Time Travel. A History

Also in play is the obverse of forgetting, which is not-yet-knowing. Even the omniscient rereader remembers not-yet-knowing, or where’s the fun? No matter how many times we reread a book, we want ignorance of the past, doubt about the future, or we read without expectation, disappointment, suspense, surprise—the panoply of human emotions dependent upon time and forgetting. In Nabokov’s Ada, someone (the omniscient author or his forgetful narrator) says of his heroes, “Time tricked them, made one of them ask a remembered question, caused the other to give a forgotten answer.” They strive “to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all—nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression).” Time tricks us all, even fastidious rereaders with time machines.

So even in a book, as in life, closure is an artifice. Someone needs to create it. It is the author who takes on God’s job, and as the narratological options grow more convoluted, so do the world-building challenges. “Writing is extremely difficult,” says José Saramago, “it is an enormous responsibility, you need only think of the exhausting work involved in setting out events in chronological order, first this one, then that, or, if considered more convenient to achieve the right effect, today’s event placed before yesterday’s episode, and other no less risky acrobatics, the past treated as if it were new, the present as a continuous process without any present or ending.” In turn, readers—and moviegoers—grow ever more aware, learning the tropes and the tricks. We stand on the shoulders of all the time travelers who came before.

Here is a man with a time machine. Perhaps I should say a man in a time machine. His name is Charles Yu. He tells us he works in the time-travel industry. He repairs time machines for a living. He’s no scientist—just a technician. “To be more specific,” he says, “I am a certified network technician for T-Class personal-use chronogrammatical vehicles.” For now (troublesome word, in this book) he is living inside one: the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device,

which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science fictional universe.

In other words, we are in a book. It is a story space, a universe. “You get into it. You push some buttons. It takes you to other places, different times. Hit this switch for the past, pull up that lever for the future. You get out and hope the world has changed.” Yes, we know all about that by now. We can expect some paradoxes, too.

Charles is a bit of a sad sack. His main companions are a computer UI with a personality skin named TAMMY (sexy software with self-esteem issues) and a “sort of” dog named Ed. The dog was “retconned out of some space western.” Retconning is a post-post-modern narratological term, short for retroactive continuity: after-the-fact rewriting the backstory of a fictional world. Ed doesn’t actually exist, though he has a strong smell and licks Charles’s face. “Ed is just this weird ontological entity….He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all this saliva.” Evidently we should just accept it. Charles does. It’s a lonely job: “A lot of people who work in time machine repair are secretly trying to write their novels.” Coincidentally, the book we are reading is a first novel by an author named Charles Yu, called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

Living in a time machine gives Charles an unusual perspective. Sometimes he feels he exists in a tense: the Present-Indefinite. It’s a kind of limbo. It’s different from Now. “In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn’t been working out so great for me.” Chronological living—everyone just moving forward, looking backward—is yesterday’s news. “A kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore.”

So he sleeps alone, in “a quiet, nameless, dateless day…tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space-time,” and he feels safe there. He has his own mini-wormhole generator that he can use to spy on other universes. Sometimes he has to explain the facts of life to his customers, people who rent time machines in hopes of going back and changing history, or people who rent time machines but worry about inadvertently changing history: “Oh God, they say, what if I go back and a butterfly flaps its wings differently and this and that and world war and I never existed and so on and yeah.” The rules are that you can’t. People never want to hear it, but you can’t change the past.