Time Travel

As a vision of an idealized world, a sort of utopia, Astor’s book owed a debt to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the American bestseller of 1887, likewise set in the year 2000. (Time travel by sleep again: our hero enters a trance of 113 years.) Bellamy expressed the frustration of not being able to know the future. In his story “The Blindman’s World” he imagined that we earthlings are alone among the universe’s intelligent creatures in lacking “the faculty of foresight,” as if we had eyes only at the backs of our heads. “Your ignorance of the time of your death impresses us as one of the saddest features of your condition,” says a mysterious visitor. Looking Backward inspired a wave of utopias, to be followed by dystopias, and these are so invariably futuristic that we sometimes forget that the original Utopia, by Thomas More, was not set in the future at all. Utopia was just a faraway island.

No one bothered with the future in 1516. It was indistinguishable from the present. However, sailors were discovering remote places and strange peoples, so remote places served well for speculative authors spinning fantasies. Lemuel Gulliver does not voyage in time. It is enough for him to visit “Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan.” William Shakespeare, whose imagination seemed limitless, who traveled freely to magical isles and enchanted forests, did not—could not—imagine different times. The past and present are all the same to Shakespeare: mechanical clocks strike the hour in Caesar’s Rome, and Cleopatra plays billiards. He would have been amazed by the theatrical time travel that Tom Stoppard creates in Arcadia and Indian Ink: placing together on stage stories that unfold in different eras, decades apart.

“Something needs to be said about this,” Stoppard writes in a stage direction in Arcadia. “The action of the play shuttles back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day, always in this same room.” Props move about—books, flowers, a tea mug, an oil lamp—as if crossing the centuries through an invisible portal. By the end of the play they have gathered on a table: the geometrical solids, the computer, decanter, glasses, tea mug, Hannah’s research books, Septimus’s books, the two portfolios, Thomasina’s candlestick, the oil lamp, the dahlia, the Sunday papers … On Stoppard’s stage these objects are the time travelers.

We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked. It was long in coming. The year 1900 brought a blaze of self-consciousness about times and dates. The twentieth century was rising like a new sun. “No century has ever issued from the womb of time whose advent has aroused the high expectation, the universal hope, as that which the midnight litanies and the secular festivals but eight days hence will usher in,” wrote the editorialist of the Philadelphia Press. The Hearst-owned New York Morning Journal declared itself “The Twentieth Century Newspaper” and organized an electrical publicity stunt: “The Journal Asks All Citizens of New York to Illuminate Their Homes Monday Midnight as a Welcome to the Twentieth Century.” New York festooned City Hall with two thousand lightbulbs in red, white, and blue, and the president of the city council addressed a throng: “Tonight when the clock strikes twelve the present century will have come to an end. We look back upon it as a cycle of time within which the achievements in science and in civilization are not less than marvelous.” In London the Fortnightly Review invited its now famous futurist, the thirty-three-year-old H. G. Wells, to write a series of prophetic essays: “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought.” In Paris they were already calling it fin de siècle, emphasis on fin: decadence and ennui were all the rage. But when the time came, the French, too, looked forward.

An English writer could not hope to have an international literary reputation until he had been published in France, and Wells did not have to wait long. The Time Machine was translated by Henry Davray, who recognized an heir to the visionary Jules Verne, and the venerable Mercure de France printed it in 1898 with a title that lost something in translation: La machine à explorer le temps.fn3 Naturally the avant-garde loved the idea of time travel: Avant! Alfred Jarry, a symbolist playwright and prankster—also an enthusiastic bicyclist—using the pseudonym “Dr. Faustroll,” immediately produced a mock-serious construction manual, “Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps.” Jarry’s time machine is a bicycle with an ebony frame and three “gyrostats” with rapidly rotating flywheels, chain drives, and ratchet boxes. A lever with an ivory handle controls the speed. Mumbo-jumbo ensues. “It is worth noting that the Machine has two Pasts: the past anterior to our own present, what we might call the real past; and the past created by the Machine when it returns to our Present and which is in effect the reversibility of the Future.” Time is the fourth dimension, of course.fn4 Jarry later said he admired Wells’s “admirable sang-froid” in managing to make his mumbo-jumbo so scientific.

The fin de siècle was at hand. Preparing for Year 1900 festivities in Lyon, Armand Gervais, a toy manufacturer who liked novelties and automata, commissioned a set of fifty color engravings from a freelance artist named Jean-Marc Côté. These images conjure a world of marvels that might exist en l’an 2000: people sporting in their tiny personal aircraft, warring in dirigibles, playing underwater croquet at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps the best is the schoolroom, where children in knee breeches sit with hands clasped at wooden desks while their teacher feeds books into a grinding machine, powered by a hand crank. Evidently the books are pulverized into a residue of pure information, which is then conveyed by wires up the wall and across the ceiling and down into headsets that cover the pupils’ ears.

