Time Travel. A History

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 order^*5—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.”