time travel Archives - Martin's Booklog

The Big Time – Fritz Leiber

Published on January 28, 2008

Cover of The Big Time

The Big Time
Fritz Leiber
127 pages
published in 1961

Rereading Asimov’s The End of Eternity remonded me of another time wars novel, a far more cynical and modern one: Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time. And since I had never read a Leiber novel during all the time I’ve kept my booklog, I thought it was time to start. I had read this novel before, first in Dutch, then in English and been impressed by it. Nor was I the only one: in its original, magazine publication in 1958 it so impressed the fans that it won a Hugo Award, which is high praise indeed.

The Big Time is a somewhat unconventional science fiction novel, in that it’s staged as a one room play, with the stage fixed while characters move on and off it. Which means that all the action that doesn’t happen in the room has to be described in dialogue between the characters, which of course has a distancing effect. For a genre which often takes pride in creating awe inspiring, inventive and strange settings and then making them believable to the reader, this is an audacious trick. Leiber takes this huge idea of a time war, in which history is in constant flux and which spans billions and billions of years throughout the universe and only shows us glimpses of it. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.

The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov

Published on January 20, 2008

Cover of The End of Eternity

The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov
192 pages
published in 1955

So it turns out that in the more than seven years now that I’ve kept this booklog, I had not read any Asimov novel at all. Which is somewhat strange, as it was for a large part due to discovering Asimov in my local library’s youth section that I became a science fiction fan. I, Robot for example may very well have been the first proper science fiction book I ever read. For a long time Asimov was
in fact the gold standard against which I measured every new science fiction writer I came across. If they weren’t at least half as entertaining or interesting I wouldn’t bother with them. Of his many novels and stories it was this, The End of Eternity that was my favourite, one of the first science fiction books I bought for myself and the first to introduce me to the idea of time travel as more than an excuse to visit scenic parts of the past. Rereading it, the question was whether it would be as good as I remembered it to be. So many novels first read as a child disappoint when you reread them; fortunately this didn’t. In fact, it read almost exactly as I expected it to be.

The central idea in The End of Eternity is the existence of Eternity, an organisation that monitors and safeguards all of humanity’s history from the first invention of the secret of time travel. Most people outside of Eternity think the organisation only exists to facilitate trade between various centuries and perhaps in some vague way protect them from the unspecified dangers of time travel. What they don’t realise is that Eternity in fact exists outside of time, from which realm it can not just study and monitor time, but alter reality to make sure that humanity is kept on an ever increasing path to perfection. A whole organisation of Computers, the people who calculate these reality changes, Technicians, who execute them and various other specialists all work together to this goal, over a span of time that is literally millions of years long. Power is provided by tapping into Nova Sol, the Sun as it goes nova at the end of its lifecycle. An incredibly neat idea, not quite original to Asimov, but as I said the first time I encountered it was here.

Time travel in Einstein’s Universe — J. Richard Gott

Published on November 16, 2006

Cover of Time Travel in Einstein's Universe

Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe
J. Richard Gott
291 pages including index
published in 2001

I have to say, Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe does exactly what it says on the tin, exploring the possibility and methods of timetravel in the universe as we know it since Einstein formulated his formulas about special and general relativity. In the process Gott manages to also explore some of the more exotic theories about our universe and how it came to be. It seems that science fiction writers got stiff competition from astrophysicists these days in dreaming up weird and wonderful posssible universes…

It’s this that I have a bit of a problem with here. Granted, this is of course a popular science book, written for thickies and ignoramuses like myself, but it seems to me that a lot of what Gott theorises here is put too strongly as the truth rather than as just a possibility, a theory. For example, at one point he is explaining how the universe might have used timetravel to come into existence, having a closed timeloop for an origin rather than a true origin, now safely in our past so that we can no longer use this timeloop ourselves. Now I’m sure this is all allowed by the maths, but is there any observable support for this theory? That is, can our measurements of the observable universe prove or disprove this theory? Because otherwise, what is the point?