Regrets, who doesn’t have them? Who hasn’t made mistakes? Relationships, jobs, passions, living locations. Sometimes we took too long to end them or change them. Sometimes we jumped too early. Sometimes we never jumped at all and are now trapped in some hellish half-life. Sometimes we look back and think, I should have stayed. Palliative care worker, Bronny Ware, has famously listed the common regrets shared to her by dying patients:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings (rather than suppressing them to keep the peace with others).
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
These questions are of special interest to psychologists and philosophers, who reflect on life’s choices, on its possibilities and constraints. Each in their own way try to construct an adequate model of free will and determinism, of agency and structure, of identity and personal change – of who we are, of what makes us, of what we can do and what we can’t, and why this is so.
Science fiction has its own privileged sub-genre for examining these questions, one particularly suited to thought experiments about personal timelines, decisions and their consequences, of who we are and how we became that person and not someone else, another version of ourselves – the time travel story.
Golden Age great Robert Heinlein not only defined the time travel story’s ability to engage with these issues, but he essentially exhausted the permutations of the time travel paradox in two stories, “By His Bootstraps” (1941) and “All You Zombies” (1958). “By His Bootstraps,” is the longer of the two, a novella of 20,000 words. It tells the story of Bob, an academic attempting to finish a thesis that shows time travel is impossible. Bob is interrupted by an unlikable man claiming to be from the future and promises great things for the protagonist, Bob. In rapid succession, Bob is interrupted by several more characters, and an atmosphere of confusion sets in, of knowledge hovering just beyond one’s reach. “By His Bootstraps” is an elegant example of the paradoxes and identity disruptions possible in the time travel form. Bob agrees to travel into the future and much of the rest of the story reveals, in typically mind-shaking revelations, that the disruptive characters were, in fact, older versions of Bob. As these older versions, Bob lives through the same scenes several times, each as one of the other characters, and so it ends closing the loop with a repetition of the opening scene. The story is essentially one of clever logical and narrative loops. Heinlein’s rudimentary and adolescent prose mark it as a story from science fiction’s Golden Age, when characters were barely characters at all, but sometimes (as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories), abstract rationality in putative bodies without any materiality.
When Heinlein returned to the same paradoxes nearly twenty years later, the faintly superior knowingness that typified the Golden Age writer’s faith in science had given way to strains of noticeable anxiety and dread, as the nuclear age and the Cold War fuelled the genre’s fascination with post-apocalyptic landscapes.[1] With the influx of more sophisticated themes or alienation, isolation, anxiety and social collapse, science fiction writers were called to elevate their prose, to infuse it with greater characterisation, with more delicate and subtle irony, with traces of the poetic, as in the hands of Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, or Richard Matheson.
Surrounded by this new cultural climate in 1958, Heinlein provided a more adequate consideration of the psychological and ontological consequences of time travel. The result, a 6000-word story called “All You Zombies,” stands as the definitive example of the form. By the story’s end, the protagonist ends up being his own mother (called Jane), his own father, and everyone else in the story (his mother is also his own daughter, both of whom are also himself (if I haven’t got my logic messed up)). In its final lines, Heinlein captures the existential depths to which the protagonist’s sense of self is subjected, questions of identity that from then on typically underlay the sub-genre. In the time travel story’s serious mode, as in “All You Zombies,” it forever threatens to disintegrate into existential dread and nihilism – a flattening of value and meaning circle the narrative like predators. By the end of “All You Zombies,” Heinlein captures the fearful potency of this existential dread. In the final lines, the protagonist concludes:
I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.
You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.
I miss you dreadfully!
All the Lies That Are Your Life: Identity As Narrative
Who are you, gentle reader? Right, that’s what you tell yourself. Now, who are you really?
