TIME TRAVEL

   It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative viewpoint backwards or forwards in time, and writers have always been prepared to use whatever narrative devices come to hand for this purpose. Until the end of the last century dreams were the favoured method -perhaps most significantly deployed in Charles DICKENS's A Christmas Carol (1843) and Edgar Allan POE's "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844) -although entirely arbitrary timeslips were also used, while characters could be brought from the past into our own time via various SUSPENDED-ANIMATION devices, including CRYONIC preservation, extendedsleep and drugs, as in Grant ALLEN's "Pausodyne" (1881). H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895) was a crucial breakthrough in narrative technology,providing sf with one of its most significant facilitating devices, ultimately used in this instance to survey the kind of FAR FUTURE and END OF THE WORLD prophesied (erroneously) by contemporary scientificknowledge. The idea of employing a hypothetical MACHINE as a literary device, using a jargon of apology to add plausibility, was not entirely new, but this particular deployment of it was so striking as to constitute a historical break and a great inspiration. Oddly enough, Wells never again used such a device, leaving its further exploitation to others. The earliest writers to take up the challenge included Alfred JARRY in his classic essay in 'pataphysics, "How to Construct a Time Machine" (1899); the anonymous "A Disciple" (of Wells), who borrowed the machine in order to explore The Coming Era, or Leeds Beatified (1900); and H.S. MACKAYE, whose eponymous time machine in The Panchronicon (1904) is unashamedly ludicrous. Most UK writers of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, however, continued to prefer visionary fantasy as a method of time-exploration - E.V. ODLE's The Clockwork Man, (1923) is one honourable exception - and it was left to theUS pulp writers to show what really might be done with time machines if one had the imaginative daring to employ them. Even the pulp writers remained relatively modest in their time-jaunting until the 1920s, although William Wallace COOK's A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903 Argosy; 1925) deals sarcastically with the accumulation of time-travellersto be expected in the magical millennial year. MAINSTREAM WRITERS who found literary dreams becoming increasingly unfashionable had more and more recourse to arbitrary timeslips, and there is a curious subgenre of "timeslip romances" whose affective power is very often concentrated intolove stories, although the real emotional substrate is nostalgia. "Arria Marcella" (1852) by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), although its timeslipis "rationalized" as a visionary fantasy, provides an archetypal example of the peculiarly heated eroticism with which such stories are sometimes endowed. Henry James (1843-1916) spent the last few years of his life working on The Sense of the Past (1917), but left it incomplete; it inspired the play Berkeley Square (1929) by J.L. Balderston and J.C. Squire (1884-1958) which was memorably filmed in 1933. Other notabletimeslip romances include Still She Wished for Company (1924) by Margaret Irwin (1889-1967), The Man in Steel (1939) by J. Storer CLOUSTON, Portraitof Jennie (1940) by Robert NATHAN, Time Marches Sideways (1950) by Ralph L. FINN, Time and Again (1970) by Jack FINNEY, Bid Time Return (1975) byRichard MATHESON, The Dream Years (1986) by Lisa GOLDSTEIN and Serenissima (1987) by Erica JONG. "Psychological timeslips", by means of which protagonists are permitted to relive their lives with the aid of a mature and knowledgeable consciousness, are featured in The Devil in Crystal (1944) by Louis MARLOW, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1947) by P.D.Ouspensky (1878-1947), Replay (1986) by Ken Grimwood and Changing the Past (1989) by Thomas BERGER. Significant timeslip "anti-romances" include A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark TWAIN and Friar's Lantern (1906) by G.G. Coulton (1858-1947), the latter being written to dispel the nostalgic illusions about the Medieval Church harboured by G.K. CHESTERTON and Hilaire BELLOC. Within pulp sf, writers were quick to graspthe nettle, using time machines to explore both past and future, often venturing speculations about the nature of time. Even a mediocre pulp writer like Ray CUMMINGS could get