the endless, luminous panorama surrounding me. I wanted to remember it
well. I intended, of course, to come again next day, but the old man was right:
I did not know what lay in store for me. What if something prevented me from
coming? What if a long time, several decades, passed before I happened to
climb the Cone again?
All fiction translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošic.
10
Annotations 2
At the very beginning of my creative writing course at the Faculty of Philology,
University of Belgrade, I used to ask my students a seemingly simple question:
“Why do we write prose?” Every time, there was a variety of imaginative
attempts to answer, but only rarely did they come near to the truth—that we
write prose because we still haven’t invented any better way to provide answers
to the most profound existential questions. No other discipline, artistic or
non-artistic, regardless of how illuminating it might be in this respect, can
really compete with the art of prose.
There is a very special kind of literary gnoseology that provides us with a
deep understanding of the complex and complicated dilemmas, ambiguities,
and paradoxes of human existence; much deeper in fact than those offered by
philosophy, religion, or the sciences. In the entire art of prose there are
basically only two main themes—love and death—around which everything
else circles. Is there any connection between our ability to love and our
mortality? Is the former a kind of compensation for the latter? Would we
still be able to love if we were immortal? You don’t have to be a philosopher, a
theologist, or a scientist to cope with these questions. Just read any great work
of literature. It is only there that you may hope to find truly good answers.
The art of prose is no less useful in handling ideas which apparently belong
to the domain of speculative thinking. Time travel, for example, or first
contact. In the 20th century, science fiction had its say about these two
themes. It was mostly imaginative and original, but certainly not all there
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
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Z. Živković, First Contact and Time Travel, Science and Fiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90551-8_10
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Z. Živkovic
was to say due to SF’s generic limitations. To avoid them, a new, non-generic
“fantastika” 1 was required, which started to take shape in the early years of the 21st century.
Being its humble practitioner, I had an opportunity to try to make the most
of the literary potential of the time travel and first contact themes. My mosaic
novel Time Gifts and short story “The Cone” are not about how to achieve
chronomotion (that would be SF), but whether it has any meaning. A human
meaning. Do those who receive various time gifts from a mysterious visitor
really benefit from them? Are they now any happier? Should an older version of
the protagonist disclose to his younger self what the future has in store for him?
Or is ignorance of the future the only thing that makes life possible?
Similarly, is there an aspect of first contact that has been overlooked or
neglected so far? We have approached the problem of the Grand Silence of the
Universe from all imaginable angles—save one. In my stories “The Puzzle” and
“The Bookshop” I used art as the key to the solution. Is a series of drawings
inspired by music the long-awaited signal from the stars that has finally
arrived? Is a literary work, barely written, able to provide a shortcut to another
cosmic island inhabited by Others?
Difficult questions that can be properly asked and answered solely by the
noble art of literature. It is only right that it should have the last word.
1 I decided to retain here the original Serbian term “fantastika” because apparently there isn’t a fully satisfactory English equivalent. The “fantastika” encompasses all non-mimetic types of narratives, in the sense that worlds imagined in the literary works of this sort don’t fully coincide with what is generally considered to be reality. According to certain statistical studies of literature, nearly 70 percent of everything that has ever been written belongs to one or another type of “fantastika.”
Document Outline
Preface
Contents
Part I: Essays First Contact
1: The Theme of First Contact in the SF Works of Arthur C. Clarke 1.1 Introduction
1.2 Three Short Stories 1.2.1 ``Report on Planet Three´´
1.2.2 ``Crusade´´
1.2.3 ``History Lesson´´
1.3 `À Meeting with Medusa´´ 1.3.1 ``There Is Life on Jupiter: And Itś Big...´´
1.3.2 Medusae and Mantas
1.3.3 Prime Directive
1.3.4 Noumen and Phenoumen
1.4 Conclusion
2: Utopia in Arthur C. Clarkeś Childhoodś End
3: Chronomotion
4: The Labyrinth Theme in Science Fiction
5: Annotations 1
Part II: Fiction 6: The Bookshop
7: The Puzzle
8: Time Gifts The Astronomer
The Paleolinguist
The Watchmaker
The Artist
9: The Cone
10: Annotations 2
Zoran Zivkovic - First Contact and Time Travel Page 24