does the usual sleep cycle (this time with dreams, including the bad ones as
well, if you are already inclined to them or if you have a bad conscience). If you
could observe the “external” world, it would seem to you that events go on
there at incredible speed. And in reverse, to those “outside” it would seem that
everything happening in your world would play out inconceivably slowly. But
this spying on one another is not possible. Two temporal streams are irrecon-
cilably split. In reality, that is.
Does the accelerated pace of movement through time offer any literary
consolation? Certainly. Human drama.
Above all, melodrama. Are there any more exciting melodramatic situations
than the meeting of close relatives in completely mistaken time phases?! For
example: Just after giving birth to her daughter, a young mother sets off on a
time dilation journey which will last only one year in her local time, but then,
when she returns, she will encounter the world from whence she came which is
twenty years older, so that she will meet her daughter who is now the same age
as she. (Ursula Le Guin, “Semley’s Necklace”.) In a literary sense, the idea
seems steadily attractive, although the terrain here has already been thoroughly
investigated, because the factor of estrangement is relatively simple.
The extreme cases of accelerated movement through time are those which
occur in (only genre allowable) points of reaching and exceeding the speed of
light. Would time then stop completely, or might it even begin to go
backward? Would one here achieve regression (or ‘progression’, depending
on one’s point of view) from old age to youth, and even further, to birth? (Dan
Simmons, Hyperion.) What comes before (that is, in this backwards view,
after) birth: death? Could it be considered that a man is dead before he is born?
The estrangement is much less restricted here, but it is not certain that the
human drama also grows proportionally. On the contrary. Everything in good
measure. Extremes are an uncertain means of support.
The genre also allows the possibility that temporal streams with different
rates of movement into the future do not remain separate after all, but that
they come into contact, interweave. What happens when a slow and a fast
temporal stream meet? What kind of influence can they have on one another?
Would the slower one be more authoritative than the fast one? (Roger Zelazny,
“The Great Slow Kings”.) Or, perhaps, is the opposite true? (Frank Herbert,
The Heretics of Dune.) The idea is not void of genre excitement, but it can seem
Chronomotion
47
to be a bit stretched, unconvincing. At least as fertile ground for high quality
human drama.
Finally, what is the last moment at which, in one of two accelerated ways,
one can arrive in the future? Is there, in and of itself, such a moment? The end
of time? The end of the cosmos? Does the idea of the end of time make any
sense whatsoever? What if time is not linear but cyclical? What if, instead of
advancing, the only place where it is appropriate to talk about the end, we have
an eternal returning, a melding of the end into a new beginning? This is
stepping into the area of ultimate questions, of cosmology, and here human
drama, after all, becomes secondary.
Or does it? It is not completely certain. Reading the novels of Olaf
Stapledon (Last and First Men, Star Maker) or some of Arthur Clark’s stories
(“Transcience”)—written under the influence of Olaf Stapledon—most cer-
tainly does not leave the reader indifferent. But what is exciting here is not so
much the human drama as it is the vision which reaches immeasurably beyond
human boundaries. The question remains open as to whether such visions can
possess literary value and also human drama.
So much for speed. Let us look at what happens with change in direction.
Specifically, movement from the future into the past.
One might say, at first glance, that in reality there is nothing to support such
an idea. No time machines, at least as far as we know, have been noticed
arriving from the future. Not now, and not at any earlier time.
This, to be fair, still does not mean anything. Perhaps the world is teeming
with such time machines but we do not notice them, because they either
directly or indirectly are not making their presence known, that is, they are not
influencing the past. Why don’t they? It is possible to come up with three
principle reasons: They don’t want to, they don’t dare to, or they are unable to.
If they dare to and are able to, but still do not want to, then only one cause
for that can be discerned. They are behaving as impartial observers who are
avoiding getting involved in any possible way with the object of their obser-
vation. Those would, actually, be the ideal historians: They have a chance to
directly study the past which they have absolutely no desire to desecrate by
interfering with it. (Connie Willis, Doomsday Book) Here there is plenty of
dramatic tension, but it is somewhat simplified: everything, actually, is
reduced to whether it is possible to retain complete indifference toward the
time being observed. The desire to take action in it can be truly powerful. It is
fertile ground for an exciting story, but it basically remains summarily simple.
