99, 100). Such understandings of the usefulness of time travel within science fiction are, of course, compatible with my analysis of its functioning as a narratological laboratory, but they also help explain why time travel has tended to avoid falling into a distinct subgeneric niche within science fiction at large, and has instead cut across more clearly visible delineations of aesthetic, stylistic, and political subtypes.
