What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Now a couple of specific spoilers, but still fairly mild ones:

  The thing about Nicole that I think best sums her up is that at the end of the book, when she is back in California, she goes into a bookshop to check whether she can really read Latin or whether the whole thing was a hallucination. She finds she can really read Latin. Then she goes out of the bookshop again! There she is, with the ability to look up the actual history and find out what happened next to people she saw what was for her literally yesterday, a bookshop where Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is very likely available, and she just walks out. This is typical of her whole attitude, even after the authors have piled calamities on her so that she has learned to thank people, and realize how nice hot showers, and doctors, and regular meals can be.

  I remember a friend of mine complaining about Thomas Covenant: “Any of us would give our right arms to be in the Land, and he goes about moaning and he won’t even believe that it’s real.” That’s my exact problem with Nicole—she’s had this marvellous opportunity and there she is so passive and ignorant that I want to kick her out of the way and do it myself and prove that women can be Martin Padway and not all Nicole Gunther-Perrin. (Also, I have had head lice. They’re not that bad.)

  We never learn what happened to Umma—she wasn’t in Nicole’s body, so where was she? Is she going to wake up the next morning in the lumpy bed with no memories of the last six months? Or what? I’d really have liked a hint. Also, I’d have liked a companion volume of “Umma spends six months in Nicole’s life” because I bet she would have coped just fine, though she might not have wanted to go home again.

  The world really is excellent. The history is accurate, and the daily life is as accurate as possible. If you can put up with Nicole, it’s terrific.

  JUNE 16, 2010

  111. Screwball-comedy time travel: John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice

  Corrupting Dr. Nice is about time travel and con games, it’s fast paced and funny, the chapter titles all come from classic screwball comedies, and it contains a cute dinosaur called Wilma. If you don’t want to read it already, you probably won’t care that it also has one of the best courtroom scenes ever, the trial of the apostle Simon for terrorism.

  Corrupting Dr. Nice is the kind of book that’s either your kind of book or it isn’t. I bought it because the British edition had a very striking cover. It shows a red car whizzing past a row of Roman legionaries with rifles standing by a city gate, plus an Ursula K. Le Guin quote—the combination got me. It doesn’t matter that this moment doesn’t occur in the book, it accurately represents the story, as does Le Guin’s comment “brilliantly intelligent, light-handed and warm hearted.”

  There are a lot of different ways of doing time travel stories. What Kessel does here is to take the idea of a very large but finite number of universes (137 splitting off every second) which he calls “moment universes.” Time travel to different moment universes, whether settled and exploited from the future or “unburned” and never visited before, is easy but controlled—you usually move from one stage to another, stay in tourist hotels, and visit the sights.

  This is in one sense a satire on tourism and exploitation of the third world, but along with that come the deeper implications of what it means to exploit different versions of the past. In the second half of the book we see what it’s doing to the future—it’s very hard for the ordinary people of the future to get a job when famous people from the past are available. The past might be full of locals begging for bacteriophages and televisions, but the future isn’t a nice place to live either—people are selling off organs to survive. This is a comedy, and it is full of comedic set-pieces, but it’s a better comedy for being set against a dark background.

  Dr. Owen Vannice (“Dr. Nice”) is the son of very rich parents, a klutz, and a palaeontologist who spends most of his time in the Cretaceous. He has a trusty bodyguard and sidekick, Bill, who happens to be an AI inside his head who can take over his body from time to time.

  Genevieve Faison and her father, August, are con artists. Owen steals a baby apatosaur and illegally takes it forward through time. He meets Gen and August in the tourist hotel in first-century Jerusalem. They decide to scam him and things get complicated from there on, with the story involving true love, revenge, disguise, and of course the baby dinosaur.

  With this setup, Kessel is potentially facing the “Riverworld problem”—if you can have anyone from any time in history, all mixed together, then what do you do with them? What he does works very well—he sticks to his protagonists from the future, Owen and Gen, and to Simon the apostle, who when we first meet him is working in the kennels of the hotel.

  We see Jesus, Lincoln, Mozart, Freud, Jung, etc. in passing, enough to pull off the joke and create the illusion of a world full of people that people in the near future would think are worth the trouble of “rescuing” from their own contexts, but we don’t see enough of them to get bogged down. Feynman being recruited as the drummer for Mozart’s band is a good one-line joke, that’s all it needs and all it gets. Same with Jesus’ talk show—Kessel mentions it, we don’t need to see it. This is a believably complex future world, with time travel and with protesters against time travel, with neo-Victorians, with downloadable personalities and implantable AIs, and with James Dean working as a receptionist because he got fat at forty. You sail through it so quickly that it all glitters past.

  On the human emotional level, I am seldom convinced that characters in romantic comedies who have deceived and tricked each other will be redeemed by love and remain together happily, and this is no exception. It isn’t a problem, especially as the Simon strand ends so well, but I think Kessel was right to stop where he did and not a moment later.

