Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination 9781472542731, 9781441123954

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This one is for Jim

It seems to me, then, that time is merely an extension, though of what it is an extension I do not know. I begin to wonder whether it is an extension of the mind itself. St Augustine, Confessions

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support, encouragement and intellectual input of many people. Special thanks are due to my colleagues and friends at the Department of English and American Studies of Tel-Aviv University. Dr Amit Yahav of Haifa University first drew my attention to the problematic of temporality. My editors at Continuum made this book possible by setting firm deadlines. My mother Maya Kaganskaya and my sons Ariel and Eliran Gomel were as inspirational as ever. My students in the courses of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Postmodernism were invaluable in responding with genuine enthusiasm to the ideas expressed in this book and offering insights of their own. I thank all of them, particularly Hadass Elber and Shawn Edrei. And finally, my profoundest gratitude goes to Dr Jim Martin. This book is for him.

Preface: Timeshapes

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity. This is John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819). In the poem, time congeals into a material shape, permanent and palpable; the present becomes charged with eternity; and the flux of beginning, middle and end freezes into the perpetual ‘now’. In ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) Walter Benjamin writes: ‘A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop’ (Benjamin 262). Historical flux becomes an object to be examined and evaluated. In Alastair Reynolds’ science fiction novel Century Rain (2004) a ‘quantum snapshot’ of Earth in 1940 is enclosed in a giant cosmic sphere, complete with all the people who existed at that point in time, as immobile and eternal as Keats’ painted maiden. ‘Jolted’ back into time, it begins to develop, acquitting its own history. But are people in it any more real than ‘the images in a burning photograph’ (Reynolds 284)? Do they feel anything? Is their transition back into time a deliverance or a fall? A masterpiece of poetry; a longing for a new kind of history and a new kind of historian; a science fiction novel. As motley a collection of texts as one could assemble. And yet they share something: an image of time, which is tangible and material and yet paradoxical and elusive; time as an object in space; time as a shape. It is not merely that all three texts wish time would stand still, as one often wishes when faced with a beautiful moment or a looming deadline. They intimate that time is already standing still; has always been standing still; that our perception of the evanescence of the present and the non-existence of the past and the future is an illusion. Eternity is real; time is not. Whether this eternity is conceived as the world of Platonic ideas as in Keats; the Marxist pattern of history as in Benjamin; or a physical property of the quantum universe as in Reynolds can, for now, be set aside. What is important for my

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purposes is that underlying their texts, so different in meaning, address and literary quality, is the same insight: that time is an illusion. The past, the present and the future coexist. Time is not a flux, a flow, a rushing river, as it is so often envisioned in other texts, from Heraclitus to pop-songs. But then, what are the flux, the flow and the rushing river if not another set of images linked by the concept of motion, just as the Grecian urn, the eternal present and the quantum snapshot are linked by the concept of stasis? All language is inherently figurative. But underlying the three quotes above is something more substantial than a metaphor: a form of experience, an embryonic worldview, the DNA of a philosophy or metaphysics of temporality. And at the same time, it has a clearly political dimension, most obvious in Benjamin who is writing in the inexorably shrinking crevice between his own Marxism and the Fascist tide engulfing Europe, between Stalin and Hitler. The same great war over the future of (post)modernity is reverberating in Reynolds’ novel of the quantum Paris of 1940, the year of Benjamin’s death on the Spanish border after his escape from France. Keats’ urn holds not just the beauty of ancient Greece but also the ashes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. In the very stridency of these texts’ denial of time one can hear the shriek of what Benjamin in another meditation called ‘the storm blowing from Paradise’, the storm of history (257). Something more than a metaphor and less than a concept: an image, a form of thought, an experience of time between public and private, between memory and history. I will call this something a timeshape. A timeshape has similarities to Fredric Jameson’s concept of ideologeme: the smallest possible unit of ideologically charged meaning (1981). Or it might be compared to Richard Dawkins’ notion of ‘meme’ – the unit of cultural memory analogous to gene, which is the unit of hereditary memory. But a timeshape has a strong narrative dimension which both ideologeme and meme lack. Memes, ideologemes and timeshapes cross discursive boundaries that separate art from politics and sciences from the humanities. But if memes and ideologemes are genes of meaning, timeshapes are seeds of narrative, and consequently, seeds of time, since we experience time through stories we tell. Time is simultaneously the most central aspect of human experience and the most elusive. We live in time, we cannot escape it, and yet we can neither define it with any certainty nor even agree on the object of definition. It is not just that cultures of the past had very different notions of temporality from our own. But even within contemporary postmodern culture there are many conflicting discourses of time including the one that claims that time has come to an end. I disagree, as the rest of this book will make clear. But even if it were true, the end of time is articulated through yet another timeshape. Time is resurrected in its very denial, coming back to haunt postmodernity with ghosts of its disavowed history. Time has been the subject of ferocious philosophical, scientific and ideological battles, many of which will be referenced in this book. But more importantly,

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time has also been the subject of multiple narrative representations. And the forms of these narratives capture the essence of the cultural conceptualizations of temporality. This book is about the postmodern geography of time. It is a tour of the baroque shapes into which our perception of time has been hammered by history. Looking back at the three quotes with which I begin, we can see that Reynolds’ use of their common timeshape is different from the other two. He embodies it in a complete narrative, while Keats and Benjamin do not. And not just any narrative but a particular kind of it: a science fiction (SF) novel.1 Narrative is what enables us to experience time as a lived reality, both individually and collectively. And SF is the narrative genre that at this particular historical juncture, postmodernity, offers us the best access to the clashing timeshapes that define the postmodern fragmentation of both public and private time. Or rather times, for while I believe that time is real, we can only apprehend it through its cultural inscriptions and conceptualizations, through the timeshapes of ideology, science and religion. SF, the genre that has given us the expressions ‘time travel’ and ‘time machine’, is the mirror of postmodern temporalities. But perhaps the ‘mirror’ is a wrong word because it assumes a passive reflection of whatever already exists. Let us say, rather, that SF is a quantum snapshot of the multiple timeshapes of postmodernity. Or perhaps SF is a Grecian urn that ‘doth tease us out of thought’ by the strange and mysterious images it contains. Or maybe it is a historical record of postmodernity’s multiple pasts, presents and futures; a key to the postmodern temporal imagination.

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I am going to use the standard abbreviation SF for science fiction throughout the book.

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Introduction: Time Enough for World

Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of time and space, but also the vast diversity of mind’s possible modes. But this I can only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the range of your imagination. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

Time Lost . . . Are we living in a post-temporal age? What happens after the end of time? Where do we go from here, now that history is over? Paradoxes are cheap, interrupts the reader. These questions are meaningless: ‘age’ presupposes temporality; nothing can ‘happen’ if time comes to a standstill; and in the unlikely event of history being over, we surely are not going anywhere. And yet these paradoxes have been central to the theoretical articulations of postmodernity. Supposedly we live in the historical moment at which the idea of the ‘moment’ becomes suspect, at the time of time’s disappearance, in the age that rejects its indebtedness to the past and its responsibility to the future. In his famous discussion of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late or global capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes: ‘We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism’ (1991, 16). For Derrida, ‘the concepts of present, past, and future, everything in the concepts of time and history which implies evidence of them – the metaphysical concept of time in general’ is undermined by the ascendance of the postmodern notions of the trace and difference (1976, 67). Postmodern literature registers ‘a shift in sensibilities from a predominantly temporal and historiographic imagination to one much more concerned with the spatial and the geographic’ (Smethurst 15). Such statements could be multiplied indefinitely. They attest to the fact that something has gone awry with the Kantian categories of space and time as forms

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of intuition through which we apprehend the world. Time and space have been sundered and set against each other. The crisis of temporality is accompanied by the crisis of historicity. There is a consensus that the universal history of the Enlightenment and the grand historical schemes of high modernism have failed. In The Postmodern Condition Jean-Francois Lyotard defines postmodernism as the recognition that the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity, which made temporality intelligible in terms of some overarching principle, ‘such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’ have gone bankrupt under the twin assaults of philosophical scepticism and political catastrophe (Lyotard 1979, 37). Henceforth, space rather than time is to function as the dimension of cultural production and affective interplay because it allows dispersion, isomorphism, fragmentation and discontinuity. In Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault defines his own enterprise as purging historiography of the old concepts of continuity, causality and temporal progression and substituting for them ‘the [spatial] categories of discontinuity and difference, the notions of threshold, rupture and transformation’ (14). In Metahistory Hayden White denies the distinction between historical and fictional discourse and substitutes for the temporal intelligibility of traditional historiography the spatial structure of textual organization. As the dream of progress is being buried deeper and deeper in the rubble of World War II, the Holocaust, the collapse of Communism and 9/11, time becomes an enemy. Its defeat by space is a deserved comeuppance or even a utopian deliverance. Perhaps we shall be finally liberated from the tyranny of the ‘chrono-logical’, which is often identified with the repressive and ethnocentric project of the Enlightenment. There are some dissenting voices. Jameson wryly points out that the defeat of time is not ‘merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well’, since the subject unable to ‘organize its past and future into coherent experience’ is reduced to an agglomeration of ‘intensities’, a heap of psychic fragments with no capacity for agency and choice (1991, 15). Gary Saul Morson in his seminal essay ‘Essential Narrative: Tempics and the Return of the Process’ argues passionately for a new narrative poetics, which goes beyond spatialization and expresses ‘the messiness, historicity, and timeliness (not timelessness) of things’ (Morson 292). Lubomir Dolezel takes on the postmodernist challenge to world history by offering ‘a new understanding of the notion of the world’ (Dolezel 1999, 253). But most such arguments are prescriptive rather than descriptive; they call for a change in postmodern praxis but do not doubt the rightness of the postmodern diagnosis. They accept that defeat of time and wonder how – if at all – this defeat can be turned into victory. My goal is different: it is not to plead with time to come back but rather to argue that it has never gone away. The diagnosis of postmodernity as a posttemporal age hinges on a narrow and misleading interpretation of temporality.

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Postmodernity is characterized not by depletion of temporal imagination but by its explosive growth. We are daily inundated by new articulations of temporality and historicity, which we perceive as a-temporal and a-historical only because we have been conditioned to squeeze time and space into narrow conceptual and representational frames. These frames can no longer contain the new forms of time, new timeshapes, generated by evolutionary theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, cyberspace, globalization and resurgent religious fundamentalism. It is not that we do not have world enough and time; rather, we have too much of both. The revolt of postmodern theory against time and history is predicated on the notion of temporality as ‘the linear sequence of past, present, and future’, the repressive, universalizing chrono-logic of the Enlightenment (Currie 78). But in assuming that this is the only form of temporal perception, postmodernism falls into a trap of its own making. It has to concede that chronology is natural, inherent either in our genetic makeup or in the very structure of the universe. Postmodern theory, with its radical epistemological scepticism, is notoriously reluctant to accept anything as natural. Moreover, a revolt against the laws of physics is not a viable political option. On the other hand, if linear chronology is not the only possible form of human time, why should it be identified with temporal imagination in general? Most often, this dilemma is tacitly overlooked. Postmodern narrative theory takes as its starting-point the classical narratology of Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman, predicated on the distinction between the chronological story-time, which follows the ‘natural’ order of the events, and the discoursetime, which distorts and rearranges both order and duration of the events for artistic purposes. Postmodern narrative alternatives to chronology are, therefore, regarded as parasitic ‘violations of realistic temporality’ (Richardson 48). Ursula K. Heise sounds a cautionary note when she points out that ‘the human experience of time depends on cultural contexts that are themselves subjects to change’ (Heise 47). But in her own discussion of the postmodern temporal poetics she equates proliferation of alternative forms of temporality – contingency, multiplicity, circularity and so on – with achrony, the absence of a shared temporal context. The temporal experience of postmodernity, according to her, is ‘co-extensive with and inseparable from the individual event’, so ‘it has become difficult to abstract any notion such as “history”, “progress” or “entropy” from temporal phenomena that seem to be only randomly related to each other’ (Heise 28–9). Postmodern writing (which she defines narrowly as the literary avant-garde) becomes a sideshow of narrative freaks, which abjures any attempt to connect itself to the wider social context, let alone to the physical universe: ‘postmodernist narrative time is detached from any specific human observer, and in some cases is not meant to represent any temporality other than of the text itself’ (Heise 67). But even if this diagnosis of the fragmented, ‘randomized’ temporality of postmodernism is correct in relation at least to some cultural productions,

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it does not invalidate its social, and therefore historical, significance. Time out of joint is still time, albeit crippled. And more importantly, not all non-chronological and even anti-chronological representations of time are denials of social and physical temporality. If events are ‘randomly’ related to each other, this is not the same thing as the absence of relation. Chaos theory traces mathematically describable regularities in the random and accidental. Cosmology describes the origin of time in the Big Bang and evolutionary theory creates elaborate narratives of life’s development ‘detached from any specific human observer’ (though this is not the case with quantum mechanics, as I will argue later). Narrative coherence cannot be reduced to the linear chronology derived from a culturally and historically specific moment in the history of time: the nineteenth-century positivism and its concomitant literary development, the realist novel. The tools of classic narratology, honed on Dickens, George Eliot and Marcel Proust, have to be refined to cope with new forms of narrativity, that no matter how unexpected and even bizarre compared to the recent past are still inescapably social. New timeshapes are being formed and re-formed in the crucibles of science, ideology and religion, inscribing the political and epistemological struggles that define the global culture of postmodernity. These timeshapes fulfil the crucial social role of re-conditioning our temporal perceptions to fit our changing world. When we lament the loss of time, we are saying goodbye to only one particular experience of temporality, which is neither natural nor universal.

. . . and Found In Book XI of Confessions, St Augustine ponders the nature of temporal experience and comes to the conclusion that time does not exist. The past is no longer, the future is not yet, while the present has no duration; it is just a sliding point on the perpetually reset boundary between the two non-existences of the past and the future. And therefore ‘how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is is that it is not to be? In other words, we cannot rightly say that time is, except by reason of its impending quality of not being’ (264; emphasis in the original). It is only through the human faculties of memory, imagination and attention that time comes into being. ‘It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective . . . For everything which happens leaves an impression on [my mind], and this impression remains after the thing itself has ceased to be . . . When I measure time it is this impression that I measure’ (276). In A Brief History of Time (1988) Stephen Hawking, with a respectful nod to St Augustine, nevertheless takes issue with his definition and argues that time is an objective and independent property of the physical universe, just like space is: ‘We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time’ (24).

