William White

time travel to the future
by Eric Russell
(cover by Howard Brown)

I've been reading old (for this blog post we travel back in time to 1950) science fiction stories about telepathy and time travel. I'm doing historical research because I need to knit Isaac Asimov and some of his stories into the Exode Saga and I want to know how Sci Fi story tellers of the past dealt with time travel and telepathy as plot elements.

In the Garage
Many science fiction story tellers can't resist creating time travel stories. However, I doubt if there is anything more annoying and dreary than fictional accounts of Time Travel Wars in which competing factions endlessly use time travel to keep reverting changes to the timeline that were triggered by their adversaries. Yawn. Thus, I've long clung to the idea that the only "good" time travel stories are those in which time travel exists for a short period and then the time travel technology can no longer be used.

Mad scientist? (see "Requiem for Methuselah")

Madness
Another traditional Sci Fi story element is the "mad scientist", the technological genius who, working alone in his garage (or the basement or the spare room upstairs) can (in his spare time) invent things like time machines. If time travel is invented by such a solitary and antisocial dude, then it is not too difficult to reach the end of your time travel story and destroy the one time machine that was ever built, saving us from a Time Travel War.

re-writing roles for women

One other widely-used Sci Fi plot element is the beautiful daughter of the mad scientist. You can't expect a young and virile hero of a Sci Fi story to go zipping around through Time and not bump into a luscious love interest. If the story involves a mad scientist, why not make the hero's love interest be the scientist's daughter? Thankfully, we have slowly emerged from the classical era of science fiction story telling and now women can be Sci Fi protagonists, not just hangers-on daughters and secretaries. Sadly, in 1950 you might have a Sci Fi story with a beautiful daughter (of the mad scientist) who is simply too stupid for the virile hero to stomach. Which brings us to.....

William White

Anthony Boucher

1. I've been learning about Georgy White from Rylla. Georgy and Rylla become strongly linked together by way of the Bimanoid Interface, much in the same way that Zeta and I are connected. According to Rylla, Georgy is related to William White, usually known in the Final Reality by his pen name, Anthony Boucher.

2.  Previously, Rylla had shared with me some of the lore about how Isaac Asimov had come to write his time travel novel, The End of Eternity.

3. I've also been looking back at stories written by Asimov that concern telepathy. If i) telepathy makes for fun Sci Fi and ii) time travel is so hard for story writers to resist, then why not combine these two plot elements?

cover art by Don Sibley

A nexus in time that brings these three threads together is the November 1950 issue of Galaxy magazine (download available here).

In that issue of Galaxy was 1) Asimov's short story "Misbegotten Missionary" (about telepathic aliens) and 2) White's "Transfer Point" (a time travel story). It would be interesting to know how Asimov reacted when he read "Transfer Point".

The "missionary" in "Misbegotten Missionary" is a telepathic alien lifeform that can effortlessly "listen" to the thoughts of humans and other Earthly lifeforms. The "missionary" is from a planet where all of the lifeforms are linked telepathically into one huge super-organism. (Asimov would later recycle this plot idea in his 1989 novel Nemesis.)

dead alien

As usual, there is no discussion of how telepathy works in "Misbegotten Missionary". However, we are told that there is a limit to the distance over which telepathy can function. When the "missionary" infiltrates an Earthly spaceship, it soon finds itself out of range for telepathic contact to its home planet. 😢

Original cover art by Robert Adragna.
This version: in the Buld Reality

The "missionary" is such a sensitive telepath that it can even "read" the "dim" telepathic pattern of Earthly plants (which Asimov tells us includes little more than a simple awareness of light, moisture and gravity). Not only are the aliens able to understand human thoughts, but they can make females (humans or other animals like rats) give birth to offspring that are telepathic.

The secret to telepathy resides in "green patches" that the aliens have instead of eyes. If the aliens modify a human baby for telepathy, then its eyes are replaced by little patches of green fur. Even Earthly bacteria are endowed with two tiny green patches by the aliens, apparently making them part of the telepathically-coordinated web of alien life. According to Asimov, the aliens can make females give birth to telepathic babies by "controlled use of radiant energy". Ah, the wonders of science!