  I picked this up now because I was thinking about time travel. Them Bones and Household Gods both have time travel that doesn’t work very well. Corrupting Dr. Nice has time travel that’s well understood and works really well and can bring people and objects from the past, and is still not helping. This is in the Paratime tradition though it doesn’t have alternate universes until time travelers have started to mess them up.

  JUNE 24, 2010

  112. Academic Time Travel: Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog

  Like Corrupting Dr. Nice, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a comedy about time travel. But while Kessel’s model was the screwball comedy movie, Willis’s was Jerome K. Jerome’s gentle Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat. Like Willis, I was alerted to the existence of Three Men in a Boat by the mention of it in Have Space Suit, Will Travel, unlike her I’ve never been able to get through it. If I hadn’t already been sure I liked Willis, I wouldn’t have picked this up the first time. Fortunately, I was sure, and even more fortunately this is enjoyable even if Jerome makes you want to tear out your hair.

  To Say Nothing of the Dog takes place in Willis’s “Firewatch” universe, along with her earlier Doomsday Book and more recent Blackout (and much anticipated All Clear). In this universe, there’s time travel but it’s for academic research purposes only. It’s useful to historians who want to know what really happened, and experience the past, but otherwise useless because time protects itself and you can’t bring anything through the “net” that will have any effect. The thought of time tourists hasn’t occurred in this universe, or rather it has been firmly squelched—and just as well, considering the problems historians manage to create all on their own.

  Despite having time travel and time travel’s ability to give you more time, Willis’s historians seem to be like my family and live in a perpetual whirlwind of ongoing crisis where there’s never enough time for proper preparation.

  To Say Nothing of the Dog is a gently funny book about some time travelers based at Oxford in the twenty-first century dashing about Victorian England trying to fix a glitch in time, while at home Coventry Cathedral is being rebuilt on Merton’s playing fields. Like all of Willis’s writing, it has an intense level of “I Want To Read It,” that thing whe
re you don’t want to put the book down. With this book she succeeds in a number of difficult things—she makes a gentle comedy genuinely funny, she has time travel and paradox without things seeming pointless, and she almost successfully sets a book in a real country not her own.

  There aren’t going to be any spoilers in this review, but I should warn you that the book itself contains spoilers for Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night.

  To Say Nothing of the Dog is charming. It’s funny and gentle and it has Victorian England and severely time-lagged time travelers from the near future freaking out over Victorian England, it’s full of jumble sales and beautiful cathedrals and kittens. This is a complicated funny story about resolving a time paradox, and at the end when all is revealed everything fits together like oiled clockwork. But what makes it worth reading is that it is about history and time and the way they relate to each other. If it’s possible to have a huge effect on the past by doing some tiny thing, it stands to reason that we have a huge effect on the future every time we do anything.

  The evocation of Victorian Britain is quite successful, the only place it falls down is the way they go to Coventry, from Oxford, just like that. I’m sure Willis had a Bradshaw railway timetable open before her and every train she mentions exists, but British people, whether in the nineteenth century or for that matter now, know in their bones that a hundred miles is a long way, and do not just take off lightly on an expedition of that nature, even with spirit guidance. That’s the only thing that rings really false, which is pretty good going for an American. There is the issue of the lack of mobile phones in the future, which is caused by Willis having written Doomsday Book before cell phones took off, and which I think is one of those forgivable problems, like the astonishing computers in old SF that have big spools of tape that can hold 10,000 words each!

  I read this the first time because it’s Willis, and really I’m just going to buy whatever she writes because she’s that good. I re-read it now as part of my continued contemplation of useless time travel. Willis’s continuum protects itself: actual changes and paradoxes may be built into it but the real purpose of time travel seems to be to help people to learn lessons about themselves. There are no alternate universes, no “moment universes” and while there’s often a threat of a change that will change everything, time itself is resilient. It’s possible (from Blackout) that she’s doing something more than this with time and the drops, if so, I’ll be interested to discover what it is.*

  JULY 1, 2010

  113. The Society of Time: John Brunner’s Times Without Number

  John Brunner’s Times Without Number (1969) is a surprisingly short book, and the ideas are the best part of it. It’s 233 pages and if it had been written today it would be at least twice as long. It wouldn’t be any better for it. This is minor Brunner but I’ve always been fond of it, and it seemed to fit with all these other things I’ve been reading recently about useless time travel.

  The Society of Time is an organization founded to take control of Time Travel. They’re kind of time-traveling Jesuits—which isn’t surprising, as they live in a world where the Spanish Armada conquered England, with the Spanish thereafter getting kicked out of Spain by a second Muslim conquest, and where their allies the Mohawks are the dominant people in North America. Don Miguel Navarro is an obedient servant of the emperor of Spain, a licentiate of the Society of Time, and a good Catholic. He goes into time to observe, without changing anything even by speaking to anybody, because any little change could be disastrous. Of course, things don’t go as planned.