If they want to and are able to, but do not dare to, then it can be supposed
that there is some sort of injunction keeping them from it. The purpose of the
prohibition could be the protection of the future which can be unexpectedly
48
Z. Živkovic
and irreparably disturbed if the fine weave of the past is changed even in the
slightest. Even the most harmless causes in this time can have truly heavy
consequences in a later one. (The “Butterfly Syndrome”; chaos theory.) In
order to avoid that, mechanisms or institutions are introduced to more or less
effectively protect the past. (Poul Anderson, “Time Patrol”, or Isaac Asimov,
The End of Eternity.) This is also not void of human drama, but in terms of the
genre it is a bit unsophisticated and old-fashioned.
Finally, if they want to and they dare to but are unable to, then most likely
there is a paradox at hand which, so it seems, is inescapably accompanied by
attempts to change the past. The most familiar among them is the following.
A man goes back into the past and either accidentally or intentionally causes
the death of one of his parents before he himself is conceived, thus thwarting
his own birth. But if he was never born, then he could not return into the past
and prevent his own birth by getting rid of one of his parents, so he was born
after all and returned into the past where he thwarted his own conception,
which means that he was never really born... And so forth. Reductio ad
absurdum.
This nonsensical mixing of cause and effect remains, judging by everything,
as the final prevention of altering the past from the future, but it does not stop
the writing of works for which time paradoxes are no kind of barrier. Those
paradoxes are simply not taken into consideration here. What improbable
results can then be achieved! (Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies. . .”.) The
problem, however, lies in the fact that here there is no real drama: it is mainly
just being clever and witty in the genre. Who will conceive of a more
perplexing thing than the others. A mere Gedankenexperiment, a thought
experiment.
In the end, what remains?
Clearly, the challenge in the genre is greater if changes are accepted not in
the speed but in the direction of movement through time. Ideally, a means of
influencing things in the past should be found while avoiding the paradox trap
which that influence implies. Is something like that at all possible? It is not, so
it seems, if there is a presupposition that there is only one primary stream
of time.
If, on the other hand, one thinks that there are several streams (an infinite
number), then the aforementioned paradox can be elegantly surpassed. In the
place where the past is changed, a branching out occurs: Along one
branch—the one from which a time-traveler sets out to intermingle “back-
ward” in time—the change has no influence (that stream has already played
out the way it did), but another, new branch appears which is completely
dependent upon the change. Transforming the past does not change,
Chronomotion
49
therefore, the future, but rather creates a new stream of time which exists in
parallel. (Ursula Le Guin, “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea”.)
This is a case of a first-class idea in the genre about a specific kind of chrono-
tree with literally infinite branchings and forkings. The axis of the powerful
dramatic tension here is created by the question of whether events in one
stream can affect events in another, that is, is it possible to move from one
stream into another? Likewise, what is the relationship between the different
versions of the same character in the different streams of time? Obviously, this
understanding of the chronomotion theme is also not bereft of the danger of
paradox, but that does not have to be crucial in a literary sense. Science fiction
is not an experiment in theoretical physics, but a work of fiction. And works of
prose allow paradoxes. In moderate doses, it goes without saying, and espe-
cially if they are well conceived.
Translated from the Serbian by Randall A. Major
4
The Labyrinth Theme in Science Fiction
In traditional literature, as well as in other likewise traditional forms of artistic expression, the theme of the labyrinth appears exclusively as a spatial phenomenon. In that context, it possesses three ontological properties which differen-
tiate it from other similar themes, for example the themes of wandering,
searching, that is, traveling in general.
The first property would be movement in a defined, enclosed space, which
essentially can have only two directions: toward the exit or back toward the
entrance. The second property would be the existence of a dead-end street, a
no way out of the basic peripatetic factors of the theme in question. Finally, the
third property of the labyrinth theme is the facilitation of essential change in
the protagonists during the story’s plot, which is, as literary theory teaches us,
an essential condition of good fiction: Protagonists are not the same at the
entrance and at the exit of the labyrinth.
Within the genre of science fiction, the theme we are discussing has
undergone a fundamental modification which caused certain alterations to
its ontological properties. In SF texts, the labyrinth theme is no longer a
locomotional (spatial) but chronomotional (temporal) phenomenon. Movement
from the entrance to the exit here, however, is also limited by a closed system,
which can also have only two directions: from the past toward the future, or
from the future toward the past. Time has no third dimension.