These prescient images have a story of their own. They never saw the light of their own time. A few sets were run off on the press in the basement of the Gervais factory in 1899, when Gervais died. The factory was shuttered, and the contents of that basement remained hidden for the next twenty-five years. A Parisian antiques dealer stumbled upon the Gervais inventory in the twenties and bought the lot, including a single proof set of Côté’s cards in pristine condition. He had them for fifty years, finally selling them in 1978 to Christopher Hyde, a Canadian writer who came across his shop on rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie. Hyde, in turn, showed them to Isaac Asimov, a Russian-born scientist and science-fiction writer, the author or editor of, by then, 343 books. Asimov made the En l’an 2000 cards into his 344th: Futuredays. He saw something remarkable in them—something genuinely new in the annals of prophecy.

Prophecy is old. The business of “telling” the future has existed through all recorded history. Foretelling and soothsaying, augury and divination, are among the most venerable of professions, if not always the most trusted. Ancient China had 易經, I Ching, the Book of Changes; sibyls and oracles plied their trade in Greece; aeromancers and palmists and scryers saw the future in clouds, hands, and crystals, respectively. “That grim old Roman Cato the Censor said it well: ‘I wonder how one augur can keep from laughing when he passes another,’” wrote Asimov.

But the future, as divined by the diviners, remained a personal matter. Fortune-tellers cast their hexagrams and turned their tarot cards to see the futures of individuals: sickness and health, happiness and misery, tall dark strangers. As for the world at large—that did not change. Through most of history, the world people imagined their children living in was the world they inherited from their parents. One generation was like the next. No one asked the oracle to forecast the character of daily life in years to come.

“Suppose we dismiss fortune-telling,” says Asimov. “Suppose we also dismiss divinely inspired apocalyptic forecasts. What, then, is left?”

Futurism. As redefined by Asimov himself. H. G. Wells talked about “futurity” at the turn of the century, and then the word futurism was hijacked by a group of Italian artists and protofascists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his “Futurist Manifesto” in the winter of 1909 in La Gazzetta dell’Emilia and Le Figaro, declaring himself and his friends to be free at last—free of the past.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars … “Andiamo,” I said. “Andiamo, amici!” … And like young lions we ran after death, [etc.]

The manifesto included eleven numbered items. Number one: “We intend to sing the love of danger …” Number four was about fast cars: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath.” The futuristi created just one of the many twentieth-century movements that proudly defined themselves as avant-garde—eyes fixed forward, escaping the past, striding into the future.

When Asimov used the word, he meant something more basic: a sense of the future as a notional place, different, and perhaps profoundly different, from what has come before. Through most of history, people could not see the future that way. Religions had no particular thought for the future; they looked toward rebirth, or eternity—a new life after death, an existence outside of time. Then, finally, humanity crossed a threshold of awareness. People began to sense that there was something new under the sun. Asimov explains:

Before we can have futurism, we must first recognize the existence of the future in a state that is significantly different from the present and the past. It may seem to us that the potential existence of such a future is self-evident, but that was most definitely not so until comparatively recent times.

And when did that happen? It began in earnest with the Gutenberg printing press, saving our cultural memory in something visible, tangible, and shareable. It reached critical velocity with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the machine—looms and mills and furnaces, coal and iron and steam—creating, along with so much else, a sudden nostalgia for the apparently vanishing agrarian way of life. Poets led the way. “Hear the voice of the Bard!” William Blake implored, “Who Present, Past, and Future sees.” Some people liked progress more than did Mr. Dark Satanic Mills, but either way, before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress. Technological change had not always seemed like a one-way street. Now it did. The children of the Industrial Revolution witnessed vast transformations within their lifetimes. To the past there was no return.

Surrounded by advancing machinery, Blake blamed, more than anyone else, Isaac Newton—the blinkered rationalist imposing his new orderfn5—but Newton himself had not believed in progress. He studied a great deal of history, mostly biblical, and if anything he supposed that his own era represented a fall from grace, a tattered remnant of past glories. When he invented vast swaths of new mathematics, he thought he was rediscovering secrets known to the ancients and later forgotten. His idea of absolute time did not subvert his belief in eternal Christian time. Historians studying our modern notion of progress have observed that it began to develop in the eighteenth century, along with our modern notion of history itself. We take our sense of history for granted—our sense of “historical time.” The historian Dorothy Ross defines it as “the doctrine that all historical phenomena can be understood historically, that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” (She calls this “a late and complex achievement of the modern West.”) It seems so obvious now: we build upon the past.

