Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 39

Time Travel and Alternative History

The previous post is a lead-in to talking about alternative history and time travel stories. The argument of alternative history stories is that history is not fixed. It could have turned out other than it has. I tend to see history as having a broad trend. As one of the panelists at CONvergence said, this is the river theory. For the most part, history keeps to its bed. The other view of history is the tree theory: history is full of branching points, at which it could have taken a different turn. (Terry Pratchett calls this "the trousers theory of time." At certain points, history bifurcates, and there is a choice as to which leg one goes down.)

It's possible that history took both branches, creating two separate universes. This is the multiverse theory. Some physicists are interested in this.

Time travel stories also tend to see history as unfixed. One steps on a butterfly in the Mesozoic and the future one came from no longer exists -- or, if it still exists, it is in another universe, which cannot be reached. (This is "The Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury.)

There are time travel stories in which history does not change. "The Man Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester is one example. The time traveler goes back and kills key people in history. But the effect is not to change history. Rather, it changes him. With each murder, he becomes less likely and real, until he finally vanishes.

I argue, in "Big Red Mama in Time and Morris, Minnesota," just out in Big Mama Stories from Aqueduct Press, that time is hard to change. For the most part, history re-stabilizes. This puts me at the conservative end of time travel theories.

But this does not lead me to argue that the present and future are fixed. And I do believe that large changes in the past might well change the present and future. If you went back and introduced modern technology to imperial Rome, as L. Sprague DeCamp did in Lest Darkness Fall, you might well avoid the dark and middle ages.

I think the likelihood of time travel is still up for grabs. According to Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, current theories about physics do not include anything about time. It is simply ignored. According to Smolin, this is a mistake: a successful description of reality needs to include time.

If we don't have a description of reality that includes time, then we can hardly know whether or not time travel is possible.

One of the odd things about time is -- it appears to go in one direction only. But we don't know why, and we don't know for sure whether or not this is always true. Most physical phenomena go in both directions. You can make water (H2O) from O and H2. You can also split water into O and H2. This cannot be done with time. Until we have a theory that explains this, backed by good experiments, we simply don't know for certain if it's possible to reverse time or travel back in it.

The main argument against time travel is the grandfather paradox, which doesn't convince me. If you don't know it, it goes like this: if time travel is possible, then you can go back and kill you grandfather before he fathered your father or mother. But then you don't exist, so you can't commit the murder.

I'm reading a paper by a philosopher, who argues you cannot kill your grandfather precisely because of this paradox. For one reason or another -- a change of heart, a gun misfiring -- the murder will not happen, because it cannot happen.

This also does not convince me. I imagine something closer to the Bester story. If you kill your grandfather, then you don't exist and cannot kill your grandfather. Therefore he lives and fathers one of your parents. Therefore you exist and go back in time and kill him. He dies and you don't exist and cannot kill him. He lives and fathers your parent, you exist and kill him, and the entire cycle happens over and over. Why can't this happen? We don't know enough to say.

In any case, I seem to be writing time travel stories and some alternative histories, and most likely I will continue to.

The important thing about both is as an aid to thinking about the present: for the most part, the stories say history is contingent and thus can be changed. Right now, we can only make changes in the present. Well, then, we ought to assume that what we do matters and work to make changes now. Floss. Go on a diet. Join good cause organizations. Plant a garden. Put solar panels on your roof. Believe in change.

Change

One of the commenters on my previous post asked me to explain what I meant by "Margaret Thatcher's terrible lie, There Is No Alternative." I can't be sure exactly how I answered the question, because I deleted my comment by mistake. It was apparently up long enough for the commenter to reply, which he or she did by saying that I should ask my school -- I assume this means my college -- for my tuition back. Apparently I did not get a proper education. (My major was art history, with minors in English and philosophy. I don't know what any of these -- except possibly philosophy -- had to do with Margaret Thatcher.)

TINA is (in my opinion) a terrible lie because it says that change is not possible: there are no alternatives to our present world of capitalism and neoliberal economics. This is obviously not true. Human history is a record of change. We are not living in Roman times or the Neolithic. Even societies that appear static -- the rare hunting and gathering societies that still exist -- are not, as far as we can tell really static. Most are in contact with the outside world and get at least some information and objects.

The Native American peoples of the Andes have recently carried off modern, possibly even avant garde, revolutions in Bolivia and Ecuador. This suggests they are not the same people they were 100 or 200 years ago.

Rural Afghans have cell phones. They did not have these when I was in Afghanistan 50 years ago. Their society seemed then to be isolated and unchanging. (Though if you know the history of Afghanistan, you know a lot has changed there since the days of Alexander. It only became isolated when sea trade replaced the Great Silk Route.)

Capitalism, as we know it, goes back only a few hundred years. Neoliberal economics goes back less than a hundred years. I doubt that either will last forever. Why should they?

As Isaac Asimov said, "There will be a future, and it will be different."

There are philosophies that argue history is rigid: change happens, but in ways that are absolutely determined and inevitable. This is the argument of vulgar Marxists, who used to say that the proletarian revolution was inevitable. It would happen, no matter what anyone did. This theory does not have a lot of followers today.

Pierre Simon LaPlace is famous for saying (per Wikipedia) that "if someone knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics." Later scientists and philosophers have argued that thermodynamics, quantum physics and chaos theory all make determinism impossible. If we cannot determine the future in physics, it does not seem likely we can determine it elsewhere: physics is the root science. Those atoms and sub-atomic particles underlie everything else. If the future cannot be determined, even in theory, then it cannot be fixed. True change is possible.

The argument that change is impossible is an argument for doing nothing. This is what I dislike about it. If action makes no difference, why act? I also dislike it, because it's obviously wrong. There are always alternatives, if one believes in historical change and human free will.

(I don't know if free will actually exists. But given our current knowledge, it is a good assumption. We should all act as if action is effective and we can make changes in our lives.)

An Alternative History Panel

I'm not going back to CONvergence today, since I have an essay to finish. I think it's due today. (I just checked and can't find the last email from the editor, so will have to go on memory.)

I felt I talked too much on the one panel I did yesterday. I was trying to think something through out loud. This should not be done on panels, which ought to be communal activities. Thinking through should be done somewhere private, by oneself or with one or two (very patient) friends.

The ideas I was trying to think through were difficult (for me, at least) and I didn't have a good grasp on them. What is the nature of time? A huge topic, which I am in no way competent to talk about. And what is the nature of history? Does it follow broad trends, like a river that usually keeps to its bed, or is it highly contingent? Can you change it dramatically with a single action?

The final questions I had were, why do people write alternative histories, and why are alternative histories so popular right now?

I have written a couple of alternative history stories in recent years and a number of time travel stories. I think time travel is related to alternative history. Both ask the question, can one change the past? Which becomes the question, can one change the present and future? A hugely important question. We are at a point in history (I think) when the present does not look especially good and the future looks grim. Is major change possible? How do we achieve it?

In any case, I had a lot of questions, too many for a one-hour panel. I'm going back to the con tomorrow. I have one panel, on how to write heroes. I think I will go in unprepared -- with no questions or ideas.
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Sean Murphy made a very good comment at the panel: change depends on the magnitude of the event. A small event does not change history. A large one does. To use the river metaphor, the course of the Mississippi is not easy to change, but it can be done. The river's course was changed by the New Madrid earthquake. It was a big event. More than that, the Army Corps of Engineers is in a constant struggle with the course of the Mississippi. Their dams and levees are not the same size as the Madrid earthquake, but they are big, and there are a lot of them. Sean was talking about strange attractors, and he lost me. But I think I got the basic point.

History is mostly stable, but it can be changed. It is both a river and a tree of continent events.
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Having said that, I begin to think about a story involving time engineers, trying to keep history on a certain course, and time saboteurs, planning to blow up levees.
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Alternative history and time travel stories are, it now occurs to me, a direct challenge to Margaret Thatcher's terrible lie, There Is No Alternative. Both say, history can be changed.

CONvergence

I am off to the 7,000 person monster local SF convention. I have a panel on alternative history at 11 this morning and one on how to write villains at 7 tonight. My final panel is at 11 am on Sunday: how to write heroes.

I actually don't have an opinion on how to write heroes or villains. I write them the way I write all characters: one sentence at a time.

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I skipped the second panel and came home.

Ruins

This is from a facebook discussion of global warming and coastal cities being at risk:

I have a great description in a current story of waves rushing between tall buildings in lower Manhattan... The buildings have been abandoned, except by squatters... One more thing to finish. I have three stories going at once now. Either my writing pace has to pick up, or my imagination has to slow down.

I'm not complaining. This is a lot better than the periods when I feel I have nothing to write.

I'm not sure what the appeal of destroying cities is. I've lived in New York, Detroit and the Twin Cities and put all three into stories as ruins. I've also lived in Honolulu, Paris and outside Philadelphia and not felt any need (as far as I can remember) to reduce them to ruins.

I think I have ruined the cities I love best. In Detroit's case, of course, it has more of less happened. The other cities are still with us.

Helgi Again

Thanks for the comment. I may not translate the poem by myself. I clearly do not understand the cultural context. Your explanation of the line makes the poem sound more disturbing than ever. Having bones and pebbles for toys! I realize why. That's what was easily available. But still...

I will use those toys in my story, if I finish it. One problem with me writing about Iceland is -- I don't know enough, in spite of a lot of reading and a couple of visits. It simply is not enough.

As far as the poem goes, I can take the English translation I have and clean it up, make it into smoother and more powerful English. That I can do. My Icelandic is awful, but my English is pretty good.

There are troll children in the story. They can be playing with human bones...

For Helgi

Here it is. I found it in a lecture on Icelandic folk songs. The lecturer said it was from a group of folk songs recorded in the 1920s and 30s. I have a translation, which I have not included because it might be copyrighted. I got the sense from my very poor Icelandic and my Icelandic-English dictionary that the translation could be better, and I thought I might enjoy translating it, which I think I can do, working between the Icelandic text and the translation I have.