Psychologists suggest that your sense of self is constructed interpersonally, in relationship with others, and hence also in relationship to the social world. Individualism is nothing but a liberal myth. For example, people who venture into nature to “find themselves” typically discover the opposite: they lose any sense of their self. Isolated from society, they dissolve into their surroundings, become one with daily tasks: “catch fish,” “start fire,” “sleep.” They no longer exist. “All You Zombies” brilliantly illuminates this dissolution, counterintuitive to those schooled in Thoreau’s Walden or other such romantic myths. In the story, the main character (Jane) takes painkillers for her perpetual headache but discovers that without the pain everyone else disappears. It is as if the veil is torn from a false reality, revealing the true world beneath, seen before as through a glass darkly but now face to face – a premonition of one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring fascinations. Without mother, father, a social world, Jane’s existence manifests as a headache of existential dread. Either way, with headache or not, she experiences her plight as a pain of isolation. She is “alone in the dark.” Her declaration, “I know where I came from,” is replete with irony. Her somewhat desperate affirmation is made precisely because there is nothing but doubt. Neither she, nor the reader, actually knows where she came from – methinks that Jane dost protest too much.
As Heinlein presents it in “All You Zombies,” the “self” can be thought of as a narrative, a story we have constructed, involving beliefs, ideas, sets or clusters of unconscious responses (“complexes” as Jung called them), formed from our interpretation of events. “I am a woman/man.” “I am an anxious person.” “I am a genius/loser.” “I am scared of spiders and editors.” “I once met a bear in a forest, and it was way better than when I met Jonathan.” “I am a socialist/fascist.” “My love language is words of affirmation.” “My love language is the ability to take accountability for one’s actions.” “The Ayahuasca ceremony allowed me to treat my trauma.” “The Ayahuasca ceremony is my trauma.” We cobble these together into some kind of map of ourselves. But what is a narrative? A useful definition might be this: a narrative is a causal sequence of events, where an event is something that changes the “world” of the individual or of the individual’s understanding of that world. In the face of an event, a character must respond and act, and this action tells us about who they are (for this reason, the passive protagonist is extraordinarily difficult to write).
The very first event in a screenplay, when combined with the character’s response, is often called an “inciting incident.” It marks the opening of the story: a body is found, and the detective takes on the case; Little Red Riding Hood sets out to visit her grandmother; Gandalf organises a party and Bilbo agrees to join an expedition. Your partner leaves you and you decide you must see a therapist to change your repetitive, self-destructive patterns. You are bullied from your workplace and choose not to pursue a case with the Fair Work Commission but to study psychotherapy. To reaffirm: How do we know who a character is? We know not by what they say, but what they do, their choices in the face of an event.
The relationship between event, response, and identity can be usefully illuminated by a study of trauma, so culturally important in the modern world. What is trauma? An event occurs, defined sometimes (and for our purposes) by “helplessness and horror.” Faced with a potentially fatal event – the horror – an individual enters a fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. But the event typically has the component of helplessness. The individual is unable to defend themselves, to assert enough agency to escape the horror – they are trapped (often literally) in the event without ability to influence it. They experience a catastrophic loss of agency (thus those who do “fight back” against the horrific events are less likely to be traumatised). Without agency, the horror manifests in full force and the victim cannot make sense of the event: “How could this happen?” “What kind of world is this?” “What sort of people are these?” “Why didn’t I do something?” “Why did I go along with things?” Trauma then can be defined as a disruption of the self, a disarticulation of a person’s narratives. The reasons should be clear. Without agency, the ability to act with an effect on the world, there is no narrative, no protagonist response, only the event. There is consequently no self. The individual (or protagonist) disappears – is erased. But the dialectical inversion of this is that the world itself becomes insubstantial, since the self is articulated in relationship to the world. What remains is a shadowy thing, with nothing to hold onto, nothing that makes sense, where meaning is emptied. An individual is left, in Heinlein’s terms, “alone in the dark.” Nihilism prevails in a world populated by zombies. I know where I came from, the traumatised individual may yell, but this simply reflects their terrified understanding that in fact they aren’t sure they exist at all.