So, as the Renaissance receded, a few writers began trying to imagine the future. Besides Madden with his Memoirs of the Twentieth Century and Mercier with his dream of the year 2440, others attempted imaginative fiction about societies to come, which can, in hindsight, be called “futuristic,” though that word did not register in English until 1915. They were all defying Aristotle, who wrote, “Nobody can narrate what has not yet happened. If there is narration at all, it will be of past events, the recollection of which is to help the hearers to make better plans for the future.”

The first true futurist in Asimov’s sense of the word was Jules Verne. In the 1860s, as railroad trains chugged across the countryside and sailing ships gave way to steam, he imagined vessels traveling under the sea, across the skies, to the center of the earth, and to the moon. We would say he was a man ahead of his time—he had an awareness, a sensibility, suited to a later era. Edgar Allan Poe was ahead of his time. The Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage and his protégé Ada Lovelace, forerunners of modern computing, were ahead of their time. Jules Verne was so far ahead of his time that he could never even find a publisher for his most futuristic book, Paris au XXe siècle, a dystopia featuring gas-powered cars, “boulevards lit as brightly as by the sun,” and machine warfare. The manuscript, handwritten in a yellow notebook, turned up in 1989, when a locksmith cracked open a long-sealed family safe.

The next great futurist was Wells himself.

We are all futurists now.

THREE

Philosophers and Pulps

“Time travel?! You expect me to believe such nonsense?”

“Yes, it is a difficult concept, isn’t it.”

—Douglas Adams (“The Pirate Planet,” Doctor Who, 1978)

TIME TRAVEL AS DESCRIBED by Wells and his many heirs is everywhere now, but it does not exist. It cannot. In saying so, it occurs to me that I’m Filby

“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” says the Editor.

“It’s against reason,” says Filby.

Critics of the 1890s took the same view. Wells knew they would. When his book was finally published in the spring of 1895—The Time Machine: An Invention, sold in New York by Henry Holt (75¢) and in London by William Heinemann (2/6)—reviewers admired it for a good tale: a “fantastic story”; “shocker of no ordinary kind”; “tour de force of ghastly imaginings”; “distinctly above the average of such fanciful works”; and “worth reading if you like to read impossible yarns” (that last from the New York Times). They noted the apparent influence of the Dark Romantics, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. One sniffed, “We have some difficulty in discerning the exact utility of such excursions into futurity.”

Only a few paid Wells the compliment of analyzing his fantastic notion logically. They found it illogical. “There is no getting into the Future, except by waiting,” wrote Israel Zangwill in the Pall Mall Magazine, wagging a stern finger. “You can only sit down and see it come by.” Zangwill, himself an occasional novelist and humorist, soon also to be a famous Zionist, thought he understood time quite well. He admonished the author:

In verity there is no Time Traveller, Mr. Wells, save Old Father Time himself. Instead of being a Fourth Dimension of Space, Time is perpetually travelling through Space, repeating itself in vibrations farther and farther from the original point of incidence; a vocal panorama moving through the universe across the infinities, a succession of sounds and visions that, having once been, can never pass away …

(Zangwill had clearly been reading Poe: vibrations indefinitely extending through the atmosphere—“no thought can perish”—and this sentence, too, sails indefinitely onward.)

… but only on and on from point to point, permanently enregistered in the sum of things, preserved from annihilation by the endlessness of Space, and ever visible and audible to eye or ear that should travel in a parallel movement.

Despite his objections Zangwill couldn’t help but admire Wells’s “brilliant little romance.” He shrewdly noticed that The Arabian Nights had employed a sort of time-machine precursor: a magic carpet that traverses space. Meanwhile, even in 1895, Zangwill seemed to understand certain peculiar implications of time travel—the paradoxes, we will soon say—better than Wells himself.

The Time Machine looks one way: forward. Ostensibly Wells’s time machine could travel to the past with a reverse throw of the lever, but the Time Traveller had no interest in going there. And a good thing too, says Zangwill. Just think what difficulties would be entailed. Our past had no Time Traveller barging through. A past that included a Time Traveller would be a different past, a new past. None of this was easy to put into words:

Had he travelled backwards, he would have reproduced a Past which, in so far as his own appearance in it with his newly invented machine was concerned, would have been ex hypothesi unveracious.

Then there’s the problem of meeting oneself. Zangwill becomes the first to notice this, and he will not be the last:

Had he recurred to his own earlier life, he would have had to exist in two forms simultaneously, of varying ages—a feat which even Sir Boyle Roche would have found difficult.