entranced by such mysteries, although such romances as The Man who Mastered Time (1924 Argosy; 1929) - which obligingly defines time as "what keeps everything from happening at once" - and The Shadow Girl (1929 Argosy; 1947) cannot take such philosophizingvery far. Ralph Milne FARLEY, whose time stories - begun with "The Time Traveler" (1931) - were collected in The Omnibus of Time (1950), did alittle better, and John TAINE (a professional mathematician) set new standards of sophistication in The Time Stream (1931 Wonder Stories; 1946). Theories about the nature of time, especially those put forward byJ.W. DUNNE, also influenced non-genre writers - the most conspicuous example being J.B. PRIESTLEY, in his various Time plays - but the mainstream fictions inspired by that interest were understandably more modest.Certain periods of the past have always attracted time-travellers because of their melodramatic potential. The Age of the Dinosaurs was inevitably the biggest draw - even to people who could only stand and stare, like the users of the time-viewer in Taine's Before the Dawn (1934); it was later to become a favourite era for hunters, as in RayBRADBURY's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) and L. Sprague DE CAMP's "A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956). Meeting famous people has also been a favourite theme, and Manly Wade WELLMAN was the first writer to allow a timeslipping hero to become somebody famous, in Twice in Time (1940 Startling Stories; 1957). Some of the more scrupulous pulp writers thought that time travelinto the past really belonged to the realms of fantasy because of the TIME PARADOXES thus generated, and the first classic timeslip romance from agenre writer, De Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL (1939; 1941; rev 1949), was initially published in Unknown Worlds for this reason. Others had fewer scruples, and many writers gleefully set about exploiting the peculiar aesthetics of time paradoxes. In fact, despite the dubious propriety of its literary device, De Camp's novel - like Wells's THE TIME MACHINE - warrants serious consideration as sf because of the conscientious way in which it employs its displaced viewpoint, the protagonist here being used to explore the crucial but subtle role played in HISTORY by TECHNOLOGY.Inevitably, the main focus of pulp sf interest was in themelodramatic potential of time travel, as first displayed by Cummings and then taken to exotic extremes by such writers as John Russell FEARN, in Liners of Time (1935 AMZ; 1947), and Jack WILLIAMSON, in his pioneeringstory of WAR between ALTERNATE WORLDS, THE LEGION OF TIME (1938 ASF; 1961). Timeslipping was similarly taken to extremes in Murray LEINSTER's"Sidewise in Time" (1934), in which whole regions of the Earth's surface slip into anachronistic conjunction - an idea later redeployed by Fred HOYLE in October the First is Too Late (1966). Individuals and objectstimeslipped from the future cause havoc in the present in a number of famous sf stories, including "The Twonky" (1942) and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE),"Child's Play" (1947) by William TENN and "The Little Black Bag" (1950) by C.M. KORNBLUTH. These stories appeared during the period when the elementary plot-possibilities of time paradoxes were also being comprehensively explored. The cavalier use made of time travel by the early genre writers did beg certain important questions; the language problem which would be faced by time-travellers was overlooked until De Camp pointed it out in "The Isolinguals" (1937) and his essay "Languagefor Time Travelers" (1938), and was frequently ignored thereafter, although this too became a plot-gimmick in the 1940s, in such stories as "Barrier" (1942) by Anthony BOUCHER. Other sharp idea-twisting stories ofthe period include C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season" (1946) as by Lawrence O'Donnell, in which future time-tourists are drawn to our NEAR FUTURE forreasons which ultimately become clear, and T.L. SHERRED's "E for Effort" (1947), which sets out with compelling logic the reasons why the inventionof a time-viewer would bring about the END OF THE WORLD.The capacity of time travel to generate fresh plot-twists capable of sustaining stories on their own inevitably declined in the 1950s, by when all kinds of time travel had been routinized into part of the standard vocabulary of sf ideas; this was the heyday of the "time police" story, in which vast manifolds of ALTERNATE