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There are at least three different time’s arrows, the cosmological, the thermodynamic and the psychological, which all happen to be aligned (but did not have to be). The psychological time’s arrow mediates between phenomenology and physics. There are two views here, each with a respectable philosophical pedigree: first, that time is ‘an extension of the mind’; second, that time is an objective and unalienable aspect of the cosmic laws that have generated everything in existence, including the mind itself. The humanities have often taken the first position, bracketing out the physical aspect of time and concerning themselves only with the phenomenological experience of what Martin Heidegger called ‘being in time’. Partly it has to do with the sheer difficulty of understanding some of the more arcane physical models of temporality. But much more important is the ideological distrust of science, articulated by such influential postmodern philosophers as Paul Feyerabend. His argument is paraphrased by Damien Broderick: ‘what we deem rational thought is never access to an essential Real but always nothing better than manipulations of encrusted metaphors by rules which are themselves drawn from metaphor’ (Broderick138). But if metaphors are all we have, the opposition of the ‘private’ phenomenological and ‘public’ physical time becomes untenable. By insisting that experience does not exist outside the ‘encrustation’ of discourse, postmodern theory invalidates the notion that ‘being in time’ can be separated from the being of time. And whether we trust science to articulate this being or peremptorily dismiss it out of some post-Romantic fear of ‘Newton’s sleep’ (William Blake) is, in a sense, immaterial. Science exerts a tremendous and rapidly growing influence on postmodern culture and society and shapes our perceptions of temporality through its own discourses and through the direct influence of technology. Moreover, science itself is experience. Perception and thought are indivisible. Scientists shrug off the philosophical critique of science for the same reason that mystics shrug off the scientific critique of religion: because they know what they feel. The Nobel Prize laureate in physics Steven Weinberg points out that ‘these radical critics of science seem to be having little or no effect on the scientists themselves’ because scientists ‘have direct experience of scientific theories’ (1993, 150–1; emphasis in the original). This experience is inseparable from the framework of assumptions and forms of thought that the physicist and historian Gerald Holton has called themata. ‘The themata underlie . . . the scientific endeavour and are independent of its subject-matter, experiments and analyses’ (Wolpert 1992, 107). Not just science but every discourse has its themata, which easily migrate from one field to another. Science, literature, theology and philosophy exchange their cognitive DNA as promiscuously as viruses. Scientific themata penetrate memories and dreams, just as memories and dreams bleed into the praxis of literature and science. Our most private temporal perception is filtered through the public forms of knowledge and belief. And these forms are inescapably narrative.

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Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative (1983) argues that we apprehend temporality only through narrative. The aporia of St Augustine (time exists and yet does not) stems from the attempt to get to the pure psychological essence of temporal experience outside any narrative frame. Using the Aristotelian notion of emplotment Ricoeur suggests that this aporia can be neutralized through the narrative activity, which creates an intelligible form out of the raw material of temporal existence: ‘. . . between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (Vol. 1; 52; emphasis in the original). ‘Transcultural’ is important because for Ricoeur narrative activity is universal while any particular form of narrative is not. However, many later theoreticians have inverted his formula by doubting the universality (or at least desirability) of narrative activity, while insisting that there exists only one basic form of narrative: the chronological one. Mark Currie, for example, describes the main thrust of postmodern theory as the deconstruction of ‘the linear concept of time, of meaning, of narrative and of narrative history’ (79). While acknowledging that narrative is not going away any time soon, he nevertheless emphasizes that ‘narrative has been the subject of prolonged assault not only from the new temporalities of culture, but academically, in the novel, in literary studies and in the departments of history’ (105; emphasis added). ‘The new temporalities of culture’ are, according to him, non-narrative simply because they do not conform to the chronological model. Postmodern narratology, thus, uncritically accepts classical narratology’s definition of narrative as ‘the narration of succession of . . . events’, in which ‘succession’ is automatically presumed to be chronological (Rimmon-Kenan 2). But this is not the only way to define narrative. A far more fruitful concept is Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin defines the chronotope as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (2002, 15).1 The chronotope is the textual equivalent of Einstein’s spacetime; the connection that Bakhtin acknowledges, pointing out that it is ‘not entirely’ a metaphor (ibid.). The chronotope is what structures and defines the narrative text in all its formal constituents: time (plot), space (setting) and character (actant). Within the chronotope, time, space and character are inseparable: Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history . . . The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic. (Bakhtin 2002, 15–16)

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Bakhtin stresses that the artistic chronotopes are intimately connected with chronotopes of science, religion, historiography and mythology. The two kinds of chronotopes, artistic and non-artistic, are different ways of ‘assimilating real historical time and space’ into cultural discourse (2002, 15). Their difference is not structural but referential, articulated through the concept of fictionality that I will discuss below. For those critics of science who would enlist Bakhtin on their side by stressing ‘historical time and space’, the stumbling-stone is the qualifier ‘real’. In a footnote, Bakhtin takes issue with the Kantian concept of time and space as forms of cognition and defines them instead as ‘forms of physical reality’ (1975, 235; trans. mine). Time and space are physical, not just mental and cultural, aspects of the universe. Historical time and space are representations of those physical realities that are ‘available in a given historical stage of human development’ (2002, 15). But chronotopes come in a bewildering array of shapes. Bakhtin’s list of examples from different historical periods displays a staggering variety of temporalities: the flowing, linear time of the picaresque; the recursive, pastoriented time of the Gothic; the sluggish, cyclical time of the novel of provincial life; the discrete, ‘instantaneous’ time of what he calls ‘the chronotope of the threshold’ and many others (2002, 21). And even a very cursory glance at the cultural history of temporality will show that these novelistic chronotopes are outnumbered by the equally baroque chronotopes of religions and mythologies that are even further removed from the Western chrono-logic. Cyclical time was in fact a much more prevalent concept than linear time in most pre-modern cultures. Many religions have believed that ultimate reality is timeless, while others have insisted on the distinction between two modalities of time, finite and infinite, which is central, for example, to Zoroastrism (Whitrow 35). The idea of the violent End Time obsessed the astronomically savvy cultures of Mesoamerica, while Hinduism and Buddhism developed a sophisticated chronology of recurring cycles. To deny that people in these cultures took their own timeshapes any less seriously than we do ours is to be guilty of the worst kind of Eurocentrism. But how can we reconcile this infinite variety of chronotopes with Bakhtin’s insistence that time and space are real physical entities and not just arbitrary products of the human mind? We can do it, I suggest, by viewing narrative as a mediator between physical time and cultural time. Whatever physical time is – and it definitely is something – it is inaccessible to us except through the filter of narrative. Some narrative filters are better than others in approximating the shape of the cosmos; some are more useful to a particular society, ideology, or tribe. But the fact that we need glasses does not mean there is nothing to see. Not all narratives are created equal in terms of their social, political and epistemological function. We may be more or less free to choose our own filters within the cultural plethora of conflicting timeshapes but we are not free to get rid of them

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altogether. There is no such thing as ‘natural’, ‘private’ or ‘psychological’ time that predates its narrative emplotment. Beyond the modernist distinction between public and private time; beyond the narratological distinction between story and discourse; beyond the postmodern distinction between chronology and its violations lies ‘the time of a narrative’ that unites all of them in what Ricoeur calls ‘within-time-ness’, the experience of a cultural being in the physical universe of time and space (1981, 41). In Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘The Immortal’ the narrator says: ‘To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal’ (114). Death is a physical and biological fact but not an event for animals other than humans. To know that one is mortal is to transform this fact into an event by placing it within a narrative framework of beginning, middle and end; and it is this narrative framework that generates the chronological distinction between the past, present and future. But as Borges’ narrator points out, most believers throughout human history knew that they were immortal; and their narratives of human and cosmic temporality had to accommodate this knowledge, either by positing an ontological break between time and eternity, as St Augustine does; or by bending time into a cosmic circle, the ‘wheel of certain Hindustani religions’ (Borges 114). It is this ‘divine, terrible, incomprehensible’ capacity of the human mind to create narratives of any shape that makes human time out of the raw temporality of the physical universe.

Fact and (Science) Fiction Once we shift our focus from chrono-logic to other narrative chronotopes postmodernism appears to be characterized not by the depletion and exhaustion of temporal imagination but by its explosive, perhaps almost cancerous, growth. Lyotard’s description of postmodernity in terms of the collapse of ‘grand narratives’ implies precisely such growth, since freed from the shackles of a single dominant timeshape, such as the apocalyptic expectations of medieval Christianity or the nineteenth-century belief in progress, narratives quickly evolve into new species to fill the empty niches of cultural ecology. Postmodernism is not about the death of narrative but about the fission of ‘grand narratives into little narratives’ (Currie 107). Jameson also acknowledges the narrative inventiveness of postmodernism, seeing it as a substitute for (in his opinion, lost) historical praxis: ‘the making up of unreal history is a substitute for the making of the real one’ (1991, 156). But the turmoil of postmodernity with its dizzying cascade of unforeseen events, from the fall of Communism to the rise of China; from the Human Genome Project to cyberspace, testifies that histories are still being made, even if History, in Jameson’s neo-Marxist sense, is dead (and perhaps was never alive to begin with).

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However, postmodern narratology whose task it is to analyse and classify these new and emerging chronotopes often seems to be stuck with the models developed for the realist novel, finding itself somewhat in the position of a physicist forced to describe the workings of the Hadron Collider in the language of the ether theory. As a result, postmodern narratives are often regarded as merely parasitic on the spatiotemporal structures of nineteenthcentury realism. Brian Richardson, for example, stresses the dependence of postmodern poetics on ‘the concept of mimesis, since it is only through that concept that we can understand its violation’ (48). Linda Hutcheon defines postmodern narrativity as ‘narcissistic fiction’, gazing at its own impending dissolution in the mirror of the text (252). The critical overuses of the term ‘subversion’ made Damien Broderick ask ironically why literature ought ‘to be subversive, rather than, say, bracingly uncomfortable?’(53). The importance of the realist novel for the nineteenth century lay in the fact that its chronotope (with all its many sub-species) was a faithful representation of the dominant nineteenth-century timeshape of chrono-logic (with all its many subdivisions). To go beyond the anachronistic battle against realistic mimesis one has to ask whether there is a narrative genre that typifies the many varieties of the postmodern timeshapes in the same way, in which the realist novel typified the historicity of progress and the linearity of social amelioration. My answer, as is the answer of many other critics, is science fiction (SF). For Damien Broderick, for example, ‘the continuity . . . between the registers of the postmodern and the science fictional’ is self-evident (111). In Postmodernism Jameson describes the SF of William Gibson as ‘an exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual or aural postmodern production’ (1991, 38). Brian McHale similarly sees a convergence, if not an outright identity, between ‘mainstream’ postmodernism and SF: ‘Cyberpunk SF can thus be seen in this systemic perspective, as SF which derives certain of its elements from postmodernist mainstream fiction which itself has, in its turn, already been “science-fictionized” to some greater or lesser degree’ (1992, 229; emphasis in the original). Many other studies attempt ‘to forge a link between cyberpunk, its parent mode of science fiction, and postmodernism’, as Andrew Butler puts it in his own attempt to forge such a link in the case of Philip K. Dick (Butler 45). The problem of many such studies, however, is that they assume postmodernism to be primary and SF secondary. Commonly they start with a list of postmodern themata, such as radical epistemological doubt, posthumanism, or simulacra, and then adduce SF texts dramatizing such themata. There is always something defensive about this line of argument, as if SF were a poor relation brought in to ‘pass’ in the company of its betters, mainstream postmodern fictions. But isn’t the whole idea of mainstream . . . well, not quite postmodern? A more interesting approach is to put the notion of mainstream aside and to look at what features of SF may qualify it for the literary mirror of postmodernism, in the same way in which the realist novel was the literary mirror

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of the Industrial Age. By considering this question we may alter our definition of postmodernism as well. One obvious answer is that science fiction is science fiction. Despite its often flaunted hostility to science, postmodernism is a child of the Second Scientific Revolution. There would have been no simulacra without virtual reality; no cyborgs without Artificial Intelligence; and no posthumanity without the Human Genome Project. In his last book dedicated to ‘utopia and other science fictions’, Jameson refers to an SF novel by Michael Swanwick as being ‘postmodern, not only in the way in which it represents the reality of the image, but also by carrying within itself the very cybernetic technology which is the marker, if not the cause, of postmodernity in the first place’ (2007, 70–1). ‘Carrying within itself’ implies not just a thematic reflection but a structural similarity. An SF text does not merely respond to specific scientific advances but parallels, in its very narrativity, the inner logic of science. Science and SF constitute a discursive loop, not least in the way in which SF influences scientists in their choice of targets of inquiry and hypothesis formation. As Wolpert points out, ‘the “stars” of modern science are more likely to have been brought up on science fiction’ than on science philosophy (108). Some of the most visible technological innovations of the last 30 years, including the Internet, cell-phones and the iPod, were not only predicted by SF but influenced by it. The similarity between the cell-phone and the Star Trek communicators, for example, is not accidental.2 This mutual fertilization of science and SF has a long history. Leo Szillard, a physicist and one of the instigators of The Manhattan Project, based his conviction that the atomic bomb was possible on his fascination with H. G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free, which described the military use of nuclear weapons (see Wolpert 153). But SF’s congruence with postmodernism goes beyond science. There is a deep penetration of SF imagery and topoi into everyday life. Examples range from the benign – Hong Kong embracing and capitalizing upon its ‘Dark-City’ image borrowed from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1981), to the macabre – Heaven’s Gate cult instigating a mass suicide with an appeal to Star Trek. The last example is not an isolated incident: the influence of SF on radical movements worldwide should not be underestimated. Charles Manson and his Family found their model in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was inspired by a neo-Nazi SF novel The Turner Diaries; the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan that released the poisonous gas sarin into the Tokyo Underground in 1995 had a peculiar syncretic theology that included elements of SF alongside Buddhism and Christianity. No matter how marginal, such ideological deployments of SF indicate the nature of its appeal to, and correspondence with, the postmodern sensibility. All the movements and groups that have turned to SF in search of their narrative needed not just a political platform but an ontology, a world-view that would equally embrace the nature of physical and social reality. And this ontological need was satisfied by an ontological genre.

