I recently had fun writing a short time travel story that is the first chapter from an old novel called
Time Portal. In my story, a wedding ring gets sent back through time as the first time travel trip made possible by a newly constructed time machine. Here in this blog post I'll comment on two old time travel stories, "
Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941) by Ross Rocklynne and "
Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.
This blog post can be viewed as a continuation from an earlier post in 2017 in which I commented on a couple of other old time travel stories ("The Time Axis", "Vintage Season" and "Time Locker"). Like Time Portal, "Time Wants a Skeleton" features a time traveling ring, this one with a distinctive emerald. Rocklynne's story is set in the Asteroid Belt where policeman Lieutenant Tony Crow of the IPF is packing his Luger Hampton.
Crow is in hot pursuit of three Bad Guys™, Braker,
X and Yates. Braker,
X and Yates are hiding on the 20-mile-wide asteroid 1007 where Tony clumsily crashes his spaceship, rupturing its hull and causing the ship's air to leak out.
One Down. Soon, Tony is having a shoot-out with the Bad Guys™ and
Mr. X is killed by Tony. Under fire from Braker and Yates, Tony steps into a nearby cave and finds a
giant man-eating worm human skeleton. Upon seeing the skeleton, Tony suddenly knows (as if someone is telling him) that the skeleton is from the far past. But the shoot-out is still in progress. Tony blasts a nearby cliff with his gun, triggering a landslide that destroys the spaceship of the Bad Guys™.
Is this the end? Trapped on asteroid 1007, waiting until the air in their spacesuits is all used up? Tune in next week!
Just then, a third spaceship arrives, lands close to Tony, Braker and Yates and a woman steps out: Miss Laurette, the daughter of Professor Overland. Professor Overland is in the process of proving that most of the asteroids in the Asteroid Belt fit together like puzzle pieces and were once
part of a single planet.
Logical Plot Progression? A story can't have a completely logical progression of events when the author is trying to introduce a loop in time. Safely aboard Overland's spaceship, Tony notices that Braker is wearing the same emerald ring that was on the skeleton. A mystery! Tony starts muttering about not being a ghost and poor Braker thinks that Tony has lost his marbles.
Behind door #2. A minute later, Tony and Laurette are together inside a storage closet and caught in an avalanche of falling Christmas packages. Tony does what anyone would do under such festive circumstances and kisses Laurette. She slaps his face, but with her lips now loosened, Laurette explains to Tony that the newfangled HH-drive, which moves Professor Overland's spaceship, works by means of
gravitons. And, yes, there is a reason for the closet full of Christmas presents... stay tuned for next week's episode.....
Sciensy. Now becoming chums, Tony lets Laurette know about the skeleton and Braker's ring. There's some intense cigarette smoking by Tony and Laurette as they ponder the mystery of the ring-wearing skeleton. Laurette then continues her tutorial on gravitons, explaining the the HH-drive sends gravitons into the past and that is what moves a spaceship forward "without acceleration effects".
Two crash-landings are better than one. When Professor Overland is told about the skeleton and the ring he decides to investigate the mystery. Then, suddenly, they crash into a planet. Now they are suddenly millions of years in the past and on the planet that will be shattered and give rise to the Asteroid Belt. Tony discovers that they have landed close to the cave of the skeleton -the cave that will end up as part of asteroid 1007.
Plot plods on. Professor Overland deduces that if the HH-drive happens to pass through "the spherical type of etheric vacuum" then a spaceship will be sent into the past. The kicker: they have arrived at the pre-asteroidal planet just a few weeks before it will be shattered into fragments by another approaching planet. Trying to make certain that the emerald ring does not end up on the cave skeleton, Tony throws the ring into a nearby river. However, the ring returns in the belly of a fish that Laurette catches, cooks and serves for dinner.
Back to the Future. When the pre-asteroidal planet is shattered, a shift in gravitons sends everyone back to the future. But who ends up as the skeleton wearing Braker's emerald ring? That would be Amos, a classroom skeleton that had been mailed to Professor Overland from his university on Earth as a kind of retirement gift.
Much of "Time Wants a Skeleton" concerns the characters agonizing over the mystery of who will become the skeleton wearing the ring and the philosophical question: is it possible to break the loop in time that seems to link the destruction of the pre-asteroidal planet to the mysterious skeleton on asteroid 1007? Rocklynne apparently tried to generate narrative tension with page after page after page after page of the story devoted to this "agonizing" mystery, but I think he (or the magazine editor) would have been well advised to shorten the story from 50 to 40 pages.
 |
| Spock brings future technology to 1930 |
Almost Back. However, the "slingshot effect" did not send them back to exactly the same point in time. Arriving back in the future,
Tony from the past lay trapped in rubble at the back of the cave while
pre-time travel Tony first arrived on asteroid 1007. With two copies of Tony on asteroid 1007, a type of telepathic contact developed between the two copies of Tony, providing
pre-time travel Tony with the certain knowledge that the skeleton had previously been in the distant past. Sadly, Rocklynne says nothing about how this telepathy between the two copies of Tony worked, although I do like the idea that two identical
copies of a person might have some sort of "resonance" between their brains.
