‘TIME, A SIMPLE THING, CONSIDERED AS…’
by
ANDREW
DARLINGTON
So, like it or not,
we’re stuck in this time-stuff like journalists embedded in a war-zone. We get
no choice in it. We don’t understand it. But our lives are subject to its laws,
from beginning… to end. Some speculate about the ‘Big Bang’, and about what
preceded it. Seems to me there’s some basic glitch in their reasoning.
According to the very wonderful Albert Einstein, space-time is interconnected,
they’re aspects of one another. So matter did not exist before time. And time
did not exist before matter. Time came into being woven into the structure of
matter. It’s an integral aspect of life, the universe and everything. There was
nothing prior to the Big Bang, not even time. So the idea of ‘before’ itself is
a nonsense. As Albert said, and he should know. But I’m getting sidetracked
already…
James Ussher,
diligent seventeenth-century Archbishop Of Armagh and Primate Of All Ireland,
famously totted-up all the dates in the Bible to conclude creation was
six-thousand years old. That it came into being at around nightfall – 9pm or
thereabouts, preceding the Sunday of 23 October 4004BC. That’s not a very long
period of time, in what we term historic or prehistoric terms. What it
presupposes it that the world, and everything else was created in exactly the
form it is now. That it is essentially unchanged, and unchanging. Bishop Ussher
was not exactly unique in assuming this. For the most part of human existence
on this planet, time was not something invested with the significance we now
attach to it. People in ancient civilizations lived in a state of perpetual
now-ness. Of course, those nomadic peoples on their flat-Earth world beneath a
closed dome of finite sky across which the Moon and the Sun criss-crossed on
their regular paths, they had their creation myths. They were sufficiently
curious, and poetically imaginative enough to conjure up some engaging
fantasies. Bizarrely, some claim still to adhere to those antique myth-systems
as a kind of spiritual litmus-paper test of their religious beliefs. But those
ancients were as embedded in time as we are, they aged and died like we do,
they were aware of the passing of dynasties, of old-time heroes and legendary
military campaigns. They were even surrounded by the monolithic remains of
earlier civilizations. What they didn’t have was any concept of historical
progression. The past was no better and no worse than the present. The future
would be no better or worse, or significantly different to the present. People
came and people went, but the world they moved through remained essentially the
same. In fact, for your average peasant, life didn’t change in its essential
details – tied to the cycle of seasons, for thousands of years. For some people
alive today, it’s still pretty much like that.
Many worlds of
Fantasy Fiction continue to exist within that continuum. It’s a useful and
popular story-telling device. But that’s what distinguishes it from science
fiction. Can science fiction exist without science? Without awareness of
scientific methodology? Without an appreciation of space-time…? I think not.
This is what differentiates us.
Events frequently
have unintended consequences. It could be argued that it was the industrial
revolution that rendered the slave-trade obsolete, when capitalism twigged that
machines are faster, more efficient and cheaper than forced human labour.
Darwin – and I concede there were pre-Darwin and simultaneous Darwinian-type
thinkers around, but for the sake of this diatribe we’ll leave it at Darwin.
And yes, he ripped the roof off pretty-much everything. The apes-into-human
bit, obviously. But it alters our relationship with time too. People, and
bipeds that look a lot like people, have been around for, not thousands, but
millions of years. While the Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos,
are suddenly calculated in billions, not millions of years. It expands the
scope, and introduces changes. The obvious corollary is to switch that
perspective around. If the past is not like the present, the future will be
equally unlike the present. Tomorrow will be different. The day after tomorrow
will be differenter. The past is still springing surprises, still being
fine-tuned and redrawn. But if our species and subspecies have been around
millions of years, just possibly we’ll be around a few million more. If we can
survive the current unsustainable population-bump through pandemic or
ecological armageddon, and reemerge at something resembling medieval
population-levels, with current technology intact, the potential is endless.
Until we gradually shift into something else.