Trauma then has a revealing relationship with time. Since it is not part of the individual’s life/world narrative, it exists “outside of time.” Its most famous symptom, “triggering” (or flooding), expresses this relationship. The trauma perpetually hovers about a victim’s everyday experience, a chapter which hasn’t found its place in the story of their life, like fog that won’t blow away (to mix metaphors): it is ever ready to surge into the present at the slightest reminder of a traumatic event. The individual then suffers a kind of involuntary time travel, and they find themselves “back in the moment,” when they suffered the trauma, seeing the horror of the event, flooded with the desperate feelings – they are “triggered.” A second loss of agency occurs at that moment, as the individual responds not only to the current event but also to the event of the past. Their emotional state, and sometimes their actions, become disproportionate to the contemporary situation. Their communication becomes distorted – they become silent, enraged, terrified. They re-enter fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses. They are again controlled by the past and uncontrollable emotions stemming from it. An important part of the treatment of trauma is thus the re-narration of the traumatic event/s, placing the event back in the timeline where it belongs, making sense of it within the individual’s story, finding the right place for that chapter, connecting it to the causal sequence of events in a person’s life. This sometimes requires a going back in time, usually in the presence of a therapist. Time travel.
You’ve Made Some Strange Choices: Thinking In Bets
If psychotherapy restructures time, if only for a single individual, the time travel story can offer an alternative restructuring of it – the protagonist travels to the past and changes the past, causing flow-on effects: if we could go back to that moment, if we could somehow change the way things happened and so live a different life, who then would we be? The time travel story is in this sense a philosophical investigation into the nature of agency: what role do our choices play in the pattern of events, personal and historical? Most narrative presupposes that decisions are like chaos mathematics’ well-known butterfly effect, in which the flapping of a hypothetical butterfly on one side of the world sets in motion a series of causal changes that result in a storm on the other side of the world. What would happen if someone travelled back in time to kill Hitler when he was a baby? Would Nazism have still arisen? What if one killed one’s own distant ancestor? In Robert Silverberg’s Up The Line, a secondary character suffering depression begins to kill not one, but many of his ancestors and, struck suddenly by panic, illegally travels to the prehistoric age to avoid the personal repercussions of erasing the preconditions of his own existence. (Silverberg is one of the great “New Wave” practitioners of the time travel sub-genre, playing with Heinlein’s paradoxes at a higher, sometimes less controlled, level of vitality and experimentation and jouissance.)
In these thought experiments, time travel stories often capture a consistent quality of decision making: that because of the relatively unpredictable consequences of any choice, decisions are best thought of as “bets” (to use decision-making theorist and champion poker player Annie Duke’s metaphor). Life, Duke points out in her book Thinking in Bets, is not like chess, where each move has determinate results, but like poker, where a good hand and a good decision can still produce a poor result. A decision to drive drunk can end up with perfectly good results for the individual – they get home safely – but that doesn’t make it a good decision. The reverse is equally true, and so the sober driver can take all the precautions to make it home, and yet still the result can be a crash, injury or death. In this view, the components of decision-making are skill (which can be improved), knowledge (which can be accumulated through data gathering), and finally, crucially, luck, which is out of your hands. For Duke, each decision is a bet, but if in poker the bet is placed against your opponents in the game, in life the bet is against the alternative versions of yourself, representing the alternative decisions you might have made, and hence the consequences they may have had to face. For example, your choice to stay in a relationship is a bet against the self who chooses separation – they are your “alternate” or your “double,” the person you could have been.
SF writers love to play with the ironies of such a model, where attempts to return to the past and to improve a decision typically produce either unexpected, tragic or comical results. History, as Marx once wrote, repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce – and the time travel story cannot help descending into at face at a certain point. The comic possibilities are examined by the great Connie Willis, but irony is in any case congenital to travel stories, as the character’s problems multiply, and attempts to control their lives are revealed as absurd folly and hubris (and yet as readers we thrill at these forlorn attempts, we wonder at the speculations involved in making sense of history and time). The time travel story here takes an allegorical or even tragic turn, showing that there is no mechanical causality that links intention, choice, action and consequence. Uncertainty and contingency (chaos even) are deeply embedded into ontological reality itself, and here the tragic quality to the character’s attempts resemble the lessons of the Ancient Greeks. In its science fictional form, the time travel movie says, “You are going back in time to stop your parent from being killed in a car crash, is that right? Well, that’s going to go badly.” Hubris, my friend. Hubris.
