The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  Eno – along with his most notable collaborator in the ’70s, David Bowie – was an architect of ’80s new wave. One of his many disciples was the band Human League. Driven by synthesizers, robotic vocals, and the cryogenically frozen remnants of prog, Human League wrote “Almost Medieval” – a 1979 song obsessed with century-hopping and jumbled timelines – before morphing into a romantic, soft-pop band as the ’80s progressed. New wave was an amalgam of the punk, glam, and art-rock movements of the ’70s, so it only makes sense that the ’80s bands most conversant with time travel were comprised of actual ’70s holdovers. In 1980, former Hawkwind frontman Nik Turner led his punk-fueled freakout ensemble Inner City Unit through a frenzied song titled “Watching the Grass Grow”, which opens with the shrieked lines, “We are the survivors / The eternal survivors / Androgynous energies / Traveling through time!” A year later, the iconic Krautrock group Kraftwerk reached the zenith of its android-encased electronica. Their 1981 song “Computer World” mentions “time, travel, communication, entertainment” as four of the vectors of existence that will be precisely regulated in its cybernetic vision of the future. The fact that “time” and “travel” are mentioned in the same breath seems like no coincidence.

  Another band that came of age in the ’70s was Electric Light Orchestra. Led by mastermind Jeff Lynne, ELO became one of the ’80s most accomplished proponents of time-travel music. In fact, the band’s 1981 album Time is the first major concept album devoted entirely to time travel. The basic premise: A man from the 1980s is catapulted to the year 2095, where he’s confronted by the dichotomy between technological advancement and ages-old heartache. “Though you ride on the wheels of tomorrow,” Lynne sings poignantly on the Time song “21st Century Man”, “You still wander the fields of your sorrow.”

  After 1984 came and passed, the future seemed not so terrifying. That milestone had passed without major incident; it was time to start looking fondly backward – or at least recalibrating our sensibilities so that we realized, once and for all, that we were now living in the world of tomorrow. Cue Back to the Future. The 1985 film not only gave the musty old time machine a spiffy chrome finish, it produced one of the most recognizable time-travel songs of all time: the equally shiny “Back in Time” by Huey Lewis and the News, who, oxymoronically, played an entirely retroactive kind of old-school, meat-and-potatoes pop-rock.

  Catchy, cozy, and utterly unchallenging on a musical level, “Back in Time” ushered in a decade of music – the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s – that was relatively quiet in regard to time travel. The exception was heavy metal. Unafraid to keep the dread of the future and the wonder of the past alive, metal masterpieces like Fates Warning’s 1985 song “Traveler in Time”, Iron Maiden’s 1986 album Somewhere in Time, and Blue Öyster Cult’s 1988 album Imaginos reimagined time travel in harder, darker ways. In particular, Somewhere in Time has stood the test of time. Lean, menacing, and yet subliminally progressive, the album’s loose concept covers everything from memory to history to destiny – all aspects of the mercurial commodity of time.

  Perhaps because they were starting to feel the march of time themselves, many rock veterans worked time travel into their music from the late ’80s through the late ’90s. While alternative rockers like Nirvana to Beck became fixated on irony and emotional expressionism rather than high concept, prog legend Rick Wakeman and metal stalwarts, Black Sabbath kept time travel on life support – the former with his 1988 album Time Machine, the latter with their 1992 song “Time Machine”. (That formula would repeat itself in 1999, when prog legend Alan Parsons released his album The Time Machine and metal stalwarts Saxon unleashed their song “Are We Travellers in Time”.) Still, it was clear by the mid-’90s that that time-travel music had hit a slump.

  Then came Dr. Octagon. One of many alter egos assumed by the rapper Kool Keith, Dr. Octagon is both the creator and the main character of his 1996 album Dr. Octagonecologyst. Not only is it one of the most vital and enduring hip-hop albums of the ’90s, it almost singlehandedly revived the concept of time travel in popular music. In a scrambled conglomeration of genres and storylines, the album follows the twisted trajectory of its time-traveling, extraterrestrial doctor. Fans of Doctor Who might notice some basic similarities, but The Doctor is only one of many time-warping, science-fiction archetypes Dr. Octagon weaves into his dizzying mosaic of beats, rhymes, and spacetime.

  Inspired by that madcap genius, hip-hop crew Arsonists weighed in with their clock-spinning 1999 song “Rhyme Time Travel.” As if to offset those teeming expressions of lyrical acumen, the longstanding experimental project Coil recorded their 1998 album Time Machines. According to Coil’s leader, the late John Balance, the vocal-free, minimalist, electronic tones that make up the album might sound hypnotic, but they’re actually intended to induce a mental state that would facilitate time travel. With the help of choice hallucinogens, of course.

  As with 1984, the year 2000 defused much of the mystique surrounding a chronological milestone. If 1984 marked the end of yesterday, 2000 truly marked the start of tomorrow. Following the comical-in-hindsight panic that occurred during the buildup to Y2K, though, the 21st century wasn’t as terrifying as everyone thought it might be. (The fact that the year 2000 was technically part of the 20th century didn’t seem to bother anyone.) Then the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, cast a new kind of shadow across the future. Music grew either grim or escapist – but few musicians were thinking of time travel as thematic vessel for those impulses.

  Leave it to the cheerful, acid-damaged indie-rockers The Flaming Lips to breathe new life into time-travel music. With the post-9/11 clouds beginning to part slightly, there was a sliver of sunlight for The Lips’ 2006 song “Time Travel... Yes!!” to flourish. Released in no less than three different versions that year, the song features guest singer Steve Burns, former host of the children’s show Blue’s Clues. Accordingly, the song is breezily innocent in its celebration of skipping through time.

  The rise of geek rock in the new millennium was certainly inspired in part by the science-fiction whimsy of The Flaming Lips. But it was Barenaked Ladies that formed a cornerstone of that foundation. The Canadian pop band’s 1998 song “It’s All Been Done” is one of the more imaginative examples of time-travel music: the witty tale of two lovers who cross each other’s paths throughout time, only to wind up disenchanted. Geek rock’s rap-centric cousin, nerdcore, also came into prominence in the ’00s. And the subgenre’s prime mover, MC Lars, naturally dabbled in time travel; the title of his 2006 song “If I Had a Time Machine, That Would Be Fresh” pretty much says it all.

  But the most unique, involved, and innovative of all 21st-century musical time travellers is the avant-R&B artist Jonelle Monáe. The backstory of her 2007 album Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) is so elaborate, it might as well be the product of its own time-travel paradox. Actually, it sort of is: Like Dr. Octagon, Monáe obliterates the fourth wall in her interweaving of artist and character – to the point where she’s stated that the protagonist of her songs, the 28th-century android Cindi Mayweather, has traveled back in time to inspire Monae herself. She also draws sounds and/or inspiration from generations of Afrofuturists, from Sun Ra to Parliament Funkadelic to Grace Jones. To a far lesser degree, rapper T-Pain does the same with his 2007 song “Time Machine” – but what it lacks in complexity it makes up for in hooks, sweetness, and old-school nostalgia. And when rapper Dead Prez delivers Egyptological verses about hieroglyphics and the Eye of Horus in his 2012 song “Time Travel”, it completes the Afrofuturist circuit Sun Ra established over fifty years earlier.

  And the circle keeps on spinning. Indie-pop collective The Apples in Stereo released its geeky, infectious concept album Travellers in Space and Time in 2010 – and it’s a direct descendent of ELO’s Time from thirty years prior. A profusion of pop artists of all levels of notoriety have kept the time-travel flame alive in the 21st century. Mega-successful pop singer Robyn released the single “Time Machine�
� in 2007, complete with frigid, futuristic beats. On a more modest scale, NeverShoutNever and Blouse – both of whom released songs titled “Time Travel” in 2011 – have explored different sides of tomorrow-pop.

  Metal bands are still in on the time-travel act as well, with brutal groups like Agoraphobic Nosebleed and High on Fire slicing through the time stream with 2009’s Agorapocalypse and 2012’s De Vermis Mysteriis, respectively. And then there’s Mastodon’s masterful, metallic epic Crack the Skye. The 2009 album posits the traversal of spacetime via astral projection, much as Sun Ra did; the result is a voyage through a wormhole, back to czarist Russia, and into the soul of Rasputin.

  Like Sun Ra, Dzyan, and Coil before them, some current groups have found instrumental music to be the most efficient method of conveyance through time. The one-woman electronic project Motion Sickness of Time Travel – comprising Rachel Evans on tone generators, oscillators, and other supposedly archaic analog noisemakers – composes symphonic paeans to the temporal slipstream. Meanwhile the maestro known as Mickey Moonlight crafts uncategorizable albums such as 2011’s The Time Axis Manipulation Corporation, a kaleidoscopic blend of space-age kitsch lounge music and adrift-in-spacetime electronica. Even seasoned electronic artists like Thomas Dolby (of “She Blinded Me with Science” fame) have hitched their wagon to time travel – in Dolby’s case, literally. His 2012 Time Machine Tour was conducted in a chrome-plated trailer of his own design, a self-defined “time capsule” cobbled together from bits of technology from the past, the present, and presumably the future.

  As the 21st century loses its new-car smell, musicians intrigued by time travel must find new ways to interpret the musty old notions of H.G. Wells – and the recording limitations of the past. Where the evolution of recording formats, from the seven-inch phonograph to the compact disc, once gave artists more conceptual spacetime to play with, the ascendancy of digital recording and streaming means the cloud is the limit. Neither music creators nor listeners are beholden to outmoded interpretations of the future.

  The future, actually, doesn’t even have to be futuristic at all. The literary genre of steampunk has catalyzed a movement of music that acts as its unofficial soundtrack – a genre, not coincidentally, that counts Thomas Dolby as one of its godfathers. Thriving in the same anachronistic soup as the literature that spawned it, steampunk music draws from a variety of historical eras, past and future, both real and imaginary. Alternate history clashes with retro-futurism; Victorian and/or Edwardian values jostle with cybernetics and post-humanism. In most of 20th-century time-travel lore, paradox is a thing to be avoided or explained away as logically as possible. With steampunk, chronological quirk is embraced, not buried. So when a prominent steampunk group like Abney Park constructs an overarching meta-narrative about the band’s tenure on a time-traveling dirigible, it all plays into the immersive listening experience of being both audience and scientific observer. And when steampunk troubadours Vernian Process fuse together a panoply of centuries-spanning styles – from ragtime to progressive rock to trip-hop – the polyglot sound represents the fractured linearity and immediate accessibility of music in the digital age. Vernian Process’ 2013 album is titled The Consequence of Time Travel – and for the first time in the history of recorded music, it feels as though the possibilities of time-travel music are finally, fully being embraced with a sense of adventure.

  We are living, these old-fashioned, newfangled steampunks might say, in a post-chronological world. But this isn’t a new idea. As the brainy punk-pop band the Buzzcocks sang in their 1978 time-paradox anthem “Nostalgia”, “Sometimes there’s a song in my brain / And I feel that my heart knows the refrain / I guess it’s just the music that brings on nostalgia / For an age yet to come.”

  Or, in other words: To travel through music is to listen to time.

  A Time Travel Playlist

  13th Floor Elevators, “She Lives (in a Time of Her Own)”

  Abney Park, The End of Days

  Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Agorapocalypse

  The Apples in Stereo, Travellers in Space and Time

  Arsonists, “Rhyme Time Travel”

  Ayrean, Universal Migrator Parts 1 and 2

  Barenaked Ladies, “It’s All Been Done”

  Black Sabbath, “Time Machine”

  Blouse, “Time Travel”

  Blue Öyster Cult, Imaginos

  Brian Eno, Before and After Science

  Buzzcocks, “Nostalgia”

  Coil, Time Machines

  Dead Prez, “Time Travel”

  Dr. Octagon, Dr. Octagonecologyst

  Dzyan, Time Machine

  Electric Light Orchestra, Time

  Fates Warning, “Traveler in Time”

  The Flaming Lips, “Time Travel... Yes!!”

  Grand Funk Railroad, “Time Machine”

  Hawkwind, “Silver Machine”

  High on Fire, De Vermis Mysteriis

  Huey Lewis and the News, “Back in Time”

  The Human League, “Almost Medieval”

  Inner City Unit, “Watching the Grass Grow”

  Iron Maiden, Somewhere in Time

  Isis, “In Fiction”

  Jonelle Monáe, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)

  Klaxons, “Gravity’s Rainbow”

  Kraftwerk, “Computer World”

  Led Zeppelin “Kashmir”

  Mastodon, Crack the Skye

  MC Lars, “If I Had a Time Machine, That Would Be Fresh”

  Mick Softley, “Time Machine”

  Mickey Moonlight, The Time Axis Manipulation Corporation

  Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Eclipse Studies

  Muse, “Knights of Cydonia”

  Nena, “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann”

  NeverShoutNever, “Time Travel”

  Queen, “’39”

  Rick Wakeman, Time Machine

  Robyn, “Time Machine”

  The Rocky Horror Picture Show Cast, “Time Warp”

  Rush, “Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage” and

  “Cygnus X-1 Book II:Hemispheres”

  Steely Dan, “Pretzel Logic”

  Sun Ra and His Myth Science Arkestra, “Music from the World Tomorrow”

  T-Pain, “Time Machine”

  Uriah Heep, “Traveller in Time”

  Vernian Process, The Consequence of Time Travel

  “Weird Al” Yankovic, “Everything You Know is Wrong”

  Wings, “Backward Traveler”

  Zager and Evans, “In the Year 2525”

  COMMUNIQUÉS

  WHAT IF

  Isaac Asimov

  Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific and beloved science fiction writers of the twentieth century. In addition to his popular fiction, he wrote quite a lot of nonfiction. Some say he published over 500 books altogether. He had a knack for taking complex scientific ideas and presenting them so that the layman could understand these concepts. This story was first published in Fantastic Story Magazine in the summer of 1952.

  Norman and Livvy were late, naturally, since catching a train is always a matter of last-minute delays, so they had to take the only available seat in the coach. It was the one toward the front, the one with nothing before it but the seat that faced the wrong way, with its back hard against the front partition. While Norman heaved the suitcase onto the rack, Livvy found herself chafing a little.

  If a couple took the wrong-way seat before them, they would be staring self-consciously into each other’s faces all the hours it would take to reach New York; or else, which was scarcely better, they would have to erect synthetic barriers of newspaper. Still, there was no use in taking a chance on there being another unoccupied double seat elsewhere in the train.

  Norman didn’t seem to mind, and that was a little disappointing to Livvy. Usually they held their moods in common. That, Norman claimed, was why he remained sure that he had married the right girl.

  He would say, “We fit each other, Livvy, and that’s the key fact. When
you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and one piece fits another, that’s it. There are no other possibilities, and of course there are no other girls.”

  And she would laugh and say, “If you hadn’t been on the streetcar that day, you would probably never have met me. What would you have done then?”

  “Stayed a bachelor. Naturally. Besides, I would have met you through Georgette another day.”

  “It wouldn’t have been the same.”

  “Sure it would.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Besides, Georgette would never have introduced me. She was interested in you herself, and she’s the type who knows better than to create a possible rival.”

  “What nonsense.”

  Livvy asked her favorite question: “Norman, what if you had been one minute later at the streetcar corner and had taken the next car? What do you suppose would have happened?”

  “And what if fish had wings and all of them flew to the top of the mountains? What would we have to eat on Fridays then?”

  But they had caught the streetcar, and fish didn’t have wings, so that now they had been married for five years and ate fish on Fridays. And because they had been married five years, they were going to celebrate by spending a week in New York.

  Then she remembered the present problem. “I wish we could have found some other seat.”

  Norman said, “Sure. So do I. But no one has taken it yet, so we’ll have relative privacy as far as Providence, anyway.”

  Livvy was unconsoled, and felt herself justified when a plump little man walked down the central aisle of the coach. Now, where had he come from? The train was halfway between Boston and Providence, and if he had had a seat, why hadn’t he kept it? She took out her vanity and considered her reflection. She had a theory that if she ignored the little man, he would pass by. So she concentrated on her light-brown hair which, in the rush of catching the train, had become disarranged just a little; at her blue eyes, and at her little mouth with the plump lips which Norman said looked like a permanent kiss. Not bad, she thought.