The politics of time travel

[avram]

A brief exchange over in camwyn’s LJ reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a bit — time travel as political metaphor.

Some of the best time travel stories ever written are Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. Here’s the premise: At some point in our future, humankind evolves into a better species, the Danellians. At some point, time travel gets invented. The Danellians set up the Time Patrol to make sure that no change gets made that undoes the chain of events that lead to them existing. I think the series supposes some kind of temporal inertia effect that keeps the mere presence of time travelers from knocking history off the rails.

Anyway, there are various malcontents who want to muck about with the past, but the Time Patrol exists to maintain the futuristic status quo. It doesn’t matter if you and everyone you love are going to be wiped out in some horrid holocaust — as long as that holocaust leads to the Danellians, the Time Patrol exists to make sure it happens, and the Danellians have the power to make sure that their version of reality takes precedence over yours. (Not that anything quite this blatant happens in the stories, as I recall. Though there is “Delenda Est” “The Only Game in Town”, in which we learn that the timeline leading to the Danellians requires Time Patrol interference to come about in the first place.)

See the parallel to politics? Those out of power are asked to accept poverty, death, sickness, whatever, as the price of someone else coming out on top. Why? Well, that’s just the way things have gotta be. It’d be chaos otherwise, right?

I’m tempted to write a Time Patrol fanfic revealing that the Danellians aren’t descended from human beings at all, that they’re actually illusionist psychic cockroaches (or something) that evolve after we all wipe ourselves out in a nuclear war in the 22nd century or something.

A more liberal approach is used in John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice. Here, the past is immutable. Each trip into the past spawns off a new “moment universe”, so the integrity of the present is secure. This frees up the present (set in our future) to use the past as an exploitable resource. Much of the plot revolves around a resort hotel in Roman-occupied Jerusalem in a timeline where Jesus doesn’t exist — he’s been taken into the present. (One of three Jesuses running around in the future, taken from different points in his life; one’s a talk show host.) The book draws obvious parallels between the denizens of the past and those of the current underdeveloped world. But in this case, the mechanics of time travel set up our timeline as a natural baseline, which gets corrupted by an exploiting power that considers itself safe from the effects of that corruption.

The Back to the Future movies (I never did see the third one) can be read as a sort of Horatio Alger story. In the first, Marty uses cleverness, determination, and luck to drag himself up from a timeline in which his father was a failure to one in which he was a success (and as his father’s fate went, so did that of the rest of the family). But once he’s got his favorable timeline, he spends the next two movies protecting it from someone else’s attempts to change it, like a child of poor immigrants made good who votes to keep a new generation of immigrants out now that he’s got some of the good life.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Massive spoilers for The Time Patrol

It's been too long since I read "Delenda Est" to be certain, but I'm pretty sure that you are conflating two Time Patrol stories. In "Delenda Est", the tragedy isn't that the Darnellians require history to be set aright, even though the Patrolmen think that the "meddled" history is better than the "actual" history in which Rome defeated Carthage. It's the fourth story in The Time Patrol collection, "The Only Game in Town", wherein it is revealed that the Darnellians are meddling with history to create their own past.

Amusing comments about the others. Kessel has written several short stories set in the same basic setting as Corrupting Dr. Nice, and I'm periodically struck by how different in tone they are from the novel. Dr. Nice is deliberately a screwball comedy, though certainly with the political underpinnings you note; the stories tend to be tragedies.

[avram]

Whups, you’re right.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Nive analysis. Having just gotten back from the racism/xenophobia cultivating LotR movie, I'm not feeling good about a lot of SF/Fantasy.

[avram]

Eh. I don’t mind fiction that incorporates the political views of its author, as long as it’s well-done and not preachy.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I don't mind it when the philosophy's explicit. But I find all too often there are icky hidden premises (reinforcing already common notions) that aren't noticed until one steps back to take a fresh look.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

You're being unfair to Mr. McFly, I feel. The protection of the second movie is generally beneficial (Biffworld is bad for everyone, including, to a certain extent, Biff), and the third involves little timeline-alteration at all (though I shant spoil it, as its worth watching). Ultimately, BttF denies that timetravel is zero-sum.

[avram]

I’m just bitter ’cause I wanted the villain of the sequel to be the displaced Marty who’d originally grown up in a functional, successful family, who now found himself stuck in a timeline with a dysfunctional family. (Though that probably doesn’t jibe with how the movie handles timestream alteration.)