Time Travel. A History

There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Most of his contemporaries were still technological optimists and would remain so for another generation, but in his strange novella The Machine Stops, Forster creates a grim vision—“a reaction,” he admitted later, “to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells.” Some unspecified apocalypse, presumably self-inflicted, has driven humanity underground, where people live alone in cells. They have transcended nature and abandoned it. All their needs and desires are met by a global apparatus called the Machine, which is their caretaker and, if they only knew it, their jailer.

Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars.

A second apocalypse looms (the title gives it away), but most are oblivious. Just one person sees their imprisonment for what it is. “You know that we have lost the sense of space,” he says. “We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves.”

The “literature epoch” is past. Only one book remains, the Book of the Machine. The Machine is a communications system. It has “nerve-centres.” It is decentralized and omnipotent. Humanity worships it. “Through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being.”

Remind you of anything?

*1 “Nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter,” wrote Nabokov partway through Ada. Of course, it was not true when he wrote it.

*2 Beckett’s translation. (Si du moins il m’était laissé assez de temps pour accomplir mon oeuvre, je ne manquerais pas de la marquer au sceau de ce Temps dont l’idée s’imposait à moi avec tant de force aujourd’hui, et j’y décrirais les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant dans le Temps une place autrement considéable que celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place, au contraire, prolongée sans mesure, puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants, plongés dans les années, à des époques vécues par eux, si distantes—entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer—dans le Temps.)

*3 The problem of verb tense and time travel provides endless fascination in popular culture. Volumes have been written, but most are fictional, beginning with an invention of Douglas Adams in 1980: “The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

“Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up.”

FOURTEEN

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