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Postmodernism has been described by Brian McHale as having an ontological dominant, in contradistinction to the epistemological dominant of modernism. Postmodernism is concerned with the nature of the world we live in and of the alternative/possible/impossible worlds that surround this one as a halo of virtualities. Probably the most overused word in relation to SF is ‘world’, as critical studies of the genre, representative anthologies and actual novels play endless variations on Worlds of Wonder, New Worlds for Old, World Enough and Time and so on. If postmodernism is an ontological culture formation, then SF, an ontological genre, is its truest representative. McHale makes the connection: ‘the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological . . . the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological . . . Science fiction, like postmodernist fiction, is governed by the ontological dominant. Indeed, it is perhaps the ontological genre par excellence. We can think of science fiction as postmodernism’s noncanonized or “low art” double . . .’ (1987, 9–10; 59; emphasis in the original). Like postmodernist fiction, SF is concerned with the projection and elaboration of alternative fictional worlds, whose ontological features are radically different from the world of consensus reality. Like postmodernist fiction, SF makes this elaboration into its main artistic strategy and focus of its aesthetic value. Like postmodernist fiction, SF asks questions about the porous boundary between our world and its textual doubles. In what sense, then, is it not postmodernist fiction? McHale’s distinction between SF and postmodernist fiction in his earlier work hinges upon the hierarchy of high and popular literature, which is one of the hierarchies postmodernism is supposed to have overthrown. In his later work Constructing Postmodernism (1992), McHale modifies his position but still maintains the distinction between SF and postmodernist fiction because of the chronological gap between the two. SF originates in the nineteenth-century Gothic. Some critics elevate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the position of the genre’s ur-text (Aldiss 1986). I believe that this honour belongs to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). But in whatever way one constructs its genealogy, by the 1890s the genre was definitely born, though it was not properly christened until 1923 when Hugo Gernsback, the legendary editor of Wonder Stories, coined the name ‘science fiction’. Whether one considers postmodernism to have originated in the 1940s, 1960s, or 1970s, it still seems odd to have it precede modernism. Moreover, for more than half-a-century (somewhat ironically named its Golden Age), SF survived in a generic ghetto, published in specialized pulp magazines, such as the Astounding and Amazing Stories, and read mostly by geeky teenagers. This, at least, is how the conventional story goes, though Brian Stableford has challenged it by pointing to the high-brow British tradition of ‘scientific romances’ that has always seen itself as part of the literary mainstream and included such luminaries as H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley However, the historical argument does not address the question of poetics. If indeed SF precedes what we think of as postmodernism and yet clearly

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embodies the salient features of its artistic and cultural dominant, perhaps we should revise our histories. In Postscript to The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco suggests that ‘postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined but rather, an ideal category or, better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism . . .’ (Eco 73). Postmodernism is not modernism’s successor but its wily twin, Jacob to modernism’s Esau. If postmodernism is coeval with modernism as a rival cultural poetics, it explains both the ‘premature’ birth of SF and its long vegetation in the generic ghetto. McHale suggest as much when he writes of the convergence of ‘mainstream’ postmodernism and SF in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period ‘a feedback loop begins to operate between SF and postmodernist fiction. That is, we find postmodernist texts absorbing materials from SF texts that have already been “postmodernized” to some degree through contact with mainstream postmodern poetics . . .’ (1992, 229). His main example of this generic cross-pollination is cyberpunk, a 1980s form of SF represented by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and others and characterized by a combination of a gritty noir style and a thematic focus on virtual reality and computer technology (the notion of ‘cyberspace’ was introduced by Gibson in his 1984 groundbreaking novel Neuromancer). Cyberpunk has been reabsorbed into the mainstream of SF that has appropriated its narrative strategies but moved beyond its narrow preoccupation with cyberspace and its near-future setting. Such prominent SF writers of the last decades as Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Robert Charles Wilson, Ian Banks and Peter Watts widely use cyberpunk’s narrative inventions, particularly the use of posthuman actants, ontological mise en abyme and human–computer interface, while expanding its spatial and/or temporal scale and experimenting with more flexible stylistic forms. What applied to cyberpunk in the 1980s and 1990s equally applies to the entire SF field in the 2000s. But there is still one last stumbling-stone on the way toward regarding SF as the representative narrative form of postmodernism. SF seems to be too stylistically unsophisticated. Both Broderick and McHale castigate traditional SF for its artistic puerility, the former making fun of the ‘infantilisation of much mass-market science fiction’ by quoting some cringe-inducing blurbs (11). But in itself such critique proves nothing beyond what SF writer Theodore Sturgeon, himself a no mean stylist, once put in an energetic adage: 90 per cent of everything is crap. Both Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem tried to purge the Augean stables of the genre, the latter even getting into trouble with the Science Fiction Writers of America for his uncomplimentary remarks about the standards of the association’s members. Whether most SF writers are excellent or less so is hardly relevant to the question of the genre’s poetics and its relation to postmodernism. It is rather the criterion of excellence in SF that is the issue. Most SF works are stylistically transparent, employing a matter-of-fact discourse that Roland Barthes called ‘writing degree zero’: a ‘transparent

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form of speech . . . a style of absence’, which is simultaneously ‘an absence of style’ (1953, 77). Cyberpunk’s more opaque and metaphorical style seems to have been a passing fad; and even William Gibson’s Neuromancer is tame by the standards of, say, Ronald Sukenick or Joseph McElroy. Those critics who cling to the notion of the postmodernist ‘mainstream’ seek out the few exceptions, such as Thomas Disch and Samuel Delany. If postmodernism is defined as subversion of realism, then the only postmodern SF is the one that is subversive or at least typographically startling. The poverty of this definition is evident in the fact that it would exclude both Stanislaw Lem and Jorge Luis Borges from being considered postmodern writers. Neither is stylistically adventurous to any significant degree; nevertheless, Lem’s works that range from hard SF to the philosophical fable, and Borges’ short metaphysical meditations all but define the ontological dominant in postmodern literature. It seems that the stylistic criterion is a wrong one to apply to an ontological genre. For Barthes, the transparent language, the neutral writing, ‘rediscovers the primary condition of classical art: instrumentality’ (1953, 77–8). Insofar as the SF style is transparent, it abjures what Roman Jakobson defined as the primary characteristic of poetic language, self-reflexivity (1987). The language of poetry is autotelic; it draws attention to itself. The language of SF is instrumental; it erases its own quiddity in order to function as a means to an end. The end of an SF text is to elaborate a specific type of fictional world and the artistic merit of the text has to be judged by how successfully it performs this function. The seeming artistic conservatism of SF, its imitation of certain techniques of the realist novel (especially insofar as style and characterization are concerned) have to be seen not as backwardness but as innovation, a resurrection and recycling of the instrumentality of ‘classical art’ in service of postmodern goals. In this book I am going to discuss not postmodern SF as a subset of the genre but rather SF as a postmodern genre; or perhaps even more ambitiously, SF as postmodernism, as a dominant literary expression of postmodernity’s temporal (and therefore narrative) imagination.

Making Time Darko Suvin’s influential definition of SF hinges on ‘the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic’ (63; emphasis in the original). The novum, as he explains, has to be ontological, pertaining to the basic shape of the text’s fictional world rather than to a particular detail of it. In other words, the SF novum is a new chronotope. All narrative texts project fictional worlds. Fictional-world theory that studies these worlds is a new and exciting approach to many basic narratological problems. Exemplified by the work of Thomas Pavel, Ruth Ronen, Lubomir

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Dolezel and others, fictional-world theory defines a fictional world as ‘a small possible world shaped by specific global constraints and containing a finite number of individuals who are compossible . . . compossibility is dependent on the global order of the fictional world’ (Dolezel 1998, 20). A fictional text’s area of referentiality is its own world rather than the shared consensus-world of its readers. The basic distinction is between ‘world-imaging texts (I-texts) and world-constructing texts (C-texts) . . . Whereas for imaging texts the domain of reference is a given, fictional texts stipulate their referential domain by creating a possible world’ (Dolezel 1998, 24–6). I-texts comprise works of science, history, autobiographies, self-help, celebrity gossip and in general almost anything that publishers lump under the rubric of ‘Non-fiction’ as long as it has a narrative component. C-texts are fictions. But as Hayden White pointed out, I-texts and C-texts have similar structures. They are differentiated only by the rules of reference and verification which apply to distinct ontological domains. The most important contribution of fictional-world theory to narratology is its redefinition of narrative. Classic narratology defined narrative in terms of a chronological chain of events, a story. But fictional-world theory insists that the ‘basic concept of narratology is not “story,” but “narrative world,” defined within a typology of possible worlds’ (Dolezel 1998, 31). Classic narratology typified by the work of Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman focused on the distinction between the story time and the discourse time, the first defined as ‘temporal order of the events’, the second as ‘the pseudo-temporal order of the narrative’ or the artistic rearrangement of the events of the story in the plot (Genette 25).3 This definition accepted chronology as the natural and inevitable temporality of any text, no matter how artfully disguised by the writer’s skill. Even the complex structure of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu could be patiently unravelled to reconstruct Marcel’s chronological journey. But fictional-world theory suggests that the whole procedure may be misguided because the configuration of the text’s chronotope may not obey chrono-logic at all. Instead, the world of the text has to be analysed in terms of the overall shape of its chronotope, which unifies spatiality and temporality in its unique and specific spacetime. But this shape still has to be compared to something, some baseline of narrative normalcy just as in classical narratology the discourse time is analysed in relation to the chronological story time. Many critics compare the fictional world of the text to ‘reality’ and elaborate a typology of chronotopes in terms of their congruency with what they assume to be the common-sense reality consensus. Fictional worlds, then, are classified as possible, impossible, or improbable, depending on how they relate to the real world (see Pavel). But should it not be the real worlds? It is self-evident that different historical periods have had very different notions of what reality is. And it is equally self-evident that different social and cultural groups, ideologies and religions have equally different concepts of reality within our own postmodern episteme. Indeed, the nature of the world we live in is a fiercely contested issue, the arena of both metaphorical and real battles. The acrimonious debate between

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biology and creationism is a relatively tame example of the passion that can be aroused by seemingly abstract ontological issues. It would not be a gross exaggeration to say that most religious or ideological wars have been fought over ontology. When SF is described as fiction of the impossible it is often forgotten that our baseline of the impossible is not only historically but also ideologically variable. Some fictional-world theorists have pointed it out but without specifying how this issue is to be resolved. Thomas Pavel, for example, cautions that ‘different kinds of realism vary, of course, according to the description of the actual world and to the definition of the relation . . . that connects this world to its possible alternatives’ (47). And Peter Stockwell undermines his own definition of SF as ‘impossibility fiction’ by pointing out that possible and impossible are cultural variables, not constants: ‘The reality out there might be stable for all we humans know, but our idea of the reality is continually being revised or overthrown by religion, political ideology, science, and philosophy’ (Stockwell 4). This is not an abstract issue but a problem in practical criticism. For example, Christian SF which I will discuss in Chapter 4 is simply incomprehensible if its specific baseline of the evangelical consensus reality is not taken into account. I will suggest that for each chronotope of SF the reality baseline has to be established by analysing the text’s cultural paratext. If we can no longer assume that chrono-logic is natural, we have to seek the temporal logic of each chronotope, its underlying timeshape, in the discourses of science, religion, politics and philosophy that are referenced, directly or indirectly, in the text itself. In each of the following chapters I will move freely from literary text to cultural paratext, trying to establish the cultural significance of SF’s fictional worlds by finding their analogues among the multiple real worlds which we inhabit. SF is the realism of postmodernity because it allows all its different and incommensurable realities to see themselves as in a glass, darkly, and occasionally clearly as well. Among the issues that postmodern ontologies clash over none is as pressing as the nature of history. Re-imagining history today is neither an intellectual exercise nor an emotional luxury but a political necessity. Fredric Jameson is a theoretician who understands the historical urgencies of postmodernity with a particular clarity. And he also relates the successes and failures of the postmodern temporal imagination to the successes and failures of SF. ‘How to fix this intolerable present of history with the naked eye?’ (Jameson 2007, 287). Jameson first posed this question in his 1982 essay ‘Progress versus Utopia, of, Can We Imagine the Future?’, in which he argued that SF’s seeming remoteness from reality is in fact a strategy of grasping the essential temporality of human existence. By narrativizing our present as another culture’s past or as one of many possible alternatives, SF ‘brings to bear . . . [a] strategy of indirection on the ultimate object and ground of all human life, History itself’ (2007, 287). It is not necessary to share Jameson’s neo-Marxist reification of History in order to see how much of SF is about histories and historicity. In another essay

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‘World Reduction in Le Guin’ (1975) Jameson describes a technique of what might be called ontological translation, in which a fictional world becomes an embodiment of a cultural timeshape. According to him, SF is ‘based on a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality, something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification which we will henceforth term world-reduction’ (2007, 271). And it is precisely this paring down of the excrescences of an ideology to reveal its narrative core that functions as a strategy ‘of some more fundamental attempt to reimagine history’ (2007, 276). SF fictional worlds incarnate postmodern emplotments of historical time. However, not all SF is thematically concerned with re-imagining history. All narrative chronotopes involve time but not all narratives are about time. In what follows I will only look at SF texts in which time is not just a structural but also a significant thematic component, in order to probe the correspondence between what Jameson called ‘the content of the form’ and ‘the content of the content’ (1981), the shape of the chronotope and the explicit thematic message of the text.