I did this years ago with mid-20th century Icelandic poetry. I missed a lot of idioms, of course, which my father caught when he double-checked my work. But it was fun, and the end result -- after checking -- was not bad.

The black sand on green fields makes me think it's about an eruption, at least in part. Grimsvotn went off in the same period as Laki, which might give the line about glaciers crying out. Anyway, I have a neat story idea about trolls and humans meeting, when they both flee the Laki fires.

I don't know if I mentioned it on my blog, but a friend of mine wants to experiment with becoming a small press publisher, and his first project is going to be a collection of my fantasy stories based on Icelandic sagas and folktales and the Eddas.

One thing I can't find in either of my two dictionaries is Voluskrin. What does it mean?

Writer's Block

This is mostly from facebook. It begins with a post by Judith Tarr on writer's block.

I thought Tarr's post was terrific. I refuse to believe in writer's block, because I think believing in it gives it too much power. This does not mean it isn't real. It is a lot easier to write if you are able to sell. Beating against a wall is exhausting. People tire out, and writing becomes a lot less fun. When I lost my last day job and decided to retire and write full time, I discovered it was hard to write. I had lost my drive to write in the years I worked day jobs full time and wrote little. Gradually the energy and enthusiasm has come back -- mostly, I think, because I'm selling.

(For example, my sudden enthusiasm for trolls. Let me tell you about trolls. Maybe I need to write a novel about trolls.)

I never had the kind of physical panic response to trying to write that Judith Tarr describes. I just found it hard to write and not all that interesting. Though I did keep on, largely due -- I think -- to my writing group, the Wyrdsmsiths. And now I am enjoying writing again. The stories inside me are beating on the inside of my skull and trying to chew their way out.

At times one simply needs a vacation from writing. At other times, the stress of life can make writing very difficult. And at times the problem is the one Tarr describes: a failure to sell, a failure of positive feedback...

In another post, Tarr writes about using Book View Cafe (an e-publishing collective) to get her large backlist out in e-books and using Kickstarter to fund two novels. I do feel there are more options these days. At the moment, I am sticking with independent publishers, and I would not say no to a New York publisher. Publishers of all varieties reduce the work I have to do. But I am keeping the other options in mind.

Writing

When I first got laid off four years ago, I felt I had pretty much lost interest in writing. My day job had taken most for my energy for years, and the desire to write seemed to have withered.

But I felt I had to use my new free time, so I tried to get back to writing. It's been a long, slow, difficult process, during which I had to keep pushing myself. I still have four stories that should be done by now, but aren't; and there is still a novel to finish.

But the current troll story is filling my mind and demanding to be written. It's the old pressure and obsession. I can't stop thinking about the darn thing, and I have a feeling it won't let me alone till it's all written.

This isn't true about every story. I have another one about valet parking in space which is coming slowly, but many halts.

And I have the four unfinished stories and the novel.

Still and all, I seem to have become a writer again.

Laki

I spent the day before yesterday bent out of shape by a stupid argument I should never have gotten into.It was a classic Internet argument, with a facebook friend of a facebook friend of mine. He maintained that poetry was an elite art form, and there was no popular readership of poetry and no folk or popular poetry. Nada. None.

I should have left right then. Instead I mentioned poets who have been popular, such as Pablo Neruda, and I pointed to the lyrics of ballads as poetry written by the folk. He had a reason why every example I gave was not a good example. He was also rude. A classic Internet troll. I became furious. I finally had the wits to leave, but I remained angry.

As a result of the argument I started researching Icelandic poetry on the Internet. That led to a really bleak Icelandic lullaby, all about death, darkness, bones, black sand covering green fields and glaciers groaning. It came with a translation, but it was a less than perfect translation, and I decided I wanted to translate it. Then I decided I wanted to put it in a story. What kind of story? An Icelandic story, of course. but what kind? I thought the lullaby might be about the eruption of the Icelandic volcanic rift Laki in the late 18th century. That's a wild guess. I have no reason to believe I'm right. But the obvious thing to do is write a story about the eruption of Laki. Laki carpeted the country with poisonous ash. 80% of the sheep and 25% of the people died from poison and starvation. Imagine a story about an Icelandic farm family, fleeing the eruption. I can see them, the parents carrying their children, who are wrapped in blankets, the parents breathing in toxic ash. Their animals are dead. They have nothing except what they are carrying. The land is black and the sky is black.

Of course, there have to be trolls...

I got the first couple of pages of the new story done yesterday. I was going to call it "The Troll Maid." Now I think I will call it "Laki." Laki sounds friendly to me. As mentioned above, name does not refer to a single mountain such as Hekla or Mount Rainier. Rather it is a rift that runs north from the volcano Grimsvotn. During the 18th century eruption, 130 craters opened along the rift, spewing lava, ash and toxic gas.

Now it is time to stop talking about the story and work on it. There's a theory that you shouldn't talk about a story in progress, because you will talk the story out of you. I'm not sure I believe that, but I'm not going to risk using up the creative impulse and the good ideas. Anyway, a person who talks too much about what they are going to write is boring.