A Time Travel Model of History
Time travel stories almost always are built on an unspoken model of history, which tries to balance necessity and contingency. Consider the 1980s movie Back to the Future, perhaps the most popular cultural expression of time travel from the last half-century. In the film, Marty McFly is accidentally transported back to the 1950s, where he interrupts his parent’s first fateful encounter. Without this, his parents never fall in love, and Marty will never exist. His goal is to spark the parent’s attraction and hence re-establish the conditions of his own birth. If in “All You Zombies” there exists a despairing flattening of meaning, narratives like Back to the Future base themselves on a desperate attempt to hold this disintegration at bay. The best way to achieve this is by “setting the timeline right.” If we can do that, all will return to normal, to how things are meant to be. In Back to the Future, in fact, Marty is successful, and he returns to his own time (the 1980s) to discover that he has secured his own existence (the goal, as depicted in causal “logic”) and healed the dysfunctionality of his family (an unexpected, contingent, result). He returns to a kind of personal utopian vision of happy family life when previously it had been unhappy – but the rest of the world is as it was.
This idea of history, the logical, structural, side, is sometimes set forth in desperate monologues (by “Doc” Emmett Brown in Back to the Future or, to choose another case, by Kyle Reese in Terminator) but the contingent side left unspoken forms the typical “ontological unconscious” of time travel stories. In this theory of history, mostly the timeline remains stable, but every now and then one crucial event can drastically divert the sequence of events, causing cascading changes. It is a theory of history that sensibly tries to account for the grand sweep of impersonal social and historical forces, so much larger than any individual or group. During these ordinary times, the theory implies, a general structure and logic prevails, so that the causal sequence of events carries on, unchanged and perhaps unchangeable. Agency is confirmed in a modest way but structurally limited: this is usually our own sense of the world around us. Yet these narratives also suggest that there are certain decisive moments when agency rises above structure and is itself capable of mutating or breaking that structure, decisively resisting or diverting the impersonal forces. Agency becomes dominant over the determining structure at certain relatively rare moments – the moment of decision.
This seems, to me at least, a useful paradigm for understanding and navigating our personal lives. When we are offered the opportunity for a life change, a job overseas for example, we can decisively alter the structure of our lives, within which almost everything will reflect that change. From then on, everything is different. Should we resist such large changes, most of our lives continue rather predictably and should we try later to make these life-changes, we often discover that the opening for them is no longer there. Our lives are probably defined by a limited number of decisive choices (which might include conversations, as authors of the book Crucial Conversations suggest). From these narrative “events,” in which we make choices, our multiple futures branch out in various directions.
We can think of these decisive moments as “plot points” that divide our lives up into Acts, as in drama. Plot points (event+character response) structure the narrative of the entire following Act: Macbeth kills the King, the letter from Friar Lawrence never reaches Romeo, who kills himself since he is unaware that Juliet lies not dead but in a deathlike sleep, Boromir attempts to take the ring from Frodo and breaks the fellowship. The overall landscape of possibility is determined by the plot point and there is no going back, nothing will ever be the same again – not in the traditional narrative – and this new situation lasts until another decisive event occurs. Time travel recasts these crucial moments with a specific science-fictional capability, unavailable to realist writing: the events can be returned to and changed, often multiple times and producing multiple alternative “Acts.” If I hadn’t returned to Australia but had instead remained in Finland, what would have happened? Let’s check it out: bring Dr Who’s Tardis around, we’re going to see. Regrets, who doesn’t have them? Who wouldn’t return to some event and do it differently?