And if the Earth
has been around billions of years since its fiery birth, chances are it’ll be
around, in some form or another, for billions more, until it eventually ceases
to be. A fairly obvious conclusion, to us, now. But a perception that’s
different to Bishop Ussher’s fixed static world-view. And a step-change in
human consciousness from what came before. An awareness that ripples out and
alters with unintended consequences. It shocks the documentation of history out
of this-happened then this-happened then this-happened into a structured
narrative that starts way down there in messy unhygienic primitivism and
inexorably climbs up to whatever cultural pinnacles we now enjoy. Relativistic
issues may gnaw at that certainty every now and then, but some things are
inescapable. Read this online. Now argue that’s not progress. Yet narratives
are not fixed. They involve plot developments, with chapters as-yet unwritten.
They also imply a dénouement.
There could be no
ancient Roman or classical Greek science fiction, because they did not possess
this sense of time as something infinitely malleable. Homer and Virgil schemed
tales of epic journeys to fantastic realms which are easily adaptable to a kind
of SF-mindset. They are fantasy, with story-telling devices that have been
subsumed into SF. But they are not SF.
And human’s being a
naturally inquisitive organism, just as desert nomads once dreamed
creation-myths from the dance of campfires beneath the stars, so there’s no way
they’re not going to populate that immensity of future-centuries with new
ideas, with playful half-fantasy, half-speculation. Jules Verne was writing
about dinosaurs and evolutionary proto-humans in ‘Journey To The Centre Of The
Earth’ (1964) even as, simultaneously, the Darwinian dialogue was still
hot hot hot. We forget just how innovative that was. Then HG Wells transported
his Time Traveller forward to the very end of old Earth’s story, to its bleak
cold extinction days, in prose that still shocks chills of frisson through the
frontal lobes. These concepts open up the scale of what is possible. This is no
small thing. This is a big deal. That science fiction was a trashy
academically-disreputable genre that rapidly became associated with cheap
bug-eyed monsters in garish pulp-magazines doesn’t detract from the fact that
the SF community was the first to think of us as one global tribe – we are
Earthlings. One species, beyond national boundaries.
From its very
beginnings, writers have never ducked the opportunity of projecting their
visions to the end of time. Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The City And The Stars’
(1956) envisions a single eternal city on an otherwise dead planet. Michael
Moorcock’s ‘Dancers At The End Of Time’ (1972-1976) novel-series has
decadent humans with techno-supernatural powers cavorting and partying into
eternity. Jack Vance’s ‘The Dying Earth’ (1950, and on) has
the Earth awaiting the Sun’s death as cunning and intrigue continue their
devious eccentric way towards oblivion. Against all the evidence these fictions
suggest the human form will survive the passage of millions of years largely
unchanged. Others are not so restrained. Brian Aldiss’ brain-expanding
end-of-time ‘Hothouse’ (1962) is populated by squat lemur-like humans lost
in a vast tropical rainforest world of a single Banyan tree. Stephen Baxter has
it both ways. In his ‘Evolution’ (2002) humans change and
devolve into a bleak arid Mars-like world 500-million years ahead, while an
alternate parallel-future diverges into “The Children
Of Time”, a Baxter spin-off that appeared in ‘Asimov’s Science Fiction
Magazine’ (July 2005), and later in the Mike Ashley-edited ‘The
Mammoth Book Of Apocalyptic SF’ (Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010).
This related story-strand insists
humans will stay human. Until there are no more humans. Still elsewhere, the
Asimov and ‘Star Trek’ tomorrows suggest human manifest destiny is to
expand out across the stars and colonise the thronging galaxy. Others look at
the distance of the stars, and turn away. No, we are here to stay. One planet.
One solar system. Fact is, we don’t know. We can guess. It’s all up for grabs.
But our guesses are restrained by the now-ness of this time-stuff we’re
embedded in.
There’s a
beautifully absurd sequence in HG Wells’ tale filmed by Alexander Korda into ‘Things
To Come’ (1936), in which a fleet of vast propeller-driven
flying-machines appear over devastated post-war Europe. It’s a stunning
steam-punk image as outmoded by subsequent events as our imaginings will soon
be reconfigured and junked by what happens tomorrow. My story ‘The New Flesh’
in the current issue of ‘Jupiter’ takes a light-touch look
at species origins, and at future evolutions, while caught up in the midst of
eco-catastrophe. It’s a work of fiction, but everything here has gone into it.
That’s what makes SF unique.