We can place "Time Wants a Skeleton" into the "accidental time travel" category, rather like the
Star Trek episode "
The City on the Edge of Forever" in which Dr. McCoy does not try to travel into Earth's history, but ends up being accidentally sent into the past. In the late 1940s, Asimov wrote a story that ended up being published as "
Pebble in the Sky" and which for some strange reason included the accidental time traveler, Schwartz, a retired tailor.
Bottom line. The best thing I can say about "Time Wants a Skeleton" is that we get a time travel story without the added agony of a genius scientists who has to build a time machine in his basement. I suppose warnings will be sent to all users of the HH-drive to carefully avoid "the spherical type of etheric vacuum" lest they accidentally get catapulted through time.
Lucky Laurette. For a story that was published in 1941, Rocklynne provided readers with a fairly interesting female character: Laurette. Yes, we see Laurette preparing meals and serving food to a table full of men, but in the "thrilling climax" of the story when the damaged rockets of Professor Overland's spaceship are struggling to provide enough thrust to lift the ship off of the surface of the doomed pre-asteroidal planet, she jumps out the door to remove her 105 pounds of body weight from the ship. Luck for Laurette, she survives her fall to the ground, struggles back to the landing site, has the presence of mind to open the gift box containing the skeleton and puts the emerald ring on the skeleton's finger, thus completing the Time Loop. Whew! Oh, and in the end, so that
something is accomplished by this overly-long story, Laurette ditches her fiancé and takes up with Tony the policeman.
I wonder to what extent Rocklynne's fanciful time-loop influenced Asimov when he eventually created his own time-loop for the story
The End of Eternity. For his story, Asimov amplified the time-loop idea by using a loop in time as part of the development of time travel technology.
Toy Box. "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" quickly transports readers off to the far (millions of years) future when we might hope that there are no cliché genius scientists inventing time machines in their basement. But no. Unthahorston has just built his Time Travel Box™. Success in this project has arrived so suddenly that Unthahorston has given no thought to what he should send into the past. Only AFTER activating the time travel circuits does he rush to the storage closet and randomly grab some items (old toys) to send into the past.
After having been appalled by the first page of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" I carefully avoided reading the rest of the story for 45 years..... until now.
Early in the 1900s, people were making some adjustments to their thinking. "Atoms", originally conceived as the fundamental, irreducible constituents of matter were found to be composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. The flow of time, previously imagined to be universal, was found to be relative to one's rate of movement through space. Some observers threw up their hands and tried to pretend that all human knowledge is nothing more than socially-constructed convention, likely to be wrong. If so, then maybe we should be searching for the correct way to view the universe, after having first thrown conventional science and mathematics in the trash bin of history.
 |
Unthahorston's time machine
|
Another perspective on the human condition is that we have evolved as biological organisms that are carefully tuned to the universe. Yes, we might fail to recognize the existence of invisibly small things such as electrons, but eventually, by careful and persistent efforts, we can use our conventional thought processes to figure out how the universe works.
The optimist's view is that (given a little time and persistent efforts) we humans can actually understand the universe. But what if some features of the universe can't be understood by we humans using our existing conventional thought patterns? Enter the type of science fiction story in which alternative modes of thought are imagined which make it possible to slip into hidden dimensions or... perform whatever magic the story teller wants to include in their story.
Callooh! I suppose that for some people, the accomplishments of science and engineering all seem like magic anyhow. If so, then when creating a story about imaginary futuristic science, why not simply depict it as being made possible by a totally inexplicable or unimaginable trick such as by means of speaking magic words?
 |
future toy
|
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" champions the idea that only young children would be able to adopt the "advanced" patterns of thinking used by the evolved human descendants of our far future. In that future, there would be sophisticated educational toys that show children how to think in extra dimensions. Such toys are what Unthahorston pulls out of the closet and sends back into the distant past, transforming a couple of 20th century children into
Super Children™ who can walk off of Earth and into the 5th dimension. Yes, that's exactly how "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" ends.
My favorite part of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is the anatomically correct doll from the future and its mysterious internal organs, only some of which are known to us. I love the idea that the human body might contain nanoscopic components (
endosymbionts) as yet unknown to science.
In 2007 there was a film inspired by "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". The film tried to provide a reason for sending toys into the past rather than depict it as some freakish accident.
Related Reading: Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Phaeton
Also: The Last Mimzy
Next: the science fiction stories of Fredric Brown
No comments:
Post a Comment