Time Travel, Doubling, Histories
As in the Heinlein stories, one consequence of these return journeys is the production of doubles (or multiples) of the protagonist. In this way the time travel story externalises this alternate self that we keep in mind when making decisions, and presents them in physical form, with very different opinions and judgements to the “original.” The double returns to fix the past and there encounters the original, the one who made a bad bet, who made the mistake – the path taken with the poor result – against whom the new decision is pitched as superior, of greater skill and understanding, usually also of greater knowledge. What happens when we put together two people with passionately different opinions about decisions that effect their life? It’s not all tea and biscuits.
Around fifteen years ago, I wrote a screenplay called Overtime (or The Second Law of Thermodynamics) with director Ben Chessell (Dr Who, Giri Haji, Deadloch). The film was optioned for a few years and in development for that time. The script was a romantic comedy that played with time travel paradoxes. The typical romantic comedy, and here I’ll devolve into the dated gendered industry terms, is a story of “boy meets girl,” “boy loses girl” (often to another man who has qualities he himself doesn’t, the Hugh Grant character in Bridget Jones’s Diary, let’s say), “boy wins girl back.” What, our film asked, would happen if the “other man” was in fact the protagonist’s double, who had returned to fix the mess his younger original self (called Leo) made of his relationship? Seen from the younger Leo’s perspective the two are set into deadly conflict – literally deadly, as the younger Leo kills the older wiser one, thus ruining everything including his romantic relationship. What, of course, is Leo’s solution? He must use the time travel machine to return in time to fix the past. In doing so, younger “original” Leo becomes the older “double” Leo. Why has he returned? To fix the mess he’s made of his life.[2] For the last part of the film, we see events repeat through the eyes of the double, the older Leo, as he heads toward his own death. To avoid the repetition of the catastrophe, Leo must realise that he is his own problem. His narcissism, his attempt to control history itself, is the issue at hand. He must become a different person. A new person.
Did that just break your brain? Good.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics ran aground not only on its brain-breaking narrative difficulties (all credit to Ben for holding it together in ways I couldn’t), but something far worse. First came release of Looper (2012) which was based on a similar high time travel concept. Then news spread that Richard Curtis was working on a film that sounded disturbingly like ours. This film, About Time (2013), torpedoed our film – thanks Curtis! More recently, there was the Paul Rudd series Living With Yourself, which again played with similar ideas, apparently. I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch either About Time or Living With Yourself – it’s a writer’s special tribulation to witness someone else doing your idea (which of course is never “yours”). Almost all authors know this. I’m not special. I’m just cranky.
The idea of “the double” has itself been central to my fiction, starting with my first published literary speculative fiction story, “The Interminable Suffering of Mysterious Mr Wu,” but of course predated it. This notion of being in struggle with yourself has always appealed to me and I can’t seem to avoid returning to it in SF – which allows that wonderful ability to externalise it. Within science fiction, the idea dates to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), in which the brutish, elemental, animalistic – violent and sexual and working-class – Mr Hyde represents the unconscious fears and secret desires of the repressed Victorian middle-class men, that person they secretly wanted to be but were forced by social norms to repress. For a while the gentle Dr Jekyll revels in drinking his chemical concoction in the evening and heading out as Mr Hyde, with his exciting life of lechery and debauchery. But then something happens. Mr Hyde takes on a power and life of his own and, without the chemical preparations, overwhelms Dr Jekyll. Hyde becomes stronger and stronger, and threatens to seize control permanently, thrusting the formerly primary self into the darkness from where Hyde sprang – the concept of the unconscious was at this very historical moment, through Pierre Janet and of course Freud, emerging.
This was science fiction, but possibly the first literary example was Hans Christian Anderson’s 1847 fable, “The Shadow.” Ursula K. Le Guin published an essay on the topic, and deployed Jung’s idea of “the shadow,” both to discuss the Hans Christian Anderson story and to examines Tolkien’s character Gollum as Frodo’s double: his alternative path, his other self, the one he may yet become. For Jung, the “shadow” is composed of those aspects of ourselves that we have deemed unacceptable and so pushed into our unconscious. “Good girls don’t get angry,” we might say, or “Boys don’t cry.” Both are close to impossible to sustain. The anger or sadness is thus pushed into the unconscious and later erupts, often in destructive ways. Since we are all multifaceted, complex, imperfect creatures, when someone claims, “I never lie,” I know I’m in the presence of a liar. The truthful person says, “I do my best to tell the truth, but sometimes I fail to live up to my aim.”
Time travel stories develop this idea of the double, but then, as in both “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies,” this can become multiple selves, endless, repeating. If the double recalls Jungs idea of “persona” (or “Ego” as Freud might have it) and “shadow,” then these “multiples” recall therapeutic models like Internal Family Systems (IFS), where the self is pictured as composed of multiple parts, each with their own patterns of thought and behaviour (here is “warrior Rjurik”, and here is “anxious Rjurik” and here is “playful Rjurik,” and here is “traumatised Rjurik who suffered workplace bullying”). At its extreme, the tendency of the self to fragment can develop into Dissociative Identity Disorder, once called multiple personality disorder. In this case, the parts are so unrelated to each other that they alternately “take over” the individual – multiples rather than doubles. Therapeutic parts work (or shadow work) typically requires, as in Ben and my script for The Second Law of Dynamics, bringing the various parts into relationship with each other, rather than denying some aspects of ourselves and banishing them, or having parts in constant conflict with each other. The goal is a self that is more organically whole, less fragmented and contradictory.
Although there remains room within science fiction for these types of time travel investigations into identity and choice, it is in the other great potentiality where the more recent work lies – in the realm not of the individual but of history.
Histories of Alternate Histories
Time travel fascinated me from early on: Doctor Who probably played a role and combined with my childhood love of ancient history had me imagining myself surrounding Vercingetorix at Alesia, or in the dark wilds of Roman Britain, or as a Samurai in Japan. And let’s face it, who doesn’t sometimes fantasise about being able to return briefly to the age of the dinosaurs as Swanwick did, or the Greeks or the Mayans, to meet Jesus or Cleopatra or Pythagoras, to watch the battle of Cannae from a nearby hill, as Hannibal’s elephants run riot, or to experience the glory of the Mughals in India? If time travel stories remain exciting thought experiments in which to reflect on the individual and their destiny, most contemporary innovation comes from this combined with specific social and historical contexts. The first great story of the sub-genre, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), was concerned precisely with this question of history, of the deleterious role of class divisions, and finally with humanity’s destiny. Its depiction of the distant future remains magnificently estranging and disturbing to read even today. More recently, Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series features history students studying the past by returning there – and these are novels of significant achievement.
The philosophical questions discussed in relation to individual choices apply also to history in this wider grand sense. Questions of structure and agency, of impersonal social forces and group (or individual agency), remain central to historians and philosophers of history (see, for example, Perry Anderson’s discussion of structure and agency in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1984)). In history it appears that although social structure and forces are mostly dominant – economics appears, for example, as something like a weather system – there are certain decisive moments where critical decisions can lead to vastly different, world-historic outcomes. One such moment was the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, where a small group of politicians and leaders were enabled by the context to either start a nuclear war or to negotiate an outcome to preserve the system as it was. Other events might include Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, or the assassination of Malcolm X.[3] In these cases, the decisive role of an individual’s agency was itself enabled by the “movement of the structure,” of the world-historic forces – they become foci or loci in which the system’s power is concentrated for a moment. So, the extraordinary influence of Lenin in the October 1917 Revolution had as its precondition the inability of the liberal and aristocratic forces to resolve the systemic crisis of Russian Tsarism, at that point put under irresistible pressure by World War One, itself a consequence of systemic contradictions toward empire building among the “Great Nations”. A second precondition lay in Lenin’s preeminent position in a political party he had spent 20 years helping to construct, which stood at the head of the mass popular movement against the Tsarist aristocracy (for consideration of these issues, see Issac Deutscher’s The Prophet Outcast). In these types of situations, power and influence flow through a structural arrangement and into the hands of a few small people, for a moment. Their choices in that moment set into motion masses of humans, diverting history suddenly onto another track, like a train leaping onto another route.
But the reverse then is also probably true: certain actions have no effect on the overall pattern of events. Killing Hitler as a baby may have had little influence on the rise of fascism in Germany: most likely another figure or party would have taken on the same role, keeping the general structure intact but altering the quality of it. You can’t shoot a system, as socialist arguments against individual terrorism typically assert. But killing Hitler at the point when power was intensely concentrated in his hands in 1944-5 may well have had a more decisive effect, leading the disenchanted German elite to negotiate the end of the war with the American-led forces, perhaps stopping the Soviet army from capturing Eastern Europe, especially Germany. The question then is: what social forces are currently concentrated or refracted through the individual or small group?
My own attempt at playing with this idea was another abandoned screenplay, in which a time traveller to ancient Rome falls in love with a Vestal Virgin, and you know, it’s an “event” – in more ways than one. She is a member of the Claudii Marcelli, and the beloved daughter of the General Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who is meant (historically) to defeat Hannibal at the battle of Nola, and (in my version anyway) thus stop him from conquering Rome. Our dashing protagonist seduces the Vestal Virgin, a deadly dual occurs, Marcellus is killed, and Hannibal ultimately conquers Rome. Things turn, to use a technical term, to shit. From that point, European history descends not from Latin culture (with its descended languages – Italian, Spanish, French, English) but from Carthaginian. The difficulties of such a story eventually caused the screenplay to crumple under the strain. The goal of returning a timeline to the “right” historical one always threatens to become simplistic when examined too closely, since by nature it gets reduced and simplified into the reversal of a single “incident.” “Stop the killer from murdering Hitler,” say. Everything else is fine. This logic is sustainable according to our “time traveller’s theory of history,” you just must be a really good writer to pull it off. Perhaps Grand Historical time travel stories, where history is altered, are rarer for this reason (and because Connie Willis hegemonized the field with daunting brilliance). Still, I’d be happy to take calls from producers (an alternative version of myself is sitting by the phone right now; in an alternative history where people still sit by phones, that is)
If my own experiments with the time travel paradox have sometimes run aground (while those of “doubles” have been more successful), my most successful contribution led along a different vector – to be found in my story, “Domine,” (my own personal favourite), which can be found in the Vandermeers’ wonderful anthology The Time Traveller’s Almanac (get that book, gentle reader, since it showcases the diversity of time travel, far beyond the contours here described) and is republished in this journal for those interested. “Domine” isn’t particularly innovative in terms of the laws it is playing with (they are those used by Joe Haldeman in The Forever War); its innovation is in the way it illuminates a particular type of difficult interpersonal relationship in the modern world. I won’t say more now. In this, perhaps “Domine” shows that though Heinlein may have exhausted the paradoxes of time travel decades ago, there still exists life in the niches of the subgenre, and perhaps always will, for as long as questions of agency and structure, of choice and identity, inter-personal relationships in general, are central problems that each of us face.
And finally, could someone please build that time machine? There are a few things I want to fix in my past, but such minor catastrophes aside, frankly, I want to watch as Caesar stands at the Rubicon and, knowing that decisions are more like a game (rather than a complex set of computations like chess), speaks those famous words, “The die is cast.”
Or did he? Send me back and I’ll let you know.
Notes
[1] If not imagined as nuclear war then as plagues of zombies or vampires or, in pulpier forms, as body snatchers or giant insects or, apparently even more fearful, giant women – which a Freudian would read as a double disaster, not just as representations of the immense destructive feminine, but of the safely contained Golden Age form, populated by men of ideas or men of action, barely troubled by the existence of women at all.
[2] This is a loop time travel story rather than a multiple variations story; it thus avoids “tripling” by displacing the paradox onto the question, “If he isn’t the antagonist, where did that antagonist come from?”
[3] As a kind of negative case, since Malcolm stood at a decisive transition politically, and with a significant base among the urban and radical African-American youth, seemed destined to become perhaps the most important figure in the Black Power movement in the second half of the 1960s.
Rjurik Davidson is a writer, speaker, and psychotherapist. His last novel is The Stars Askew (Tor). He can be found at www.rjurik.com