The Clades of Time Classification is a secret vice of the literary critic. Traditionally SF has been divided into historical sub-genres, such as space opera, science fantasy, closerange extrapolation, cyberpunk, future histories and so on. The problem is that a number of such sub-genres is asymptotically approaching the number of individual SF texts. Mark Rose’s thematic classification goes to the opposite extreme, drastically cutting the number of SF categories to just four: Time, Space, the Machine and the Monster (1981). The structure of the chronotope mediates between the particularity of the historical variety and the abstraction of the theme. By focusing on the spatiotemporal configuration of the fictional world, a new map of the genre emerges in which space, time and meaning are inextricably linked. Space opera, for example, whether the Golden Age variety of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Skylark series or the contemporary intricate canvasses of Vernon Vinge, Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, projects a complex multi-level ontological hierarchy, with many embedded sub-worlds, whose spatial and temporal configurations are gradually meshed into a common matrix. But by inflating space, space opera shrinks time as thousands and even millions of years fail to effect any qualitative change in the human condition. Cyberpunk builds future worlds barely distinguishable from the present; or rather, worlds in which the future is ‘collapsed’ into the present (Csicsery-Ronay 27). Science fantasy escapes into

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a historically impoverished, cyclical world, whether on another planet or far into the future, where the familiar drama of the imaginary medievalism is replayed out on a new stage. While time and space are always connected in the chronotope, the themata of the text may emphasize one or the other. SF has the reputation of a ‘space’ genre but in it is at least as much concerned with time: ‘one can argue that time travel is actually its principal fascination, and that the genre first emerged in response to a growing interest in the future more than a growing interest in outer space’ (Westfahl 2). Time travel, however, is only one major form of the genre’s fascination with temporality. There are at least two others: alternate history, sometimes called ‘uchronia’ or stories of ‘branched time’ (Slusser and Heath 13); and the end of time or apocalypse. Each of these categories inscribes a specific timeshape through the narrative architecture of its fictional worlds. Time travel necessarily assumes temporal determinism. If one can travel into the past or the future, then St Augustine is wrong and both the past and the future exist in exactly the same way as the present, just like the three space dimensions all exist in the same way. The very idea of time travel implies spatialization of temporality. Time and space become a single frozen spacetime, isotropic and capable of being navigated in any direction one chooses; a flat, accessible terrain to explore or to conquer. And yet, paradoxically, this seeming freedom of accessible time forecloses any genuine freedom. By choosing to travel in time, one has to give up choice. For if the future exists, then it cannot be changed; and if the past can be revisited, it has to be preserved against interference for the notion of revisiting to make any sense. This is the source of the time paradox, or the chronoclasm: an exasperating and overused SF device, whose ideological implications, however, are immense and rather frightening. Alternate history is the opposite of time travel. It presupposes the endless malleability of history, the radical distinction between the future and the past, and the unlimited human agency to effect change. For the one-to-one causality of determinism, alternate history substitutes a fluid contingency, in which a single cause might have multiple and unpredictable effects. The timeshape of contingency is beautifully described in Borges’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’: ‘an infinite series of times . . . a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.’ (Borges 28). This ‘multiverse’, as ‘the network of times’ is called in modern physics which seriously entertains the possibility of its existence, is infinite, dizzying and sublime, in the Kantian sense of the mathematical sublime. Its SF representations have to cope with the artistic challenge of representing the unrepresentable (infinity), while at the same time inscribing

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a very different notion of both the past and the future to that of the inflexible determinism of time travel. Neither time travel nor alternate history inscribes time as chrono-logical and linear; the former because time is conflated with space, which is isotropic; the latter because time is multiple and web-like. But there is one timeshape which strictly conforms to the proverbial time’s arrow: apocalypse. Apocalypse in SF is not merely a depiction of the catastrophe du jour; it is a complex of narrative features that links the cessation of time with the advent of the millennium. Apocalypse is a one-way road to eternity which is the salvation of the chosen few and the damnation of the discarded many. It is perhaps the most ideologically potent and dangerous timeshape – and the most popular. Like time travel, apocalypse is deterministic but only in its destination, not in the means of getting there. In other words, if the timeshape of determinism presents the entirety of time as a frozen, spatialized expanse of predetermined events, the timeshape of apocalypse specifies the beginning and the ending of history but leaves some room for contingent action in the middle. Apocalypse may be averted or postponed but it remains a perpetual temptation because, alone of all postmodern timeshapes, it promises the timeless utopia/millennium that will come after the ritual murder of time. That this promise is false does not, of course, detract from its appeal. For each of the SF temporal chronotopes numerous literary and cinematic examples can be adduced. Time travel gave birth to the modern genre of SF in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is the subject of the next chapter. And though, as I will argue, Wells’ masterpiece contains not just one but all three primary timeshapes of SF, its invention of a mechanical device for navigating time has unleashed a flood of time-travel narratives, from Robert Heinlein’s ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ and ‘By His Bootstraps’, to Brain Aldiss’ Cryptozoic! and Frankenstein Unbound, to many popular movies, such as Back to the Future, The Terminator series and The Time Traveller’s Wife. Alternate history has spawned a never-ending stream of ‘what might have been’. Uchronia: The Alternate History List website lists more than 2900 titles and new ones are appearing every day. Some alternate histories, such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America have even managed a crossover into the so-called mainstream, despite being narratively indistinguishable from any other SF text. And as for apocalypse, even setting aside the ordinary literary and cinematic SF dealing with the end of the world, the best-selling work of Christian SF today is the Left Behind series (more than 65 million copies sold), based on the ur-apocalypse of the Christian Book of Revelation, which surely should give a pause to anybody who still believes that postmodernity has done away with God. In the following chapters I will analyse the three chronotopes, each of them within the appropriate cultural paratext. But before doing so, I want to look at these paratexts in more detail in order to reconnect SF’s narrative strategies with the varieties of the postmodern temporal imagination.

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Myth, Contingency and Apocalypse Those who argue that postmodernism gives up ‘any pretence of being able to visualize time’, often rely on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s diagnosis of the collapse of master narratives (Smethurst 40). Lyotard himself, however, does not suggest that this collapse has resulted in universal temporal blindness. Rather, he defines his own project in ‘Time Today’ as ‘trying to bring out some of the ways in which modernity deals with the temporal condition’ (1988, 58). His essay maps three modalities of the postmodern temporal imagination: myth, contingency and apocalypse. Myth is the most ancient and most durable ‘means of controlling time’. It is a narrative template which ‘allows a sequence of events to be placed in a constant framework in which the beginning and the end of a story form a sort of rhythm or rhyme’ 1988, 67). Myth is highly deterministic, since it ‘presupposes the existence of a timeless agency which “knows” in its totality the succession of moments constituting a life, be it individual or collective . . . human beings have as their only task that of unfolding identities already constituted in synchrony or achrony’ (ibid.). This description, of course, instantly evokes Oedipus Rex or the Mayan calendar but Lyotard would not let us escape into a smug sense of superiority over the distant past, reminding us that modernity ‘gave birth to the reconstitution of great narratives – Christianity, Enlightenment, romanticism, German speculative idealism, Marxism – which are not entirely foreign to mythical narratives’ (1988, 68). It is arguable that there was less determinism in ancient Greece than in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Even setting aside religious determinism (of which more later), all political utopias were deterministic and so were Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies of history, in which ‘the general course of history is conceivable’ according to some overarching law (Lyotard 1988, 68). Myth is a narrative means of assimilating time to space, ‘rendering spatial what is essentially temporal’ (Kermode 124). It reveals ‘a timeless, permanent, transcendental reality . . . [in which] each element . . . is necessitated to be what it is by its relations to the other elements and to the whole’ (Berlin 107). A mythical narrative is a reiteration of what has already been said, is being said and will always be said; a retracing of the same path over and over again; an image of time that denies temporality; a philosophy of history that brushes away the annoying specificity of lives and choices to reveal an immutable pattern of the historical law. Myth is the underlying timeshape of time travel, which treats time as another dimension of space. Time machines do not travel in history but in myth. The era of myth is not over; determinism is alive and well, though its contours have changed in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. There are three areas in which temporal determinism remains a dominant, if challenged, paradigm: religion; physics; and paradoxically, some uncritical versions of postmodern theory.

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Religion is self-evident, though in the last chapter I will discuss at length the dangerous transmutation of the Protestant concept of predestination into the so-called Rapture theology of American fundamentalism: myth giving birth to apocalypse. The situation with physics is far more complex and will be discussed in Chapter 3, where I will show that Einstein’s theory of relativity, despite common preconceptions to the contrary, had actually strengthened the deterministic concept of natural law, until challenged successfully by quantum mechanics. And as for articulations of postmodernity in terms of ‘categories of space rather than . . . categories of time’, they unwittingly lock themselves in the spatial chronotope of myth where history becomes an arbitrary collection of exemplary images (Jameson 1991, 154). This is beautifully illustrated in Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of the simulacrum of the ‘usable past’, which creates a fake space of history, ‘a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin’ (Baudrillard 350). Like the Creation Museum in Kentucky, this ‘visible myth of origin’ is a Disneyland of the imaginary past, which destroys the very temporal coherence it craves. In the spatial simulacrum of history, ‘events follow on illogically from one another, with a total equanimity towards the greatest inconsistencies, with a profound indifference to their consequences’ (Baudrillard 372). If time is space, causality is a visitor’s walkway. For Lyotard, though, (post)modernity is largely defined by a different timeshape: contingency. This is not a historical progression. Like Eco, Lyotard sees postmodernism as a sensibility rather than a period: ‘modernity is not, I think, a historical period but a way of shaping a sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate of contingency’ (1988, 68). Nevertheless, our episteme is particularly open to the contingent ‘way of shaping’ time: ‘Postmodernist theories prefer to stress, in lieu of ideology and grand trends, the role of chance and contingency’ (Corfield 128). Contingency is an extraordinarily powerful paradigm in contemporary historiography where it has successfully challenged the deterministic Hegelian and Marxist ideologies; in economics and political theory, as testified by such bestsellers as Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) and Leonard Mlodinow’s Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2008); and even in the erstwhile bastion of determinism, theoretical physics. But perhaps the scientific discourse in which contingency has first supplanted determinism and which remains the model for the deployment of contingency in articulating the postmodern sense of time is evolutionary theory. In his many books Stephen Jay Gould brilliantly combines history of life and history of science to discredit the ‘progressionist’ concept of evolution as a linear teleological process of improvement. He shows that this concept was a misreading of Darwin that gained popularity in the late nineteenth century as an attempt to defuse the devastating philosophical implications of Darwinism – devastating to those who clung to myth as their timeshape. I will return to the struggle over the evolutionary narrative in the next chapter where I will discuss the genesis of SF chronotopes in the fin-de-siècle crucible of H. G. Wells’ The Time

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Machine. For now, it is important to stress that the contemporary interpretation of evolution denies teleology and asserts that contingency is the basic timeshape of the development of life. Evolution is a drunkard’s walk, a stochastic process going from nowhere to nowhere. For many people this is a terrible idea; so terrible in fact that they are prepared to deny the accumulated scientific evidence and defy common sense in order to cling to the reassuring solidity of myth. Gould enthusiastically insists that ‘our own evolution is a joy and a wonder because such a curious chain of events would probably never happen again, but having occurred, makes eminent sense. Contingency is a licence to participate in history, and our psyche responds’ (1989, 284–5). He speaks for many but not for all. And those who find contingency chaotic and frightening, while being emotionally or intellectually repelled by the determinism of myth, will often be attracted to apocalypse. The Western historical imagination, indelibly stamped by the prophetic impulse of Christianity, has always been infected by what Derrida called ‘the disorder or delirium of destination’ (1984, 24). But in postmodernity apocalypse has become mega-entertainment and mega-war; an actual possibility and an ever-present temptation. The apocalyptic mindset expresses itself in the cultural nihilism of those who see our present situation not merely as the end of an era but as the ‘end of conventional temporality and indeed the end of ending’ (Heise 74). But perhaps an even more dangerous notion is the obverse side of nihilism: utopia. Utopia is inseparable from apocalypse since millennium can only be purchased at the price of the end of history. E. M. Cioran writes in ‘Mechanisms of Utopia’: Hostile to anomaly, to deformity, to irregularity [utopia] tends to the affirmation of the homogenous, of the typical, of repetition and orthodoxy. But life is rupture, heresy, derogation from the norms of matter . . . By banishing the irrational and the irreparable, utopia further sets itself against tragedy, paroxysm and quintessence of history. In a perfect city, all conflicts would cease; human wills would be throttled, mollified, or rendered miraculously convergent; there would reign only unity, without the ingredients of chance or contradiction. (86–7) The road to New Jerusalem goes through the Great Tribulations. The apocalyptic impulse did not exhaust itself in the millenarian paroxysms of Nazism and Communism. The resurgence of religious fundamentalism makes apocalypse the most politically relevant of the postmodern timeshapes. Chapter 5 deals with the ethics and aesthetics of the End Times, weaving between SF cataclysmic thrillers and the literature of the Christian right. But the allure of apocalypse transcends specific religious beliefs. It is an ever-present temptation of postmodernity, perversely uniting the reassuring immobility of

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myth with the freewheeling action of contingency. Whether as a full-fledged religious or ideological platform or as an inchoate sense of an ending, apocalypse permeates the postmodern sense of history. In ‘Time Today’ Lyotard oddly laments the fact that the ‘human race is already in the grip of the necessity of having to evacuate the solar system in 4.5 billion years’ – hardly the most pressing concern, one would think, in the face of global warming and ecological deterioration (1988, 64)! But this spaceopera anxiety makes sense as an oblique intrusion of apocalypse into a world oversaturated with myth and contingency where ‘more and more “times” ’ are being produced by the heterogeneous narrative machines of science, religion, ideology – and SF (64). Crushed by determinism, bewildered by contingency, we may seek refuge in the promises of the end of time, which will inevitably turn out to be the time of our end.

Of Narratology (and Other SF Attractions) The chronotope unites the narrative inscriptions of time, space and character or agent. Classical narratology has developed sophisticated tools for analysing each of these constituents but has been less successful in exploring the nexus between fictional techniques and non-fictional discourses; between literary chronotopes and cultural timeshapes. As early as 1984 Frank Sadler regretted the fact that ‘little if any attention has been given to the various ways in which narrative technique has been influenced by modern science’ (1). But while for Sadler the nexus between science and science fiction is conceptualized in terms of ‘influence’, I will focus on mutual imbrications, treating text and paratext with the same set of narratological tools. Determinism foregrounds the plot construction. The plot in classic narratology is the temporal dimension of narrative, characterized by two main aspects: order and duration. Order is founded on the distinction between the ‘natural’ chronological sequence of the events and the artistically rearranged textual representation. Duration is the relation between reader-time and text-time and encompasses such techniques as scene, summary, stretch, ellipsis and pause. Order and duration are aspects of the overall artistic design of the text, its synchronic structure. In this sense the notion of the plot in classical narratology dovetails with the principles of determinism, which discerns ‘a timeless, permanent, transcendental reality’ behind the seeming flux of temporal events (Berlin 107). No surprise, then, that the plot construction of most nineteenth-century realistic novels exhibits strong parallels with the Newtonian view of law-bound, chronological and deterministic universe. However, the temporality of determinism contains the seeds of its own destruction. If the past and the future are not ontologically different; if temporality is simply an unfolding of a pre-existing design, then time does not

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exist at all. The transition from the nineteenth-century bildungsroman to what Joseph Frank called ‘the spatial form’ of modernism is not a revolution but a predictable evolution. Pursuing ‘pure time’, modernists, such as Woolf and Joyce, found themselves locked into static spatial patterns, since ‘ “pure time,” obviously, is not time at all – it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space’ (Frank 68). Treating the plot as a synchronic pattern or structure, determinism runs into the aporia of causality. Causality is the third aspect of narrative temporality explored by classical narratology and regarded by Gerald Prince as a necessary component of a minimal story. Rimmon-Kenan suggests that causality follows from the temporal order of narrative representation since cause-and-effect can ‘be projected upon temporality’ (18). Recently, Emma Kafalenos has amplified this suggestion by arguing that narrative design is an epiphenomenon of the process of reading, since ‘we understand events . . . by viewing them as elements in chronological and causal chains of events’; in other words, we impose causality in retrospect upon contingent sequences (35). But in the deterministic timeshape there is no such thing as a contingent sequence; in fact, there is no such thing as sequence at all, only our flawed and limited perception of the timeless and necessary reality. This not only vitiates any notion of human agency but makes causality both absolute (since all events are necessary) and meaningless (for the same reason). Oedipus Rex is the first great narrative to exhibit these two aspects of the deterministic timeshape. Oedipus is a tragic hero whose actions, according to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, lead to his downfall. But since his actions are caused not by his past choice but by his future fate revealed by the oracle, he has no choice and in a sense, performs no action. Fated by the inscrutable gods to kill his father and sleep with his mother, he does just that, despite his foreknowledge of his doom and his attempts to escape it. The causality of Oedipus Rex is that of a snake biting its tail: Oedipus’s knowledge of the future makes this future come to pass but since the future is inevitable both his knowledge and his actions contribute not a jot to its advent. Many SF texts dealing with time travel are drawn to the Oedipus myth, from Brian Aldiss’ Cryptozoic! to Back to the Future. This is often seen as a proof that Freud was right or at least that the authors of these texts thought he was. I would suggest, however, that it is not Freud’s but Sophocles’ Oedipus who is the secret patron saint of time travel: the man caught in the inescapable loop of determinism, stranded on the arid terrain of time-as-space. Chapter 2, ‘Strangled by the Time Loop: Paradoxes of Determinism’, deals with the paradoxes of time travel as a narrative expression of the aporia of determinism. It offers a narratological and ideological analysis of time travel in the SF texts by Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Brian Aldiss, Richard Matheson, Octavia Butler, J. R. Dunn and Martin Amis. It expands by engaging determinism in physics, theology and history and ends with a discussion of time-reversal as a strategy of questioning the political implications of deterministic ideologies.

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If determinism foregrounds the plot, contingency emphasizes agency. The question of narrative agency is perhaps the most vexing one in narratology. On the one hand, the modernist revolt against the pieties of nineteenth-century realism has led to the dismissal of the character as the artistic focus of the literary text. This revolt has been reinforced by the postmodern deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject leading to the critical abandonment of ‘the idea of a person as a unifying, homogenizing, singular presence within a narrative text’ (Gibson 144). On the other hand, as James Phelan cogently reminds us, our response to a narrative text inevitably involves a specific ‘understanding of what character is and of the complicated relations that readers can have with it’ (42). A character does not have to be a human being (and in SF it often is not); it may interrogate or undermine our notion of what a human being is; it does not have to be unifying, homogenizing and so on but the one thing it has to be in order to engage our emotions is to be an agent. The classical narratology, following Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the fairy tale, distinguished between functions and traits, or in Greimas’ terminology, between actants and acteurs. Briefly, actants are narrative functions assigned to specific entities in the text; while acteurs are composites of traits that perform these functions. I will use the terms ‘actants’ and ‘agents’ to emphasize the connection between this narratological classification and perhaps the question in moral philosophy, historiography and increasingly, in neuropsychology: the question of free will. Do we choose our actions? Are we responsible for our decisions? Can we, at any given moment, choose otherwise? Are we actants or agents? And related to it, a series of questions about history: does human history hinge on individual human choice or on some ineluctable laws of development? If we decide that human beings are mere actants, puppets of progress, genetic programming, divine predestination, or economic development, we are back in the static terrain of determinism. But if we decide that human beings are agents, are we not declaring history to be essentially random, since the freedom of the will is precisely the freedom to choose differently? Chapter 3, ‘ “My Name is Might-Have-Been”: Contingency, Counterfactuals and Moral Choice’ deals with these issues in the context of alternate history. It starts by considering some salient narrative features of alternate history, especially the split between the diegetic and extradiegetic point of view, with examples from Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg and Sever Gansovsky. The diegetic level, to put it simply, is the level of the projected fictional world of the text, while the extradiegetic level is the level of narration. In the texts which have a so-called homodiegetic (often first-person) narrator who inhabits the world of the text, the perspective is from within whatever temporality this world possesses. In texts with a heterodiegetic (omniscient) narrator, the point of view is ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ this world. Alternate histories, however, regardless of the actual strategies of their narration and/or focalization, offer a double

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perspective, since the authorial persona is always aware both of the history of the fictional world and of our own history, to which the fictional history is a plausible alternative. By offering this double point of view, alternate histories inscribe the possibility of agency in the very shape of their chronotopes. The chapter relates alternate history to the widespread use of counterfactuals in postmodern history-writing, regarding this use as a symptom of the cultural shift from determinism to contingency. It engages theology, moral philosophy and historiography in order to argue that the question of agency and moral responsibility is at the heart of the postmodern debate about subjectivity, regardless of whether this subjectivity is conceived as human or posthuman. It uncovers the historical and political implications of contingency by considering the inscription of moral responsibility and historical necessity in three famous alternate histories, all centring on the most contentious issue of postmodern historiography: Nazism and the Holocaust. By analysing Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), I will make the case that only by considering the Holocaust as contingent, preventable and accidental we can grapple with its moral lessons. The chapter also briefly considers the question of posthuman agency and suggests that rather than the biological and/or mechanical cyborg, it is a historical cyborg who functions as a promising new modality of the posthuman. If determinism foregrounds the plot, apocalypse highlights the setting. The baroque ruinous landscapes of apocalyptic movies from Matrix to Terminator are their most reliable attractions that compensate for the puerility of the plot and for the predictability of the characters. The growing avalanche of apocalyptic blockbusters confirms Derrida’s description of the postmodern ‘unfinished’ apocalypse that lingers in the twilight of the Tribulations. But the millennium, even if disavowed, is never completely absent from apocalyptic texts. The lingering visual pleasure of the catastrophic landscape foreshadows the timelessness of a New Jerusalem. Like determinism, the chronotope of apocalypse is essentially mythical. But apocalypse differs from determinism in its lateral expansion, its durational aspect. If in the deterministic chronotope time is space, in the apocalyptic chronotope time is forever becoming space. Chapter 4, ‘Everyday Apocalypse: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the End of Time’ outlines the apocalyptic chronotope. It starts with a brief history of the End Times in Christian eschatology and its rebirth in the millenarian and utopian ideologies of the nineteenth century. It follows this with a discussion of contemporary Christian SF, focusing on the popular Left Behind series and on Ted Dekker’s Circle trilogy. It compares the structural and ideological implications of apocalypse in religious and secular SF by referencing an SF classic of humanity’s transfiguration, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Most of the chapter, however, focuses on the four novels of J. G. Ballard known as the

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Four Elements Quartet. In dramatizing different aspects of the apocalyptic chronotope, these novels constitute a sustained critique of the millenarian world-view and of the ruined agency shaped by catastrophic temporality. Conclusion, ‘Beyond Millennium’ questions whether a postmodern utopia is possible, after all, and how its narrative inscription functions within the apocalyptic/millenarian chronotope. In each chapter, the choice of specific SF works to be discussed is idiosyncratic, determined by how well they illustrate a specific narrative chronotope rather than by their intrinsic importance and/or representability. But there is nothing arbitrary about the subject of the next chapter. Chapter 1 is about H. G. Wells’ 1895 masterpiece The Time Machine. The chapter has to be there not just because Wells invented time travel as a literary topos; not just because the novel is a paradigm and perhaps even a progenitor of the very genre of SF; not just because it is a literary tour de force. The Time Machine, I will argue, is a birthplace of postmodern time(s) itself; a locus in which determinism, contingency and apocalypse have found those narrative forms that have been with us ever since.

Chapter 1

The Time Machines: H. G. Wells and the Invention of Postmodernity

‘We were making the future,’ he said, ‘and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!’ H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes

The Many Times of the Time Traveller ‘ “Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time is only a kind of Space” ’ (Wells 1960, 268). ‘The proper pause’ would not be very long today: in the post-Einstein age the idea that time is the fourth dimension of space does not strike us as unusual. But in 1895 when these words are uttered the lateVictorian audience falls silent and the Traveller has to walk them patiently through this brand-new concept and its implications. It would be easier, a contemporary reader might think, simply to refer to Einstein who has achieved the status of a science icon and whose conclusions, therefore, are seldom argued with even – and particularly – if they are not understood. But the Traveller cannot fall back on this unimpeachable authority; he has to struggle on his own to convince his sceptical friends. The reason why he quotes neither Einstein nor Hermann Minkowski, who created the mathematical apparatus for describing the four-dimensional spacetime continuum, is simple, though astonishing. Their discoveries lie in the future. Einstein’s special theory of relativity was published in 1905; Minkowski developed Einstein’s insight in 1907; and the general theory of relativity appeared in 1915. The Traveller, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine, is addressing his audience in 1895. Uncannily, the novel enacts its own theme: time travel. In fact, despite the pop-culture image of Wells as a time traveller, there is nothing supernatural about this insight.1 The notion of spatialized time was in the air in the fin-de-siècle. The revolt against the Newtonian chrono-logic encompassed arts and philosophy no less than science ‘as artists and intellectuals

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envisioned time that reversed itself, moved at irregular rhythms, and even came to a dead stop’ (Kern 29). Still, Wells’ achievement is stunning. Not only did he foresee Minkowski’s argument that henceforth ‘space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserved an independent reality’ (Minkowski 76); he also invented a new literary technique and therefore, a new narrative chronotope that incarnated the emergent concept of spacetime. For the revolutionary nature of The Time Machine lies not merely in the fact that its protagonist travels through time but that he does so with the help of a mechanical device. Sporadic instances of time travel in mythology, folklore and literature before The Time Machine were based on the distinction between the earthly time and a timeless supernatural realm. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was published in 1889 but Twain’s whimsy offers no explanation for his protagonist’s return to the Middle Ages. By inventing a time machine Wells created a new kind of chronotope firmly rooted in science. The Traveller’s long and scientifically plausible explanation of time as the fourth dimension of space serves the same rhetorical function as his cogs-and-wheels device. Both are means to validate his ontological novum in terms of scientific cognition rather than supernatural faith. In doing so, Wells shaped the emergent genre of SF. It did not get its contemporary name until 1923; Wells himself called his novels ‘scientific romances’. But his scientific romances, especially the five masterpieces written at the beginning of his long career, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), have profoundly influenced the narrative techniques and the thematic repertoire of the new genre. Darko Suvin regards The Time Machine as a ‘paradigmatic’ SF text based on the interaction of ontological estrangement and cognition whose ‘world . . . is not a priori intentionally oriented toward its protagonists, either positively or negatively’ (11). In other words, as opposed to the worlds of fantasy or utopia, the fictional world of The Time Machine is neither a wish-fulfilment nor a stern moral warning; it is neither allegorical nor admonitory; it simply is. Its relevance to consensus reality, therefore, has to be understood in terms of the fin-de-siècle revolution against the reality of such a consensus. As The Time Machine was being written, the Newtonian temporality was splintering into startling and unfamiliar shapes as ‘a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space’ (Kern 1). What Jameson calls ‘the immense range of temporalities of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine’ is both a reflection and an artistic transformation of these new modes (Jameson 2007, 126). By ‘range of temporalities’ Jameson means the juxtaposition of different timeframes: the late-Victorian present of the frame narrative, in which the unnamed witness-narrator recounts the story of the Time Traveller; the Traveller’s own story of the sojourn in the year 802,701 AD; and his eventual venture into an

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even further futurity. But beyond the representation of different times, the novel also offers a narrative emplotment of different timeshapes. It exhibits what I will call heterogeneous ontological embedding, in which several different and irreconcilable chronotopes are squeezed into each other like Russian dolls. This short text, barely a hundred pages long, manages to combine three different ways of experiencing, inscribing and conceptualizing time. In this sense, Suvin’s claim that SF has been born in the crucible of The Time Machine, no matter how contestable on chronological grounds, is fully justified on structural ones. The Time Machine prefigures the three main chronotopical categories of postmodern SF’s representation of temporality: time travel; alternate history; and apocalypse. An even more ambitious, and yet defensible, claim would be that The Time Machine contains the three main postmodern timeshapes: determinism, contingency and End Time. Postmodern temporalities and therefore postmodernity itself are as implicit in The Time Machine as a potential organism is implicit in its DNA. The novel is a framed narrative, a story within a story. The embedding story is told by a first-person narrator who together with a group of friends listens to the embedded tale told by the Traveller. The frame narrator describes the Time Machine itself, witnesses its launch and testifies to the Traveller’s return with the flowers from the future. He concludes the novel by stating that the Traveller failed to return from his next voyage and offering his own thoughts on the subject of time travel. In the embedded tale, the Time Traveller narrates his adventures in the year 802,701 AD, followed by several more time-jumps into an even more distant future. Both narrators are nameless and flat, mere averages of the Victorian educated upper-middle-class. But despite the similarity of the point of view, the embedding and the embedded tales are radically different in their attitudes to temporality. Moreover, the embedded tale told by the Traveller himself contains two different timeshapes, corresponding to his extended stay in 802,701 on the one hand and his further travel that culminates in his witnessing of the heat death of the Sun on the other. Critical interpretations of The Time Machine vacillate between seeing its vision of the future as deterministic, apocalyptic, or open-ended. Sometimes, all these interpretations coexist in a single reading. Robert Philmus, for example, sees the flowers that the Traveller brings back from the future as ‘a hieroglyphic of despair’, an expression of inexorable destiny. But at the same time he argues that the novel is ‘a parable of guarded hope’ since ‘the future is real, possibly catastrophic, but not beyond redemption’ (Philmus 1977, 167). If this were directed at almost any other text, the critic could be justifiably accused of prevarication since the two alternatives are mutually exclusive. But in relation to The Time Machine both are true. The novel contains several different chronotopes, several different and incompatible ways of representing time and space; and it is this heterogeneous ontological embedding that gives it its artistic and intellectual richness.

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In the rest of this chapter I will analyse each chronotope of the novel against a particular strand in the fin-de-siècle debate on time. I will be reading Wells’ masterpiece not as a seamless inscription of a particular world-view but as a textual field of conflicting interpretations of temporality. This field is constituted by the tensions between three approaches to time: the determinism that perceives time and history as a design of inevitability, the contingency that emphasizes historical accident and human agency, and the apocalypse that voluptuously lingers in the twilight of the unavoidable end. In The Time Machine, these three approaches struggle for the mind of the reader and perhaps the author as well.

Weena’s Flowers As the Traveller lectures his guests on the equivalence of time and space, he stresses that the future exists in exactly the same way as the past. Just as one can move in any direction in space, there is nothing in principle to prevent one from moving in any direction in time. The time machine he eventually shows his guests, while rather low-tech from our point of view, is a logical extension of his argument: this solidly mechanical contraption with its padded seat and oddly-shaped handles gives solidity to the notion of a spacetime continuum. It is a sort of temporal omnibus that makes the distinction between the past and the future as trivial as the distinction between the right and the left. Nor does the Traveller shy away from the most disturbing consequence of his ‘time is space’ idea. If, contra St Augustine, both the past and the future exist as solid material presences (and where would the time machine go if they did not?), then we are no more than fixed details of an equally fixed universal tapestry. Rather than space and time being extensions of the mind, the mind becomes an epiphenomenon of spacetime. What Einstein said in Relativity had been said in The Time Machine 20 years earlier: ‘It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three-dimensional existence’ (Einstein 150; emphasis in the original). The notion that we are mere specks in the frozen block of a four-dimensional existence, unable to move beyond our predestined location, jars with what Martin Gardner eloquently describes as everybody’s ‘intense intuitive belief that his or her will is free’ (Gardner 428). This belief, however, seldom withstands the battering of philosophy or science. Many philosophers had claimed before Einstein that the ‘feeling of free will [is] . . . an epiphenomenon, a psychological by-product of events that has no more influence on the universe, as it goes its predetermined way, than a rainbow has on the sun or on the falling drops of rain’ (Gardner 430). But propped up by the unimpeachable authority of science this notion becomes doubly effective, despite its counter-intuitive nature. This is why the Traveller spends so much time patiently explaining to

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his guests the logical steps of his discovery of spacetime in order to arrive at the definition of a human being as a mere sum of its temporal parts: “Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.’ (Wells 267; emphasis added) Curiously, contemporary physicist Brian Greene uses a very similar image to explain away our instinctive sense of temporal flow and individual agency in time. He asks us to imagine Gone with the Wind being played on a defective DVD player which randomly jumps from one frame to another. We will not be able to make sense of the non-sequential jumble but Scarlett and Rhett will have no problem because in each stop-freeze frame they do what they always do, what they always have done and will always do in this particular slice of simulated spacetime. If we imagine the characters as having interiority, in each frame they will have the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their situation. ‘Similarly, each moment in spacetime – each time slice – is like one of the still frames in a film . . . to the you who is in any such moment, it is the now, it is the moment you experience at that moment. And it always will be. Moreover, within each individual slice, your thoughts and memories are sufficiently rich to yield a sense that time has continuously flowed to that moment’ (Greene 140). The visual metaphors employed by both Wells and Greene indicate the non-narrative or even anti-narrative nature of the human subject within a deterministic timeshape, in which we exist not as dynamic stories of memory and desire but as collections of static states of being, piles of random snapshots, accumulations of ‘islands of time, which can be rearranged in any order, as we do in photo albums’ (Slusser and Heath 17). The narrative coherence of our identities is a delusion, a by-product of the fact that ‘the human mind impose[s] on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and hence does not show up in the laws of physics . . .’ (Greene 141). Denial of agency implies denial of causality. If everything is predetermined, nothing is caused by anything else. If there is no choice, there are no consequences. But how can a narrative proceed without agents and without causality? How can a narrative, dynamic and temporal by its very nature, convey the timelessness and immobility of the deterministic timeshape? The chronotope of time travel brilliantly solves this technical conundrum but at the price of generating philosophical, psychological and political paradoxes and pathologies that might make even a confirmed determinist want to rethink his/her position. The solution is called the time loop or the chronoclasm. Chronoclasm is a Mobius strip of causality. If time travel is possible then X may go back in time, kill his grandfather, thus preventing his own conception

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and making it impossible for him to go back in time and kill his grandfather, etc. A chronoclasm manages to be an affront to logic, narrativity and history at the same time. Logically speaking, chronoclasm is ‘a circular causal structure’ which results in ‘a real tautology becom[ing] a falsehood’ (Lem 1985, 140–1). Narratively speaking, chronoclasm or time-loop is infinitely recursive and therefore cannot be narrated: ‘The problem with such loops is that narrative itself, the act of telling the loop, cannot remain tenseless nor without declension’ (Slusser and Heath 15). And historically speaking, chronoclasm dramatizes a ‘philosophy of history’ that undermines the very concept of historicity as an arena of human endeavour (Lem 1985, 145). And yet at the same time chronoclasm is an infinitely alluring technique precisely because of its capacity to generate subversive and paradoxical narrative forms that dramatize the multiple antinomies of physical and historical determinism. Since the Machine can ‘travel indifferently in any direction of Space or Time, as the driver determines’, the terrible future the Traveller encounters already exists just as much as the Victorian present which he leaves and comes back to (Wells 269). The Traveller’s entire million-year-long odyssey takes place between Chapter 2, titled ‘The Time Machine’, and Chapter 3, titled ‘The Time Traveller Returns’, which is exactly a week for the frame’s narrator. This almost infinite ‘stretch’ does not result from the discrepancy between objective and subjective time, as in the high modernism of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce whose goal is ‘to explore how human perception and memory shape or distort time’ (Heise 53). Human perception plays no part in the ontological poetics of The Time Machine. Both the frame narrator and the Traveller himself are as transparent as a character can be without disappearing altogether; their namelessness and psychological poverty are a technique to shift attention to the shape of the chronotope, within which time is absolutely objective. It is this objectivity of time, or rather, of spacetime that makes it possible for human beings to navigate it at different speeds. The analogy with space is complete: our ordinary experience of time is to the experience of the Time Traveller as the natural speed of a pedestrian is to the augmented speed of a vehicle driver. In the world of time travel, ‘the temporal gap . . . is reduced to co-presence’ (Currie 104). This ‘co-presence’ generates a causal loop. The frame narrator, having heard the Traveller’s explanation of his device, wonders about ‘the curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion it [time travel] suggested’ (273). And indeed, as one tries to think through the implications of the Traveller’s story, ‘utter confusion’ is the result. If the Traveller saw the future, then the future already exists, and history is absolutely determined by causality, so that every cause can have only one effect. But since he knows the horrors that lie ahead and spreads the tale, why is the future not affected? And if it is affected, where exactly does he travel? Determinism requires causality, but causality excludes determinism.

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In the conclusion of the novel the narrator muses on this paradox: He, I know – for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made – thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank – is a vast ignorance, lit at few casual places by the memory of his story. (335) ‘If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.’ The narrator accepts the determinism required by time travel and suggests that the only escape is through pretending that the will is free, while knowing it is not. But does not this pretence itself suggest that change is possible? If we can imagine an alternative to the inevitable future, what prevents us from making it real? Determinism prompts us to ask this question, while making it impossible to answer. The vicious circle of the chronoclasm is merely a structural device to interrogate the deterministic timeshapes of science, philosophy and history. So now I want to shift my focus from the Mobius shape of Wells’ time-travel chronotope to its cultural paratext. If indeed the notion of spacetime was ‘in the air’ in the fin-de-siècle and eventually influenced Einstein and Minkowski, how did it penetrate Wells’ earlier text? The classical physical determinism of Newton and Laplace, which I will explore more fully in the next chapter, is in fact in eclipse at the turn of the century. Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907) criticized the application of physical determinism to organic matter. Scientist and philosopher Emile Meyerson in Identité et réalité (1908) faulted positivism’s elimination of time in its insistence on the strict one-to-one correspondence between cause and effect. Both Bergson and Meyerson were inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which ‘stresses the messiness, historicity, and timeliness (not timelessness) of things’ (Morson 292). Wells was equally influenced by evolutionary theory. A trained biologist, a self-proclaimed Darwinian and a student of Darwin’s celebrated champion and interpreter Thomas Henry Huxley, Wells created in The Time Machine one of the greatest ‘evolutionary fables’ ever written (McConnell 21). In the light of his evolutionary convictions, the mystery of the novel’s deterministic chronotope becomes even greater since it goes against the grain of the Darwinian emphasis on contingency, temporality and historicity. But just as the evolutionary problematic in The Time Machine is embedded within the deterministic chronotope of time travel, evolutionary theory in the 1890s was being challenged by alternative theories which tried to impose a deterministic framework upon the contingency and flux of Darwinism.

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In the 1933 Introduction to his collected scientific romances Wells recalls ‘the placid assumption of that time [fin-de-siècle] that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind’ and says that The Time Machine was written as an expression of his own alternative ‘vision of the aimless torture in creation’ (1933, 242–3). This passage outlines the fierce evolutionary debate of the 1890s, which is the source of the novel’s heterogeneous ontological embedding. The determinism of the time-travel chronotope originates precisely in that ‘placid assumption’ the older Wells remembers with a mixture of condescension and fondness. If it seems strange to link the optimism of evolutionary progress with the grim paradoxes of time travel, we should remember that determinism offers the lure of certainty that often offsets its claustrophobia. And this lure is so strong that it eventually overcomes Wells’ own commitment to Darwinism. In his characterization of evolutionary contingency as ‘the aimless torture in creation’ we can hear the voice of the man who some years after the publication The Time Machine succumbed to a historical determinism, albeit of a social rather than a biological variety, and repeatedly tried to rewrite the chronoclasm as utopia. The second part of the nineteenth century was the age of what Peter Bowler called ‘the non-Darwinian revolution’, an attempt to reinterpret Darwin’s theory in a way that would preserve the twin concepts of design and progress. The notion that Darwin was seen as threatening primarily because The Origin of Species (1859) contradicted Biblical chronology is an anachronism, the result of projecting the religious fundamentalism of the twenty-first century back into the nineteenth. Only a small minority of intellectuals were troubled because Darwin reiterated what had been said before by Charles Lyell, Robert Chambers and others: that Earth is much older than 6,000 years.2 But incomparably more upsetting (including to Darwin himself) was what natural selection did to the deeply rooted notion of progress. Natural selection is not inherently progressive or teleological. It adapts organisms to the randomly changing environment. It has no goal, no direction and no road to follow. It is clumsy and fraught with accidents. The only reason it works is because it is oriented toward the future and because the future is open-ended and contingent. Darwin was ‘the most brilliant thinker ever to develop a view of the world as eventful process irreducible to structure’, the view in which ‘contingency reigns’ (Morson 291–2). But it is precisely this reign of contingency that has caused a deeply visceral rejection of Darwinism among freethinkers, such as George Bernard Shaw; religious believers, such as Philip Gosse, the author of Omphalos; and many fellow scientists.3 Even today, the hatred of contingency motivates many of the proponents of Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinism. The website of the Intelligent Design Network, which promotes teaching of creationism in public schools, makes this clear: ‘The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection’.4

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The genteel expression ‘undirected process’ goes back to Darwin’s own soft-pedalling of contingency in the later editions of The Origin. However, there was no escaping the consequences of a single sentence in the book that elegantly dismissed a whole century or more of intoxication with teleology, determinism and progress: ‘naturalists have not as yet defined to each other’s satisfaction what is meant by high and low forms’ (Darwin 1859, 336). Though later organisms might be better adapted to a particular ecological niche than earlier ones, this does not mean that they are ‘higher’ in any absolute sense. Darwin’s contemporaries understood this point very well and resisted it bitterly, much as the creationists do today. The famed physicist William Herschel dubbed Darwinism ‘the law of higgledy-piggledy’. As late as the 1920s, George Bernard Shaw, who was hardly a Christian fundamentalist, rejected Darwin and embraced a scientifically bankrupt neo-Lamarckism because of his opposition to contingency: [Darwinism] seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of hope and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. (Shaw 33) Biologist and philosopher J. L. Monod pinpoints this instinctive revulsion from the accidental, the contingent and the random as the core reason for opposing Darwinism: ‘The aspect of evolutionary theory that is unacceptable to many enlightened people, either scientists or philosophers, or ideologists of one kind or another, is the completely contingent aspect which the existence of man, societies, and so on, must take if we accept this theory’ (1996, 394–5). This ‘completely contingent aspect’ is eliminated if evolution is divorced from natural selection. And this is indeed what happened in the 50 years after the publication of The Origin. While ‘the controversy over evolution itself was effectively dead within ten years, Darwin’s explanation for it [i.e. natural selection] steadily declined in popularity’ (Morton 23). A whole host of scientific alternatives – orthogenesis, neo-Lamarckism, saltationism and others – were offered as philosophically palatable alternatives to the relentlessly contingent natural selection. Whatever their scientific details, they followed the spirit of Herbert Spencer’s pre-Darwinian philosophy of progress that stated as early as 1857: ‘Progress is not an accident . . . but a beneficent necessity’. While there were some scientific objections to natural selection (mostly stemming from the ignorance of the mechanism of heredity), much of the backlash was emotionally and ideologically motivated: ‘. . . the prevailing Zeitgeist was utterly opposed to Darwin’s thought and prevented a universal acceptance of some of his new ideas for more than a hundred years. Indeed . . . many Darwinian

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ideas are still not yet fully accepted, owing to the continuing power of opposing ideologies’ (Mayr 40). The so-called modern synthesis of evolutionary theory and genetics developed in the 1930s tilted the balance toward natural selection, while the neo-Darwinism of the 1990s returned to The Origins with a vengeance. Probably the most media-savvy Darwinian of today, Richard Dawkins found a perfect rhetorical flourish to poke the determinists in the eye: Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. (Dawkins 5; emphasis in the original) Dawkins’ blind watchmaker is a sardonic twist on William Paley’s Natural Theology (1801). In Paley’s book the exquisite structure of living organism testifies to the prior design of the creator, just as the structure of a watch testifies to the prior design of the watchmaker. Dawkins shifts the metaphor from structure to function; from design to process. The function of a watch is to measure time. The ‘function’ of life is to survive in time. The ostensible design of living organisms is a measure of the vastness of the geological time-scale, which has enabled the hit-and-miss workings of natural selection. Thus Darwinism restores temporality to its central place in the evolutionary process. The living world bears what Stephen Jay Gould calls ‘the unerasable and determined signature of history’ (1989, 283). Gould and Dawkins disagree on the role of adaptation but they are in full agreement on the fact that ‘contingency sets the basic pattern of nature’ (Gould 1989, 284). This is a pattern that is the opposite of the teleological design of determinism; it is a trace of the lost past blindly groping toward the inchoate future. No time machine can follow it back or forward. Only a deterministic, ‘designed’, teleological evolution would enable the Traveller’s jaunt by acting as a road through spacetime. Of course, what the Traveller actually finds is far from the optimistic forecasts of Spencer or Shaw. But whether it is conceptualized as tragedy or comedy, evolutionary determinism imposes very specific narrative constraints on the story of life: predictability, regularity and a foreseeable ending. All of them can be found in the embedding narrative of The Time Machine, in which the inevitability of the terrible future is incarnated in the strange white flowers that the Traveller shows to his guests as a material proof of his journey. Confronted with the substantiality of the future, not as a possibility but as existence, the frame narrator tries to put the best spin on it: ‘And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual

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tenderness still lived on in the heart of man’ (335). The strange verbal form of this concluding sentence encapsulates the essence of determinism. Mind and strength have gone; are gone; will be gone; the past and the future are one. Inspired by the non-Darwinian revolution of its period, the time-travel chronotope of The Time Machine both argues against, and succumbs to, its deterministic timeshape. As opposed to the relentless cheerfulness of evolution by design, it depicts the future as a ‘rough beast’ of misery and predation. But in keeping with the narrative form of biological determinism, it retraces the inescapable loop of chronoclasm, in which the future and the past chase each other without ever breaking free. Patrick Parrinder argues that ‘The Time Machine is an attack on utopia’ (2005, 37). But determinism underlies the utopian thought, which seeks to signpost humanity’s progress toward the inevitable future. The time-travel chronotope of Wells’ novel is deterministically anti-utopian; and yet, with a simple shift of perspective, it can become the shape of evolutionary millennialism. And this shift of perspective is what Wells eventually accomplished during his long career (he died in 1946). He became increasingly enamoured of social utopianism which made him reject democracy and flirt with Fascism and Communism, half-endorsing Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin as being on the right path toward the goal of a perfectly organized society, without the waste, chaos and accident of democracy. While not completely abandoning scientific Darwinism, Wells tried to limit its historical implications, declaring as his goal to engineer a social ‘escape from the accidental and the chaotic’ (1908, 27). He became more and more determined to impose a teleological pattern upon history. This determination, first appearing in his non-fictional book Anticipations (1901) and articulated in A Modern Utopia (1905), culminates in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which is disturbingly Fascist, in its boundless disdain for democracy, its cult of purification by blood and its longing for a ruthless leader. And the narrative form of the book perfectly corresponds to its ideological message: the shape of things to come is a shape indeed, a spatial pattern, a design of progress, into which reluctant history has to be forced even at the price of terrible violence. Like many an inventor, Wells, a would-be Time Traveller, becomes a victim of his greatest invention, time travel.