(His readers would recognize Roche as the Irish politician who said, “Mr. Speaker, it is impossible I could have been in two places at once, unless I were a bird.”)fn1

The book reviewers came and went, and before long philosophers got into the game. When they first took notice of time travel it was with a certain embarrassment, like a symphony conductor unable to look away from an organ grinder. “A frivolous example drawn from contemporary fiction,” said Professor Walter Pitkin at Columbia University, writing in the Journal of Philosophy in 1914. Something was stirring in science—the realm in which time was a measurable and absolute quantity known familiarly as t—and philosophers were uneasy. In the first years of the new century, when they turned to the subject of time, they had one thinker above all to contend with: the young Frenchman Henri Bergson. In the United States, William James, who might otherwise have been resting on his laurels as the “father of psychology,” found new vitality in Bergson. “Reading his works is what has made me bold,” James said in 1909. “If I had not read Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet.” (He added, “I have to confess that Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.”)

Bergson asks us to remember how artificial is the notion of space as an empty homogenous medium—the absolute space announced by Newton. It is a creation of human intellect, he notes: “We may as well say that men have a special faculty of perceiving or conceiving a space without quality.” Scientists may find this abstract empty space to be useful for calculating, but let’s not make the mistake of confusing it with reality. Even more so with time. When we measure time with mechanical clocks, when we draw diagrams where time is an axis on a graph, we may fall into the trap of imagining time to be merely another version of space. To Bergson, time t, the time of the physicists, sliced into hours, minutes, and seconds, turned philosophy into a prison. He rejected the immutable, the absolute, the eternal. He embraced flux, process, becoming. For Bergson, the philosophical analysis of time could not be divorced from our human experience of it: the overlapping of mental states, the segue from one to the next that we experience as duration—la durée.

He held time apart from space rather than commingling the two: “Time and space begin to interweave only when both become fictional.” He saw time, not space, as the essence of consciousness; duration, the heterogeneous tide of moments, as the key to freedom. Philosophers were about to follow physics down a new path, and Bergson would be left behind, but for now he was hugely popular. Crowds thronged his lectures at the Collège de France, Proust attended his wedding, and James called him a magician. “Dive back into the flux then,” cried James. “Turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing which rationalism has always loaded with abuse.” Here he parted company with physics.

What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead … Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results.

Pitkin seems to have felt that he needed to rescue the poor scientists from Bergson’s onslaught. Described by Time magazine in a brief moment of fame as “a man of many ideas, some of them large,” he was a founding member of a short-lived movement that called itself new realism. In his 1914 essay he declared that he liked some of Bergson’s “conclusions” but despised his “entire method,” particularly the rejection of scientific process in favor of psychological introspection. Pitkin proposed to clear up the space-time conundrum by means of logical proof. He would embrace the physicists’ t and t′ and t′′ and yet he would prove once and for all that time is different from space. To wit: we can move hither and yon in space, but not in time. Or rather, we do move in time, but not freely: “a thing moves in time only by moving with all other things.” And how would he prove this? In a most unexpected way:

To make the proof as simple as possible, I shall present it in the form of a sober criticism of one of the wildest flights of literary fancy which that specialist in wild flights, H. G. Wells, has indulged in. I refer, of course, to his amusing skit, The Time Machine.

It was the first but not the last time that Mr. Wells’s amusing skit would impose itself upon the attention of this august journal.

“You cannot leap back into the thirteenth century, nor can a man of that period hop into our own,” wrote Pitkin. “Mr. Wells would have us imagine a man at rest in the space dimensions, but moving with respect to the time of that space field. Very well! Let us do our noblest to play the game. What do we find? Something very disconcerting indeed. Something which, I fear, will make time-touring very unpopular among sedate people.”

The traveler flies, not through abstract time (like the “pure space” of the geometer). He flies through real time. But real time is history: and history is the course of physical events. It is the sequence of activities, physical, physiological, political, and otherwise.

Do we really want to go down this road? Must we look for errors of logic in a piece of fantastic fiction?

Yes, we must. The practitioners of time travel, even in “pulp” magazines, were soon to work out rules and justifications that would make a Talmudist proud. What is allowed, what is possible, what is plausible—the rules evolved and varied, but logic must be honored. We may as well begin with Professor Pitkin, man of many ideas, some of them large, in the Journal of Philosophy.

His argument would not seem very sophisticated to a typical teenage sci-fi aficionado circa 1970. In fairness, he recognizes that common human intuition about the world often fails to comprehend the strangeness of reality. Science keeps surprising us. Which way is up, for example? “It was held impossible ‘by the very nature of things,’” he notes, “that the earth should be a sphere, with people on the other side walking, heads downward.” (He might have added that Aristotle’s common sense revealed three and no more than three spatial dimensions: “the line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.”) Could it be, he asks, that time travel merely strikes us as impossible “because of certain prejudices we entertain or certain facts and tricks of which we are still hopelessly ignorant?” Let us be open-minded. “[The] answer, whatever that may be, carries immeasurable consequences for metaphysics.”