 |
3 blanks
|
As described in my
previous blog post, I've been reading old time travel stories by
Isaac Asimov. This exercise in summertime reading (it is 103 ℉ here) is motivated by my high regard for Asimov's time travel novel,
The End of Eternity.
In the June 1957 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, there were three short stories called "Blank!", "Blank?" and "Blank". "Blank!" is a time travel story by Asimov. For The End of Eternity, Asimov had imagined an elevator-like time travel machine with "stops" at each century through Time. What might happen if such a time travel machine got stuck between "floors"?
 |
interior art for "Blank!"
it takes 2 to time travel
|
In "Blank!", August Pointdexter is nervous about time travel. For
The End of Eternity, Asimov had created a quirky character named
August Sennor who suggested that all human efforts directed towards space travel are useless, a waste of effort and a distraction from more important Earthly affairs. Sennor also argues that time travel paradoxes can't happen.
Pointdexter's problem. Pointdexter's problem is that Dr. Barron needs a helping hand piloting his time travel machine into the future. Oh, sure, the two men have already sent test animals backwards and forwards in Time, but Pointdexter can't escape the uneasy feeling that something might go wrong. He worries that while traveling through Time, he and Dr. Barron might become stranded and unable to return to their proper place in Time.
 |
interior art for "Blank?"
|
Trapped! In The End of Eternity, there is a scene in which the main character (Harlan) is traveling between the centuries of the far upwhen, but suddenly, he crashes into a temporal barrier and is unable to move further into the future, past the 100,000th century. Similarly, in "Blank!", Pointdexter and Barron get only about one day into the future when their time machine goes off the rails and comes to a dead stop. Due to some unexplained problem with their time travel machine, they have fallen out of the flow of Time and are now in some alternative domain of the universe that appears to be a complete blank.
What's going on? Dr. Barron carefully explains that according to his expert mathematical analysis, the flow of Time is invariant. Nothing that a time traveler does can ever alter the course of history. Dr. Barron is certain that there can be no temporal paradoxes arising from time travel. I think readers are supposed to assume that the universe always finds a way to "protect itself" and prevent time travel paradoxes. In the case of Pointdexter and Barron traveling through time, before they can start altering the timeline, their time machine "malfunctions" and they are trapped in a "blank" compartment of the universe where they can do no harm to the historical timeline.
 |
Figure 1. one paragraph from "Blank?"
|
Project Project. According to
this source, Randall Garrett studied chemical engineering while in college. He apparently grew up reading science fiction and at the age of 16, he published a short "
probability zero" story in
Astounding. Isaac Asimov published a series of short stories about the fictional substance "thiotimoline", including his 1953 "
The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline". In Randall Garrett's story "Blank?", the fictional chemical diazotimoline is used to "project" Bethleman's mind into the future (see
Figure 1).
Mental Time Travel. Bethleman is a New York City newspaper reporter who remembers having gone to Boston to conduct an interview with a biologist, Dr. Elijah Kamiroff at Boston University School of Medicine. However, at the start of "Blank?", Bethleman's recent memory is "
blanked out" and he can't remember anything from the past two weeks. Bethleman investigates the past two weeks of his life and discovers that during that time period he made $50,000 dollars gambling and trading stocks.
 |
Figure 2. perfect symmetry
|
For two more weeks, Bethleman's consciousness stays in N.Y.C. and he is the recipient of mysterious messages that contain tips for additional ways to increase his wealth.
 |
Figure 3. Mind-body dualism.
|
After those two weeks in N.Y.C, Bethleman's mind shifts again, "automatically" returning his
conscious self to Boston, and the day after having interviewed Kamiroff. In "Blank?", mention is made of someone named "Dunne" (see
Figure 3, to the left) who has proposed a theory of the mind featuring the idea that minds "
just follow the body". I suspect that Garrett was referring to
John William Dunne and his book
An Experiment with Time.
 |
From Garrett's 3 page ode to R. Daneel and Elijah Baley.
|
In the
March 1956 issue of
Science Fiction Stories, was a poetic parody of Asimov's 1953 novel
The Caves of Steel. The parody composed and published by Garrett as part of a
series of such things.
Garrett wrote and published one other item of time travel fiction that I know of, "
On the Martian Problem" (1977). In that story, Garrett "explained" the "fact" that the wise savants of
Helium were able to learn how to travel between Earth and Mars simply by wishing to do so. During such a "wish trip", a person moves faster than the speed of light and also travels in Time approximately 50,000 years. When going from Earth to Mars, you go backwards 50,000 years, but when going from Mars to Earth, you go 50,000 years into the future. Thus, the Mars of
Dejah Thoris and
John Carter was 50,000 years in the past. 40,000 years ago an asteroid struck Mars, obliterating Martian civilization.
In that same issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine was a story called "The Missing Item" by Isaac Asimov. Asimov's story concerns a cult of Tri-Luciferians who believe in "astral projection" across interplanetary distances. According to the cult, Mars is the Tri-Luciferian planet because it has three "morning stars", Earth, Venus and Mercury. The leader of the cult claims to have visited Mars and seen Earth in the night sky of Mars.
"The Missing Item" is terribly long-winded and rambling, but eventually the Tri-Lucifer cult is debunked. The cult leader failed to mention the fact that Earth's Moon would be visible from Mars. This is taken as proof that the cult leader never visited Mars by astral projection. In passing, Asimov mentioned "
Bridey Murphy" and the idea of reincarnation as an example of another weird idea comparable to astral projection.
 |
interior art for "Blank"
|
Blank. The third story on the theme of "blank" that got published in the
June 1957 issue of
Infinity Science Fiction was by Harlan Ellison. Ellison was a science fiction fan in the early 1950s, about the same time the Garrett began publishing regularly. Ellison did not really try to become a full-time writer until 1955.
 |
Figure 4. Into inverspace!
|
Inverspace. Rike Amadeus Akisimov has just been sentenced to a life term to be served at the
Io penal colony. He escapes from police custody, evades the telepathic psycops, kidnaps a psioid Driver and steals an invership from the spaceport.
 |
psioid Driver
|
The psioid Driver has the ability to put spacecraft into inverspace for interstellar travel (see
Figure 4, above), but ships of SpaceCom are in hot pursuit as the hijacked spaceship approaches the "snap point" for entry into inverspace.
Time Loop. The Driver sends Akisimov into a kind of time loop, a "moebius whirl", that will endlessly make him keep blanking out of the material universe and slipping into inverspace.
In 1957, Ellison published another time travel story called “Soldier from Tomorrow”. A soldier from the future named Qarlo is sent into the past by a powerful explosion on a battlefield. After hearing Qarlo's stories about the terrible wars of the future, all the nations of Earth pass new laws designed to make it impossible for wars to be fought in the future. However, nobody is sure if the future can actually be changed.
Future Wars Trilogy. Maybe in an alternate Reality, the analogues of Asimov, Garrett and Ellison were asked to each write a time travel story about a war of the future. I imagine that Asimov might have written something like "The Machine That Won the War".
In the
March 1960 issue of
Analog Science Fact & Fiction, Garrett published a story called "
In Case of Fire". A future interstellar war is grinding to a halt and a rag-tag band of diplomats must negotiate with the alien Karna.
Karna Time Loop. I like to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality there were many important roles for female characters in science fiction stories. Maybe after the events described in "In Case of Fire", Miss Drayson got a promotion and became a field agent for the Diplomatic Corps. After the next Human-Karna war, agent Drayson was given the assignment of trying to find a way to achieve a permanent peace with the alien Karna.
Related Reading: "Psioid Charley" (1956)
Next: more future chemicals
No comments:
Post a Comment