  The thing about time travel here is that time can be changed, it has no elasticity or protective mechanisms, and nor are there multiple universes. Time travel works and isn’t useless—you can go back to the past and mine resources that are under your enemy’s control in the present, and bring them back to the future. But woe betide if you change anything—if you’re doing the mine thing, better go for seams not yet worked. You can also change your own personal timeline—if there’s a disaster you can avert it if you can find a place to change things before it happened—at the cost of having memories of something that never happened and no memory of the “real” past. And there are alternate worlds, made by careful experimenting and then putting everything back exactly the way it was, and for purposes of study only, as there can be only one world at a time.

  Brunner introduces these ideas one at a time, and always through the devout and honest Don Miguel, who isn’t always all that quick on the uptake. This starts off seeming like a simple story of an alternate world, and gets more complex as it goes. The end, when you reach it, is simultaneously surprising and obvious.

  It’s worth noting that here, as in Corrupting Dr. Nice, but unlike To Say Nothing of the Dog, the life of Jesus is of central interest—but it has been placed off-limits except to popes, for fear of changing anything.

  At one point Don Miguel muses that time travel is inherently unlikely, because once you have it there’s a temptation to make changes, and changes will eventually inevitably lead to a future in which time travel is not invented, like a snake swallowing its own tail. This is a view of the futility of time travel that I hadn’t considered.

  JULY 5, 2010

  114. Five Short Stories with Useless Time Travel

  I want to consider a selection of short stories on the theme of useless time travel. In SF, often a lot of the best work has always been at short lengths. I’m going to talk about Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” (1956), Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (1958), R. A. Lafferty’s “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” (1967), Robert Silverberg’s “House of Bones” (1988) and Robert Reed’s “Veritas” (2002).

  All five of these are excellent stories, all of them are thought provoking, and they’re all in dialogue with the novels I’ve been discussing. Most of them have been much collected and anthologized and are easy to get hold of, but the only copy of “Veritas” I have is in an old Asimov’s.

  What I mean by useless time travel is time travel that doesn’t change anything—either where somebody goes back in time and stays there without making any difference, or time travel that changes itself out of existence, or time travel that is in some other way futile. I don’t just mean changing time. In books like Butler’s Kindred where the protagonist saves the lives of her ancestors but doesn’t otherwise affect the world, time travel still serves a useful purpose.

  “The Man Who Came Early” is notable for being from the point of view of the locals who meet the stranded time traveler and are not impressed by him. Anderson is taking the Lest Darkness Fall model and saying no to it, showing a man from the future failing to make any headway among the Norsemen. His protagonist is even less successful than Tarr and Turtledove’s Nicole, who at least makes it home.

  In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” it is the nature of time itself that confounds time travelers—history is personal, in Bester’s memorable metaphor it’s like a strand of spaghetti for everyone, and when you change history you become like the spaghetti sauce, detached from the world. So you can go back in time and change it, and it doesn’t change it for anyone except yourself. Very clever, very funny, and quite chilling when you think about it. Typical Bester.

  “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” is typical Lafferty in that it’s very weird, very clever, and impossible to forget. It’s the traditional three wishes fairy tale told with time travel and making changes, with the twist that after the changes have been made the time travelers are unaware of any changes, though the reader can see them plainly. The time travel isn’t useless, but it appears to be, and ultimately everything returns to the way it was.

  “House of Bones” is about a time traveler stranded among cavemen and Neanderthals, learning a lesson about what it means to be human. He doesn’t change history and he doesn’t go home, and so it’s all useless in that sense, but it’s a surprisingly heartening story nevertheless, and I’d list it among Silverberg’s very best. Silverberg
has written plenty of other things about time travel, but it’s usually useful.

  “Veritas” is set in a world that has easy time travel to “moment universes” as in Corrupting Dr. Nice. Once you’ve gone into a universe, you can’t get back to your starting point. The story concerns some young men who go back to conquer Rome, and end up with a mission to spread Romanitas over as many worlds as possible. It’s futile, or perhaps quixotic, because there are an infinite number of worlds, and they can never revisit any of them to see what happens.

  JULY 8, 2010

  115. Time Control: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

  Asimov published The End of Eternity in 1955, and so it’s short—my 1975 Panther edition is 155 pages, and cost 35p or $1.25 Canadian, and features a typical British paperback SF Chris Foss generic spaceship cover that has absolutely nothing to do with the book. It’s a fast read, I got through it in a couple of hours, and still an interesting one. Asimov was incapable of being boring. I hadn’t read it in a long time, and I only remembered the skeleton of the plot and one telling detail.

  Time travel was invented in the twenty-third century, and Eternity was founded a few centuries later. Eternity stands outside Time, observing and messing about with it, to make the one and only reality the best of all possible worlds. Eternals are drafted from Time—they are people whose absence from history makes no difference. They’re all men, because you seldom find women in that position. (This is firmly stated, and it’s necessary for plot reasons, but I raise my eyebrows at it every time.) Time travel works only between centuries in which Eternity exists, you can’t go back further than that. So what we have here, astonishingly, is a time travel book that is all about the future with nothing about history at all.