Time Travel. A History

Usually, time travel does not incur physical symptoms—discomfort or illness. In that it differs from air travel, which often causes jet lag. The original time travel of Wells did involve some queasiness:

I’m afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are exceedingly unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like one has on a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.

This is echoed here and there in the literature. Maybe we don’t want a magic so profound and consequential to come free of bodily stress.

Ursula K. Le Guin goes a step further in “Another Story; or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.” Here the travelers obey the laws of physics as we Newtonians and Einsteinians know them. Their spaceships go Nearly as Fast as Light. A journey of four light-years takes just over four years. Relative to the people left behind, the travelers age scarcely at all. If they make an immediate round-trip, on returning home they will seem to have leapt eight years into the future. And how does that feel?

“Of the journey itself,” writes Hideo after his first experience, “I have no memory whatever. I think I remember entering the ship, yet no details come to mind, visual or kinetic; I cannot recollect being on the ship. My memory of leaving it is only of an overwhelming physical sensation, dizziness. I staggered and felt sick.”

But Hideo’s second trip is different. On his second trip, he has the more “usual” experience. It is as if time stops—as if there is no time. The journey is a moment—a period? an interval?—in which time does not exist:

…an unnerving interlude in which one cannot think consecutively, read a clockface, or follow a story. Speech and movement become difficult or impossible. Other people appear as unreal half presences, inexplicably there or not there. I did not hallucinate, but everything seemed hallucination. It is like a high fever—confusing, miserably boring, seeming endless, yet very difficult to recall once it is over, as if it were an episode outside one’s life, encapsulated.

We’ve left scientific realism by the roadside. According to relativity, for the people moving at near light speed, time would feel normal. (If time has a normal feeling.) Le Guin is reaching for something else, something unimaginable, the absence of time. When Richard Feynman met a group of schoolchildren and one of them asked what time is, he answered with another question: What if there were no such thing as time? What then?

God knows. He is outside of time, supposedly. He is eternal.

—

A MAN STEPS INTO a time machine, no need for preliminaries anymore. It has rods, controls, and a starting lever. This one is called “the kettle,” and it doesn’t resemble a bicycle so much as an elevator. He senses a shimmering, an “unseeable haze,” “gray blankness which was solid to the touch, though nonetheless immaterial.” He feels a touch of nausea, “the little stir in his stomach, the faint (psychosomatic?) touch of dizziness.” The kettle rides in a vertical shaft. So is he going up? Of course not. “Neither up nor down, left nor right, forth nor back.” He is going upwhen.

By the way—a man, again? Never a woman? Rule: Time travelers are rooted in their authors’ time. When our current hero, a Technician named Andrew Harlan, gets into the kettle, he thinks he’s a native of the ninety-fifth century, but we recognize him as a man of the year 1955, when Isaac Asimov published his twelfth novel (of forty), The End of Eternity. Reading the book now, we can infer some facts of the year 1955:

• Notwithstanding the legacy of H. G. Wells and three decades of pulp magazines, time travel remains a rare and unfamiliar concept to readers in the mainstream. (The New York Times went awry by titling its book review “In the Realm of the Spaceman.” Spaceman was a better-known concept. The reviewer, Villiers Gerson, raised what he thought was an original question: “If a time traveler were able to go back to 1915 and cause Adolf Hitler to be killed by a bullet in World War I, would our present reality change?” He was neither the first nor the last to wonder.)

• A “computer” is a person who calculates. A reckoner, an arithmetician. A machine for mathematical calculation is called a “computing machine”—in this story, a “Computaplex,” capable of “a summation of thousands and thousands of variables.” For input and output, a Computaplex uses perforated foil.

• Women are for childbearing. Also for sexual temptation.^*1