The Garden of History But the Time Machine is not the entirety of The Time Machine. The embedding chronotope of time travel is eclipsed for most readers by the drama and excitement of the embedded chronotope, which comprises the first-person narrative of the Time Traveller’s adventures in 802,701 AD. The significance of this embedded narrative can be gauged by comparing the 1895 version of the novel with its predecessor, the 1888 novella ‘The Chronic Argonauts’. In this novella

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there are also two narrative frames. But the embedded story is told only in fragments and by a witness rather than the Time Traveller himself. Patrick Parrinder stresses the thematic importance of the expansion of the ‘internal’ narrative in the final version of The Time Machine, in which ‘the smoking-room setting of the tale is forgotten for very long stretches’ (Parrinder 2005, 33). He relates this expansion to the strengthening of Wells’ ‘prophetic’ voice. I would argue, however, that if prophecy is understood as a revelation of the inevitable future, the embedded tale is the voice of an anti-prophet. The questions that the narrator of the embedding story ponders as he contemplates the inevitability of the future are dismissed as irrelevant by the narrator of the embedded story, the Time Traveller himself. While he should know better than anybody else how temporal determinism eliminates agency, it never occurs to him to doubt his own. Nor is he particularly concerned about the possibilities of time paradox that trouble his friend. Chronoclasm has no power over him. Having reached 802,701 AD, the Traveller forgets the Time Machine and its paradoxes, worrying about it only as the means of escape from the increasingly dire situations he finds himself in. He never questions either the freedom of his own actions or the contingency of the world he encounters. The Traveller is constantly confronted with choices: to leave the Time Machine or not; to save Weena or to disregard her plight; to go into the Palace of the Green Porcelain or to stay with the Eloi. Some of his choices turn out to be disastrously wrong, as when he lingers in the Palace for too long and invites an attack by the nocturnal Morlocks, which results in Weena’s death. At every fork in the road he experiences the sense of being free to choose, undeterred by the consideration that his very invention proves that this freedom is an illusion. His exploration is mental as well as physical: he is constantly advancing, testing and discarding hypotheses to account for the strange world of the future. His explanations of this world are provisional and uncertain, mere sketches of the dim panorama of evolutionary history, in which the Eloi and the Morlocks are chance fluctuations rather than the necessary end-points. The contingency of the future is emphasized by the fact that there are four different scenarios, which account for the temporal descent of the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks from our own; and neither of them is presented as the final and absolute truth. The Traveller stresses that these four alternate histories of futurity are only hypotheses and neither he nor the reader knows which – if any – of them has in fact taken place. This is a fact often overlooked by those critics who insist on reading The Time Machine as a social allegory, in which the Eloi and the Morlocks are reduced to personifications of the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have-nots’ of Victorian society (Bergonzi 51). Allegory presupposes a stable system of correspondences that enables a consistent decoding of the text. But in The Time Machine the allegorical correspondence is destabilized twice: by the enormous temporal distance between the late nineteenth century and the world of 802,701 AD; and by the

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multiple possibilities of their connection. Parrinder points out that the temporal distance only detracts from the socially allegorical dimension of the novel: ‘Evolution by natural selection – the strictly Darwinian model to which Wells and Huxley adhered – could not have brought about significant changes within the human species within recorded history, so that any such changes must be cultural, not natural in origin. Wells was determined to show the results of hypothetical natural evolution, not of artificial or eugenic processes’ (1995, 39). Since natural selection is contingent and opportunistic, the Traveller’s scenarios do not correspond to the tidy pattern of lower-to-higher (or higher-to-lower) forms, required by evolutionary determinism. In fact, the known evolutionary path of humanity is deliberately scrambled in the novel. The Eloi and the Morlocks are compared to an array of morphologically diverse animals – ants, cattle, lemurs, spiders – who are not on humanity’s phylogenetic mainline. And after leaving the world or 802,701 AD the Traveller voyages into further futurity where he meets grotesque insectoid creatures, a tentacled monster and – in the episode which was omitted in the novel’s first book publication as too gruesome – a small gray kangaroo-like animal, which still has five-digit hands and a rounded forehead. His conclusion is that ‘there is no reason why a degenerate humanity should not come at last to differentiate into as many species as the descendants of the mud fish who fathered all the land vertebrates’ (326). Instead of sliding down the morphological scale, humanity fans out into a variety of forms, adapting to the changing environment. The ending of the novel radically breaks the phylogenetic sequence, as various life-forms are ‘all present pell-mell, outside of their proper taxonomic order, within about three pages’ (Suvin 232). This evolutionary menagerie undermines Suvin’s own preferred allegorical reading of the novel ‘as a general abstract scheme or paradigm’ of late-Victorian social inequality (233). He has to admit that no ‘abstract paradigm’, either of progress or regress, explains the morphological richness of humanity’s descendants. This does not mean that the novel is devoid of social critique. However, its social aspect is inseparable from its representation of evolutionary history as particular and contingent. Each of the four evolutionary scenarios implies a different historical path for humanity with its own mistakes and pitfalls. In effect, the Traveller creates four alternate histories of the future, each with its own social message. And it is the multiplicity and clash of these messages that constitute the novel’s vision of history as the unbounded arena of choices and possibilities. The Traveller’s first impression of the ‘weedless garden’ of the future is that he has arrived in a utopia, ‘the age of quiet’, in which history concludes with a happy ending. ‘ “Communism”, said I to myself’ (286). Confronted with the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the Eloi, he then decides that this is the age of decay, ‘the sunset of mankind’ (287). This radical swerve from utopia to dystopia undermines the tight semantic fit between the literal and the

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figurative meaning of the text, which is the hallmark of allegory. If the future world is so semantically rich as to allow such different interpretations, the embedded chronotope is ‘unique, changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view’ rather than to the simple decoding of allegorical correspondences (Suvin 7). This cognitive aspect of the text is further emphasized when the Traveller once again modifies his hypothesis in the light of new data, the existence of the Morlocks. First he believes that they are the exploited slaves of their decadent Eloi masters. Then, observing that in the world without animal life the Morlocks are carnivores, the Traveller advances his next hypothesis: ‘These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of’ (311). But even this final hypothesis is tentative: ‘It may be as wrong an explanation as mortal wit could invent’ (323). This open-ended chain of conjectures follows the Darwinian method in rejecting an overall scheme of meaning in favour of a specific and concrete historical narrative. This narrative begins with the class divisions of Victorian society. It ends with two animal species, locked in a biological relationship of predation which, as opposed to a social one of exploitation, cannot be changed. The Morlocks have to feed on the Eloi because there is nothing else for them to eat; the Eloi have to be herded by the Morlocks because they will starve on their own. The two key metaphors used to describe the two species are cattle and ants. The Eloi, the Morlocks’ cattle, have lost all that makes us human: intelligence, civilization, choice. They are no more than domesticated animals whose human-like appearance only underscores their biological degradation. ‘Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same’ (321). The Morlocks, on the other hand, are not the cruel slave-drivers that they are made out to be in the deplorable cinematic versions of The Time Machine that completely miss the subtlety and daring of Wells’ text. They are industrious and instinctual creatures that breed the descendants of their erstwhile masters with no more schadenfreude than the ants that breed aphids. The social and ethical concepts of slavery or cannibalism are as inappropriate to their relation as they are to the relation of any mutually adapted predator and prey. The Eloi and the Morlocks are prisoners of their biological makeup and therefore beyond ethics. The Traveller is revolted by the spidery Morlocks but he is clear-headed enough to regard this revulsion as a mere biological quirk like the disgust some people feel toward slugs or worms. He neither judges the Morlocks nor dreams of liberating the Eloi. Since ‘the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone’ only the biological imperatives of survival remain for both species and the only way for them to survive is through mutual dependence (311).

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The horror of their situation lies precisely in the fact that they can no longer experience it as horror. This is emphasized by the fact that both species retain some vestiges of human-like behaviour that initially mislead the Traveller into trying to interpret their world in social terms. The Eloi are pretty, wear clothes made for them by the Morlocks, and have a language, though an extraordinary primitive one, like the babble of 5-year-olds. The Morlocks live among the still-functioning machines built by the extinct humans and operate them, after a fashion. But having spent time with the Eloi the Traveller realizes that he is dealing with human-like animals, incapable of moral choice. His fondness for the pretty childlike Weena does not prevent him from observing: ‘she always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was . . .’ (312). And as for the Morlocks, he comes to see their manual dexterity as a mere instinct: ‘They did it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities have impressed it on the organism’ (308). The fact that both species do not understand fire, running away from it in panic or blundering into the conflagration, is an index of their abandonment of humanity. Fire is the first human invention and had been used even by our evolutionary cousins, Home erectus and Homo neanderthalensis; the fact that was known to Wells. Portraying Weena as a moth who ‘would have cast herself into [the fire] had I not restrained her’ and Morlocks as dug-up moles blindly groping under the red sky, is a strategy to disable the reader’s automatic responses of moral sympathy and antipathy based on nothing more than the Eloi’s superficial morphological resemblance to humanity (318). There is nobody to excoriate as a villain or to pity as a victim in the future world because there literally is nobody, or at least nobody conscious and responsible. A piece of bloody meat on the aluminium table in the Morlocks’ lair is not evidence of crime but only of hunger. ‘I grieved to think how brief the dream of humanity’s intellect had been. It had committed suicide’ (322). ‘Humanity’s intellect’ had committed suicide precisely by trying to abandon the contingency and temporality of history in favour of the stasis of utopia. Sometime in the past, according to the Traveller’s last hypothesis, humanity ‘had set itself steadfastly toward comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword; it had attained its hopes – to come to this at last . . . This perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection – absolute permanency’ (322–3). It had come to ‘this’ – the world of nature adapting itself to the discarded heritage of civilization; animal species creeping into abandoned palaces and workshops like a hermit crab creeping into an abandoned mollusc shell. And yet those species are our descendants, linked to us by the unbroken chain of generations, just as we are the direct descendants of other animals. The Traveller ‘is confronted with the future in much the same way the Romantic poet finds himself confronted with the inhospitable rockface of

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nature: a mute, gigantic, threatening and absolutely incommunicable presence, about which one can only speculate . . .’ (McConnell 83). Clothes, buildings and machines are vestiges of this world’s descent from our own, signatures of its unique and irreversible history. The embedded narrative of the year 802,701 AD is not an allegory but an extrapolation, oriented not along the syntagmatic axis of correspondence but rather along the paradigmatic axis of descent. Its critique of the Victorian class system lies precisely in its reliance on the evolutionary theory, which reveals both the contingency of social divisions and their heavy biological toll. Since evolution is not ‘a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind’, it can amplify any human mistake and render it irreversible. If the deterministic chronotope of time travel is underpinned by the cultural paratext of evolution-by-design, the cautionary tale of the Eloi and the Morlocks is rooted in the contingent timeshape of Darwinism. But in the case of the embedded story the influence can be located with a greater precision in a specific text, the celebrated essay ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893– 1894) by Wells’ mentor, T. H. Huxley. Huxley, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, was one of the last and most influential defenders of Darwinism against the rising tide of the ‘non-Darwinian revolution’. Huxley’s ideas were a profound influence on his student in the Normal School of Science, H. G. Wells, who ‘considered his study of Darwinian biology under T. H. Huxley to be the foundation of his world view’ (Hughes 48). Wells’ early view of evolution as ‘the aimless torture in creation’ is largely shaped by Huxley’s, which in turn derives from Darwin’s own moral qualms regarding the implications of his theory. In 1860 Darwin wrote to Asa Gray: ‘I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world’ (1993, 124). He goes on to give examples of pain and suffering in the animal world, produced by the blind watchmaker of natural selection who clumsily twists flesh and blood into more or less adapted forms regardless of the price to the individual. This was a central issue in the debates between evolution-by-natural-selection and evolution-by-design. Nobody could deny the Tennysonian nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. But if there was an underlying design to history the unmitigated misery of the animal world could be recuperated in some overarching utopia of progress, improvement, or natural harmony, much as the Christian myth recuperates the suffering of the fallen humanity through the notion of the divine providence. On the other hand, if history was truly contingent, then the torture was aimless, meaningless and endless. The first alternative was widely accepted, while the second had few defendants. But the notion of progress had an unexpected corollary, which was fully developed in the depredations of the misnamed Social Darwinism. If the design of nature is to be a model for society and nature is cruel, then cruelty becomes a positive virtue.

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Huxley was keenly aware of the dangers of Social Darwinism. He rejected the belief that ethics is ‘applied Natural History’ (74) but did not reject Darwinism proper. On the contrary, he accepted the Darwinian continuity between ‘the State of Nature’ and ‘the State of Art’ (civilization), whose corollary is that the human species has been shaped by natural selection. But Huxley did not see the past as determining the present and the future. Since nature evinces no signs of any design, progressive or regressive, malevolent or benevolent, civilization cannot look to it for guidance. True evolutionary ethics is the ethics of freedom, unconstrained by preordained ends: ‘Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call the good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before’ (Huxley 79–80). The rhetoric of Huxley’s essay echoes its theme. Its master-trope is metonymy, based on temporal continuity. Huxley rewrites static oppositions, such as nature and civilization, human and animal, good and evil, as the end-points of a dynamic temporal process. His trope of the garden is a perfect illustration of the metonymic inscription of historical contingency. A garden is a slice of wilderness that is tended and cultivated until it becomes its opposite. If neglected, it sinks into wilderness again. But there is no particular moment in time in which the continuity between cultivation and nature is broken by a sharp divide. And yet, garden and wilderness are perceived as a neat and balanced opposition. ‘Sliced’ at a point in time, a random process presents the appearance of a design. The garden becomes an image of the continuum of evolutionary transformations that by ‘imperceptible gradations’ (Darwin’s favourite expression) links nature and culture. Civilization develops out of nature, and yet it opposes nature: and if it is argued that this is ‘logically absurd, I am sorry for logic, because, as we have seen, the fact is so’ (Huxley 11). In The Time Machine, the tropological garden of Huxley becomes the ‘long neglected and yet weedless garden’ of the future, in which the temporal metonymy of evolution underlies the spatial opposition of the diurnal Eloi and the nocturnal Morlocks (283). And the Traveller’s final plunge into an even further futurity, undaunted by his encounter with humanity’s pitiful descendants, resonates with Huxley’s stoicism in the face of time and history: ‘we should cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life’ and simply go on, ‘cherishing the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil’ (Huxley 86).

