Is All Time Redeemable?

It is not that it is completely forgotten. Neil Gaiman knows about it:

It’s funny, smart, and resonant, playing out huge themes on a tiny stage, and it demands a great deal of its readers, so it’s no surprise that it was rewarded with the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958, nor that, over fifty years later, it remains relatively unknown.

That is a pretty accurate description. It is definitely a clever story. It is also sadly true that if I had picked up this book in high school, I would have set it right back down after about 10 pages.

The problem? It is virtually unreadable if you expect that you will have any idea what is going on. The book drops you into a universe and the story begins. No background. You just sort of piece together what everyone is talking about as you merrily read along. Lots of little things are never explained. Lots of big things, the sort of things you really want to know, are also never explained. Yet, you do learn exactly enough to make sense of the story even if you have no idea how the universe in which the story is set actually works.

It’s a time travel book. Well, sort of. There actually isn’t any time travel in the book itself. Unless traveling outside time counts. Hmm. It is really hard to explain this universe of this book.

Let’s start again. There are people traveling back and forth through time, changing the past and the future. You’ve read stories like that. In this universe, however, there is the Conservation of Reality. Small changes in the past do not create radical changes in the future. So to make a big change in Time, you have to go back and forth, constantly changing things until the small changes add up to a really noticeable change. Even still, Reality has a way of reasserting itself. OK, so far?

Now imagine two competing forces trying to change history in different ways. That is the Change War.

Now, what are the effect of all these changes? From the first page of the novel:

You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.

On that basis a fun story is built, all set in a place cleverly named “the Place,” which is like a rest stop for soldiers in the Change War. Well worth the read if you like stories that read like a massive jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the box so you don’t know what the picture is and, alas, lots of the pieces are missing.

Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound too fun. Why read a story like that? For exactly the same reason we read Science Fiction in the first place. It helps us think about reality by exploring the fringes of reality. This book is a pleasant little romp through our sense of time.

Start with Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

“Burnt Norton” is a perfect expression of the idea that Time is a fixed thing. There is One Past and One Present and One Future. There are no alternative realities. There are no roads in time which are less traveled; there is only the road actually traveled.

One alternative to Eliot’s timescape is probably the normal way to think about time. There is a past which is fixed. We live in the present. Our decisions in the present determine the future. The past is fixed, but the future is unknown. We create the future by our decisions in the present. Make a different decision and the future changes.

The difference between these two ways of thinking about time is related to the question of free will and determinism. Question: Is the next sentence I will type when I finish this one already determined or will I be able to make a decision about what sentence I will type as soon as I finish tying this sentence?

The Big Time offers a third possibility. What if Eliot is not just wrong about the future? What if he is also wrong about the past? What if the past can change just as easily as the future? What if that thing you remembered but found out didn’t happen actually did happen and you are just remembering the way the past used to be? What if when you and your friend are arguing about what actually happened 20 years ago, that both your memories are right, but one of you is just remembering the way the past used to be and one is remembering the way the past is now?

Why is that impossible? If all time is unredeemable, then Eliot is right and the past and the future are fixed. But if the future is alterable, why isn’t the past also alterable? As one of the characters in The Big Time explains it:

It’s about the four orders of life: Plants, Animals, Men and Demons. Plants are energy-binders—they can’t move through space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it. Animals are space-binders—they can move through space. Man (Terran or ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder—he has memory.

Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders—they can make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their evolutionary function.

Maybe the reason you think Time is bound is the same reason that plants think space is fixed. You haven’t learned how to move through the universe of possible pasts.

I don’t like that conclusion either. But then I like Eliot’s conclusion. All time is unredeemable. Nonetheless, given the choice between a) only the future is unknown and b) both the future and the past are unknown, I am not convinced the latter is less likely than the former. If all time is not unredeemable, all bets are off.

Test: Is the last book you read the same book which the author originally wrote?  How do you know?