“The Labyrinth Theme in Science Fiction.” Written in 1980. Originally published in Serbian in 1981 in the monthly magazine “Delo”, 1–2 / 1981, 150–154, Belgrade, Serbia. First published in English in “Two Essays on Time Travel”, “Foundation” #127, Science Fiction Foundation, Harold Wood, Essex, UK, August 2017, 77–83.
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
51
Z. Živković, First Contact and Time Travel, Science and Fiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90551-8_4
52
Z. Živkovic
Yet, while both directions are possible in the model of the spatial variant of
the labyrinth theme—toward the exit or back toward the entrance—and they
are basically of equal impact, when discussing the temporal variant, there is one
significant difference which occurs in the existence of the dead-end street.
While in the spatial labyrinth it is possible to reach a dead-end street whether
one is moving toward the exit or toward the entrance, one can reach a no-way-
out situation in the temporal labyrinth exclusively while moving from the
future toward the past.
In that direction, the dead-end street appears in the form of certain logical
and causal paradoxes, retaining, however, its basic function as a peripatetic
factor. Finally, when discussing the third ontological property of the labyrinth
theme, in the temporal variant as well there is a transformation of the
protagonist, but in this case it is generally much more drastic than in the
spatial variant: in the first case, the change in the characters occurs exclusively
in terms of their weltanschauung, while in the latter they can change their
entire generic identity, mostly due to the effect of logical and causal paradoxes
related to the specific nature of the dead-end street within the temporal
variant.
It is obvious, therefore, that the focus of the chronomotional type of the
labyrinth theme lies in the factor of the dead-end street, which basically
appears only in one morphological type, with a wide range of variations. All
SF works which utilize the concept of movement from the future into the past
are faced with the obligation to take the following paradox into consideration.
A protagonist who lives in time A returns to the past in time B, where he does
something which will result in his disappearance from the future; this disap-
pearance is motivated by linear causality: the hero, for example, kills one of his
ancestors before he is able to leave his progeny behind, and thus the hero’s very
own birth is thwarted. The chain of causation, however, does not end there. If
the protagonist is not born, meaning that he did not exist in time A, then he
could not have possibly returned to time B and kill his ancestor there; and in
that case, the ancestor did manage to leave his progeny behind, and thus the
protagonist is inevitably born in the future!
Thus, we have a paradox, a dead-end street. If it is presupposed that he
returned to the past and killed his ancestor there, the protagonist could only be
born if he was never born! Contradictio in adiecto. We have been led there by
the disciplined application of linear causality, which is unmistakably in force in
the case of the spatial labyrinth: Namely, it has long been known that the
absolutely certain way of g
etting out of every closed system of this type,
regardless of how complicated it is—all one has to do is follow one wall,
starting at the entrance, and sooner or later one has to find the exit.
The Labyrinth Theme in Science Fiction
53
Here, cause and effect act in a linear fashion. There is, however, one
significant moment which is usually overlooked because it is not so obvious:
We said—sooner or later. In other words, between cause and effect there is
always a given temporal gap, only it is always true that the cause (in terms of
linear causality) comes before the effect. One cannot, namely, first exit from the
labyrinth and only then start following one wall beginning at the entrance.
Ultimately, cause and effect are, in every practical sense, simultaneous (when
you press the switch the light practically—although not really—goes on in
the room).
However, can such a sequence of cause and effect remain in force when
discussing chronomotion from the future into the past? It is clear that in this
case the linear flow of time does not work, in the sense that—already
depending on how we look at things—in certain cases the future precedes
the past. Concretely, if the act of murdering an ancestor is understood as a
consequence of the protagonist’s setting off from the future into the past then,
from the perspective of some sort of absolute time, it would seem that here the
consequence (in the past) preceded the cause (in the future), which is in
opposition to the fundamental principles of linear causality.
The objection could be made, however, that absolute time is not authori-
tative here, but rather the individual time of the protagonist. At the moment of
the ancestor’s murder, regardless of the fact that it takes place in the past, he is older than at the moment when, although it happens in the future, he set off
on his time travel. In that case, the cause would precede the effect after all and
linear causality would be preserved.
Accepting the authority of the individual time of the protagonist in defining
the chronological order of cause and effect confronts us, however, with another
difficulty. The individual time of the hero could serve as a valid measure for the
establishment of the order of cause and effect in chronomotive cases, if it were
Zoran Zivkovic - First Contact and Time Travel Page 9