WORLDS were routinely patrolled by cunning secret agents or historical conservationists. The 1960s, however, brought a new sophistication to treatments of now-classic themes and a new thoughtfulness to metaphysically inclined stories, particularly but by no means exclusively in connection with the UK NEW WAVE. J.G. BALLARD's fascination with time is reflected in many of his early stories, including "The Voices of Time" (1960), "Chronopolis" (1960), "The Garden of Time"(1962) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966). The timeslip story was remarkably refined by Brian W. ALDISS in "Man in his Time" (1965), which features a very slight but distressing slip, and Aldiss also wrote the best of several "reversed time" stories, An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! US and later UK edns); others are Philip K. DICK's Counter-Clock World (1967) andMartin AMIS's Time's Arrow (1991). A psychological timeslip story underpinned by split-brain research, then very fashionable, is Colin WILSON's "Timeslip" (1979). The linguistic problems of time-travellerswere thrown into sharper focus by David I. MASSON's "A Two-Timer" (1966). The Age of the Dinosaurs gave way to the Crucifixion as a key focus ofinterest, as in Michael MOORCOCK's BEHOLD THE MAN (1966 NW; exp 1969) and Brian EARNSHAW's Planet in the Eye of Time (1968). Theodore L. THOMAS's"The Doctor" (1967) cynically re-examines the potential available to the time-traveller to operate as an apostle of progress. This kind of narrative sophistication of idea-twists extended into the 1970s in such stories as Robert SILVERBERG's "What We Learned from this Morning's Newspaper" (1972), James TIPTREE Jr's "The Man who Walked Home" (1972),Garry KILWORTH's "Let's Go to Golgotha" (1975) and Ian WATSON's "The Very Slow Time Machine" (1978).The metaphysics of time continues to intrigue writers inside and outside the genre; notable recent works deploying ideas of this kind include Chronolysis (trans 1980) by Michel Jeury (1934-) and When Time Winds Blow (1982) by Robert P. HOLDSTOCK. The oppressions ofdeterminism are bewailed in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Slaughterhouse 5 (1979). Action-adventure stories involving time travel have, inevitably, continuedto reach new extremes of narrative extravagance, but at the same time have shown an increasing willingness to become involved with the intimate details of real history, and hence with its presumed dynamics. Such works as David LAKE's The Man who Loved Morlocks (1981), Connie WILLIS's "Fire Watch" (1982) and DOOMSDAY BOOK (1992), Michael BISHOP's NO ENEMY BUT TIME(1982), David DVORKIN's Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), Tim POWERS's THE ANUBIS GATES (1983), Howard WALDROP's Them Bones (1984), Jack L. CHALKER's Downtiming the Nightside (1985) and Vernor VINGE's Marooned in Realtime (1986) combine playfulness and seriousness in an artful fashion which is squarely in the tradition of THE TIME MACHINE. Even such frank melodramas as DR WHO and Julian MAY's series begun with The Many-Colored Land (1981), and such knockabout comedies as Ron GOULART's The Panchronicon Plot (1977) and Simon Hawke's (Nicholas Yermakov's) Timewars series, begun with The Ivanhoe Gambit (1984), have implications which are not simply left tolanguish as throwaway ideas.A variant of the time-travel story which requires brief mention is the time-distortion story, pioneered by Wells in "The New Accelerator" (1901), which is about a device that "speeds up"time for its users and makes the world seem almost to freeze; a similar hypothesis is explored in Arthur C. CLARKE's "All the Time in the World" (1952). A device with a contrary effect is deployed in John GLOAG's Slow(1954), and ALIENS for whom time moves exceedingly slowly are featured in Eric Frank RUSSELL's "The Waitabits" (1955). More sophisticated stories of subjective time-distortion include Masson's "Traveller's Rest" (1965) and Eric BROWN's "The Time-Lapsed Man" (1988), and more extravagantdistortions are featured in Dick's Ubik (1969) and Gordon R. DICKSON's Time Storm (1977).However paradoxical it may be, time travel will remain acentral element in the sf tradition, and the time machine - whether modelled on the bicycle, the cummerbund or the police telephone box - will doubtless retain its status as the ultimate literary-device-made-machine. An interesting book on the subject is Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics,and Science Fiction(1993 by Paul J. Nahin.

   MJE/BS