Time Warp

in the Ekcolir Reality

Asimov's story suffers from the usual problems that arise from looking at old Sci Fi stories from the perspective of future readers. The news reporter in the story prints his stories out on a little electronic typewriter. And he has to worry about how to get a news story about pregnant virgins past the censors. Ah, the 50s!

 "Misbegotten Missionary" also suffers from not being very good as a science fiction story. I like to imagine that Asimov's writing interests evolved through the successive Realities of Deep Time. In the Foundation Reality, Asimov was a science writer, informing the public about advances in science and technology, particularly in the areas of robotics and space travel. In the Asimov Reality, the younger Asimov, under the influence of his older time traveling self, became known for creating wild fantasy stories, published in magazines such as Unknown. The science fiction genre was not created until the Ekcolir Reality. In that Reality, Asimov published a story called "Green Sighted".

Vyrko and Lavra investigate
 the time travel machine in "Transfer Point"

The idea of the phenotypic properties of living creatures being determined by their chromosomes was already firmly established when Asimov was in school. In just a few more years after "Misbegotten Missionary" was published, the idea of a gene sequence and the genetic code would arrive on Earth. Here is how Asimov accounted for the ability of his telepathic aliens to modify the human genes in an egg cell: "They can impress their own characteristics upon its nucleo-proteins" and he added that the aliens "can impregnate any species - animal, plant or microscopic."

According to Rylla, in the Ekcolir Reality, Asimov published "Green Sighted" in the first issue of Galaxy magazine. Asimov never read White's "Transfer Point" (published in the second issue of Galaxy) and so in that Reality Asimov never became interested in writing a time travel novel.

source

The pace of scientific discovery was quicker in the Ekcolir Reality, so "Green Sighted" included a detailed account of how humans could be genetically engineered so as to make use of technology-assisted telepathy (he did not use the term "Bimanoid Interface", but rather showed how Grean the Kac'hin made use of "Grean-sight" to take control of Eternity. The people of Earth mistakenly called telepathy "Green Sight".

Transfer Point
Asimov's story "The Red Queen's Race" (1949) was about the existence of an unchangeable time travel loop that was built into the timeline of Earth. The world-as-we-know-it was made possible when a chemistry textbook was sent back in time to ancient Greece. One view of time travel is that there can be no time travel paradoxes and many science fiction stories about time travel go out of their way to avoid time travel paradoxes. Anthony Boucher's "Transfer point" (1950) is a story about a time loop that was changed. It is easy to imagine how Asimov could have been influenced by "Transfer point", leading him to include in The End of Eternity another time loop that gets broken.

Unknown future.

As a Sci Fi story from 1950, "Transfer point" begins as a kind of annoying alien invasion story, set thousands of years in our future. Somehow (aliens are involved), a poisonous element called agnoton; "unknown thing") floods the atmosphere of earth, soon becoming almost as prevalent as oxygen. Agnoton is a gas like neon, but for some reason, humans are horribly allergic to it. We are told: "agnoton brought on racking and incessant spasms of coughing and sneezing which no heart could long withstand". So... the sudden arrival of agnoton is apparently the end of the line for Humanity. Although she is the last woman on Earth, the beautiful daughter of the dude who has invented a time travel machine in his spare time (her name is Lavra) is too stupid for the protagonist of the story, Vyrko.

No future?

Vyrko grows tired of repeatedly explaining to Lavra why they can't leave their residence where they are protected from the agnoton by a super-duper air-conditioning system. Here is how Vyrko thinks of Lavra: She was a fool, but she was exceedingly lovely. Here is what he says to her, "...you're an idiot. I am not in the habit of loving idiots." Still, with nothing else to do, Vyrko makes a halfhearted attempt to perpetuate the species and Lavra becomes pregnant. Then he uses dear old dad's time machine to go back to the 20th century (1948).

You'll have to read "Transfer point" to learn about Boucher's surprising time loop and how it is broken. I'm still hoping that Rylla can obtain more details from the Writers Block about William White's role in making sure that Asimov wrote The End of Eternity.
Next: a tempting replicoid

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers