Time Travel. A History

Lacking science, literature in the world of The Alteration has failed to generate science fiction, but the novel’s young hero enjoys reading in a disreputable genre known as Time Romance, or TR, for short. TR “appealed to a type of mind.” It was illegal but impossible to suppress fully. Inside this genre has evolved a subgenre known as Counterfeit World, CW. In this subgenre, books imagine histories that never happened—alternative histories. Now Gibson will explain:

Amis accomplishes, as it were in the attic of his novel, a sublime hall-of-mirrors effect. In our world, Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle,

in which the Axis triumphed in World War II. Within Dick’s book there is another, imaginary book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, envisioning a world in which the Allies won, though that world clearly isn’t ours. In Amis’s counterfeit world, someone called Philip K. Dick has written a novel, The Man in the High Castle,

imagining a non-Catholic world. Which isn’t ours.

And isn’t theirs. It’s hard to keep track. Amis’s boy hero, in his world without science, is amazed to read of a counterfactual world where “they use electricity…they send messages all over the Earth with it” and Mozart died in 1799 and Beethoven wrote twenty symphonies, and another famous book explains that humans evolved from a thing like an ape. “This business of TR and CW strikes me,” says Gibson, “as it plays so artfully through the book, as likely the best Jorge Luis Borges story Jorge Luis Borges never wrote.”

The shelves continue to fill with counterfeit worlds. The future becomes the present, and so every futuristic fantasy is slated to become alternative history. When the year 1984 arrived, Orwell’s particular surveillance state made the transition from TR to CW. Then 2001 came and went without any noticeable space odysseys. The careful futurist learns to avoid specifying dates. Still our literature and our filmmaking keep breeding new pasts, along with all the putative futures. And so do we all, every day, every night, waking and dreaming in the subjunctive, weighing the options, regretting the might-have-beens.

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“DUAL TIME-TRACKS, alternate universes,” scoffs a skeptical lawyer in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven

. “Do you see a lot of old late-night TV shows?”

Her troubled client is a man named George Orr. (A tip of the hat to George Orwell, whose special year, 1984, had nearly arrived when Le Guin, in her forties, departed from her previous form to write this strange book.^*7) When aliens appear, they pronounce his name Jor Jor.

He is an ordinary man—an office worker, apparently placid, milquetoast, conventional. But George is a dreamer. When he was sixteen, he dreamed that his aunt Ethel had been killed in a car crash, and when he awoke he realized that his aunt Ethel had been killed in a car crash, weeks earlier. His dream changed reality retroactively. He has “effective dreams”—a sci-fi trope invented here. You might say he carries alternate universes within. Who else does that? The author, for one.

This is a lot of responsibility, and George doesn’t want it. He has no more control over his dreams than you or I—not conscious control, anyway. (He fears he had resented Ethel’s sexual advances.) Increasingly desperate, he doses himself with barbiturates and dextroamphetamine in hopes of suppressing his dreams altogether and ends up in the hands of a psychologist—a dreaming specialist—named William Haber. Haber believes in striving and control; he believes in the power of reason and science. He is plasticoated, like his office furniture. He hypnotizes poor George in an effort to guide his effective dreams and remake reality, step by step. The doctor’s office decor seems to have improved. Somehow he has become Director of the Institute.