The Ends of Time As the Time Traveller pushes forward through time he encounters more and more devolved descendants of humanity that fan out into a variety of bizarre forms to fill the ecological niches left empty by the depredations of the extinct

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Homo sapiens. Besides the already mentioned gray kangaroo-like creature, he meets a huge white butterfly crying out in a desolate voice; giant slow-moving crablike monsters; and the ultimate horror, ‘a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about’ (326). This ‘round thing’ echoes both the Martians of The War of the Worlds, who are the descendants of human-like ancestors, and Wells’ 1893 essay ‘The Man of the Year Million’ that charts a possible course of human evolution toward a creature like a giant braincase with manipulative appendages. The aliens are ourselves. But while the Martians and the Man of the Year Million retain human-like sentience, the creatures of Earth’s twilight in The Time Machine are devolved animals. The beastly round thing, the gray kangaroo, the butterfly and the crabs are additional nails in the coffin of the suicidal humanity. It seems that the last lingering sections of the Traveller’s journey are merely a reiteration of the Eloi and the Morlocks narrative: the garden of civilization sinking into utter ruin until even the outlines of its flowerbeds are erased by the relentless passage of time. There is, however, a subtle shift of emphasis in these last sections that gives them their shivery powers. The Traveller, so intellectually and physically active in his encounters with Eloi and Morlocks, becomes an observer, passively watching the darkening Earth as it is sinking into the cold embrace of the entropic death of the Sun. And it is these landscapes rendered with a voluptuous intensity that become the artistic focus of the last chapter of the Traveller’s narrative, supplanting the intellectual discussions of the embedding narrative and the suspense and adventures of his sojourn in 802,701. The fin-de-siècle, much like our own time, believed that the end was nigh. Biological degeneration, social decay and cosmic catastrophe were the favourite bogeymen of the period, inspiring social scientists, fantasy writers and party goers. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a witty exchange at a West End dinner epitomizes the hothouse atmosphere of this fashionable apocalypse: ‘Of course it is true, Lord Henry. If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however, that that would alter you much. Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.’ ‘Fin de siècle,’ murmured Lord Henry. ‘Fin du globe,’ answered his hostess. ‘I wish it were fin du globe,’ said Dorian with a sigh. ‘Life is a great disappointment.’ (Wilde 477) Fin du globe is coming sooner to Dorian than he expects; Wilde knew that bogeymen are no less real for being fashionable. But what is notable about this

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exchange is that the End Times pop up in the context of a discussion of the war of the sexes rather than of the war of Gog and Magog. The apocalyptic mindset, as Eugen Weber reminds us, is endemic in Western culture: a 1950 index of apocalyptic predictions lists ten dates between 1260 and 1834 when the world was supposed to end with the Second Coming and ‘any diligent researcher could easily add ten hundred more’ (Weber 28). The difference between the fin-de-siècle and what came before and after was that the 1890s’ inconvenient truth was couched in the language not of the Book of Revelation, prophecies of Nostradamus, or the Mayan calendar, but of science. The greatest apocalyptic bestseller of the age was Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) that railed against urbanities, Impressionist painters, homosexuals and New Women not because they offended God but because they transgressed against the laws of nature. It is not, of course, that the good, old-fashioned, fire-and-brimstone apocalypse had disappeared; the seeds for the most successful Christian apocalyptic movement of our time, the Rapture theology (of which more in the last chapter) were sown at the end of the nineteenth century. But uniquely in the history of the West’s fear of, and longing for, the ‘fin du globe’, it was physics, cosmology and biology rather than the Bible that provided the vocabulary for apocalyptic dread and millenarian hope. Biology’s contribution was precisely the non-Darwinian backlash, which substituted the ladder of deterministic progress for the tree of contingent growth, Darwin’s own preferred metaphor for evolution. One can just as easily fall off a ladder as climb up on it and so the idea of evolution going ‘backward’ became extremely popular in spite of Huxley’s attempts to introduce a more subtle understanding of adaptation. However, this ‘backward’ evolution is not what happens in the embedded narrative of The Time Machine; humanity’s descendants do not backslide but rather adapt to the new environment created by the mistakes of the past. Despite the common misreading of The Time Machine in terms of the fin-de-siècle notion of degeneration (see, for example, Suvin and Philmus), the novel, or at least its contingency chronotope, actually undermines this notion. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of the fin du globe is unmistakable in the last section but it has less to do with the biological concept of extinction than it does with the physical concept of entropy. The end is not just the end of humanity, which has already occurred millions of years ago, and not just the end of history; it is the end of time itself. The apocalyptic atmosphere of the last sections of the Traveller’s journey is inspired not by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a closed system will increase in time. The 1852 essay by William Thomson Kelvin ‘On the Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy’ popularized the concept of entropy among the Victorian literati and linked it to the End Times: ‘Within a finite period of time past the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man . . .’ (quoted in Kern 104). Human history

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becomes a hiatus, a limited duration between the catastrophes of the past and the future. Human time is squeezed between the bookends of apocalyptic no-time. Chapter 11 of The Time Machine dramatizes this durational time in its very structure: discourse time slows down, is stretched and inflated by long static descriptions of the last beach under the dying sun: So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen. (329) This is the universal Heart of Darkness, rivalling Conrad’s slow hypnotic journey down the river and back into prehistory. Wells’ apocalypse comes neither with a bang nor with a whimper but with the time itself slowing down, first to a crawl and then to a stop. The apocalyptic time is neither the spatial matrix of determinism nor the future-oriented rush of contingency. Rather, it is a timeshape of duration, in which the end is known but postponed; desired for its sublimity but feared for its ferocity. The apocalyptic time is the interval between the fin-de-siècle and fin du globe. In The Inhuman Lyotard resurrects the death of the sun as an emblem for the End Times. But if Kelvin, ignorant of radioactivity, calculated it as happening within some millions of years, we now know that the sun is not going to turn into a red dwarf for several billions of years at least, which seemingly makes the issue irrelevant. Surely, whoever is around 5 billion years from now will either be able to take care of themselves or (if only lichens and cockroaches survive) will not even notice. And yet Lyotard writes that the death of the sun ‘in my view, is the sole serious question to face humanity today. In comparison everything else seems insignificant’ (1988, 9). It is easy to dismiss this as an affectation. But it is also possible to read the death of the sun as shorthand for the apocalyptic cataclysm, in which time itself is annihilated. The sun is the first clock since most non-technological cultures have measured time by the movement of the sun and the stars. To imagine the sun standing still or going out, as it does in The Time Machine, is to tap into the

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most fundamental fear of the End Times as the end-of-time; of apocalypse not as a prelude to the millennium but as a stark cessation of temporality. The death of the sun functions for Lyotard as a visceral marker of death; not just individual but collective and ontological death, the death of thought itself: ‘In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one to toll the death knell or to hear it’ (1988, 9). The despair that seizes the Traveller on the last beach is precisely the realization that thought is limited by, and dependent on, time. And time, having had a beginning, must have an end. This realization is not necessarily a counsel of despair. While envisioning the inevitable triumph of entropy, T. H. Huxley still urges civilization to go on. The Traveller ventures into time again and never comes back, leaving the frame narrator mulling over tantalizing possibilities and unanswered questions. But the apocalyptic timeshape can also power the addiction to the catastrophic sublime, the nihilistic aesthetics of violence and destruction. Worse even that that, it may become a collective longing for the end of time, a political or religious programme of building an eternal City of Light on the ruins of temporality. The three chronotopes of The Time Machine are snapshots of the text’s present and prefigurations of its future. The Time Traveller bequeaths to his generic descendants the time-travel loop, the vista of evolutionary contingency and the apocalyptic intoxication of the End Times. And each of his many offspring chooses the part of the patrimony that suits their beliefs, obsessions, or fears.

The Traveller’s Children Wells’ novel has become the master intertext of postmodern temporal SF. In each following chapter we will encounter its shadows and reflections, sometimes overt, sometimes hidden and elusive. But to conclude my discussion of the novel’s heterogeneous ontological embedding and its implications for the temporal imagination of postmodernity I will briefly discuss three texts that are deliberately written as sequels to The Time Machine. Each of them chooses one chronotope of the three of Wells’ novel, thus inevitably reducing the semantic and structural richness of the original. But precisely because of this simplification they clearly demonstrate the contemporary cultural and ideological implications of determinism, contingency and apocalypse. While not measuring up to the greatness of their progenitor, the Traveller’s children will nevertheless guide us forward, into the twenty-first century SF. Even setting aside the largely unsuccessful screen versions of The Time Machine (all of them insisting on making Weena the animal into Weena the pet) there have been several literary sequels to the novel.5 Interesting examples include K. W. Jeter’s Morlock Night (1979), in which the Morlocks invade Victorian

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London, and Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine (1976), which blends The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Neither, however, involves any sustained exploration of temporality. But the three texts I will discuss below do. ‘The Hertford Manuscript’ (1976) by Richard Cowper is a deceptively simple novella, in which the Traveller (named as Robert James Pensley) travels back to seventeenth-century London. Stranded by a broken crystal rod in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, he successfully finds a master craftsman to make a new crystal for him but catches the plague and dies. Like The Time Machine, the novella is a story within a story. The diary of Pensley is embedded in the first-person narrative of a modern-day Englishman who receives the Hertford manuscript as an heirloom from his great-aunt Victoria who had personally known both H. G. Wells and T. H. Huxley. The novella is deliberately low-key. As opposed to many time-travel narratives that revel in the exotic scenes of the distant past, there is little sense of strangeness or wonder in ‘The Hertford Manuscript’. In fact, what is stressed is precisely the continuity between the past and the present. Pensley finds no difficulty blending into seventeenth-century London: his speech, his manners, even his clothes are quite acceptable to the world 230 years into his past. And the continuity is projected forward, into the novella’s present. The narrator’s 93-year-old aunt who reminisces about her would-be liaison with Wells reinforces the sense of history as an unbroken whole, a frozen ‘block’ of time that constitutes what the Annales school of French historiography called longue durée, the long present of geographical cohesion and long-term cultural trends. But for Pensley, the longue durée turns into a trap. The stasis of history is so powerful that no individual action can disturb its stability. Pensley alone knows that the plague is caused by rats’ fleas and tries unsuccessfully to warn others, considering himself to be out of danger because he keeps away from rats. But his knowledge and precautions are of no avail. Pensley falls ill with the plague and in additional ironic twist, almost recovers, only to die finally of ‘the black flux’, which may, or may not, be the same disease. The reassuring familiarity of history turns out to be the repetition of the same cruel and inescapable pattern of mortality. The long present devours both the past and the future. The frame narrator clearly articulates the lesson of Pensley’s manuscript. Reluctant to accept its genuineness despite all the proofs he muses on the human predicament in the deterministic universe: I feel that I am forever condemned to pace the circumference of a circle which turns out to be not a circle at all but a spiral – my point of arrival is never the same as my point of departure. For to accept the Hertford Manuscript at its face value must surely mean accepting a concept in which Time is both predetermined and yet infinite, an endless snake with its tail in its own mouth, a cosmos in which the Past and the Future coexist and will continue to do so for all Eternity. (Cowper 51)

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The reassuring pastiche of Wells’ style, the genealogical and cultural continuity of the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the familiarity of London’s cityscapes are the narrative means whose mildness underscores the nightmarish quality of their end. The sting in the novella’s tail is all the greater because of its low-key tone. No surprise that the indomitable great-aunt Victoria who had successfully fought against overwhelming odds in her youth is infected with lassitude and fatalism after discovering the manuscript. Pensley’s fate is an object lesson in the futility of human effort in the deterministic universe: he dies, ‘most horribly, on a straw pallet in a charity hospital . . . clutching in his stiffening fingers a fragment of polished rock crystal which he had staked his life to obtain, only to lose the wager at the very moment when he must surely have believed that he had won . . .’ (Cowper 51–2). There is no overt chronoclasm in the novella, despite the fact that Pensley is free with nineteenth-century money and artifacts, paying the craftsman who fashions a substitute crystal for him with an elaborate Victorian watch. The time loop is a narrative technique to inscribe the timeshape of determinism. But ‘The Hertford Manuscript’ does not need this technique because it achieves the same effect by skilfully manipulating continuity and familiarity. What cruder versions of time travel such as the Terminator cinematic franchise do with mindboggling causal contortions, ‘The Hertford Manuscript’ does simply, elegantly and devastatingly. It creates the images of time as jail and of humanity as a weary prisoner trudging along the circular track of eternity. In 1995, to celebrate the centenary of The Time Machine, the estate of H. G. Wells approved the publication of a sequel by Stephen Baxter called The Time Ships. It is the only sequel with such an official stamp of approval. Consequently, it is also the most ambitious attempt to ‘update’ Wells’ masterpiece, exceeding 500 pages and romping over the entire history of not only our universe but a multitude of alternative ones. While Wells managed to squeeze three timeshapes into his slender book, Baxter limits himself to only one, the timeshape of contingency; but he does it with flair. What the novel lacks in depth and precision, it makes up in scope. In Time Ships the Traveller returns to 802,701 to save Weena, only to find out that the future is not what it used to be. The Earth is plunged into eternal darkness and the Sun is surrounded by a giant shell, a Dyson sphere, populated by the highly intelligent and vegetarian Morlocks who keep away from the warlike Eloi. Flabbergasted by this turn of events, the Traveller is told by a wise Morlock Nebogipfel (the name of a character from ‘The Chronic Argonauts’) that the publication of his own narrative of the future – Wells’ novel – has changed the course of history and prevented the devolution of humanity. From this point on, chronoclasms pile up thick and fast. Accompanied by Nebogipfel, the Traveller attempts to persuade his younger self not to invent time travel, only to be whisked away into 1938 where World War I is being waged in time rather than in space; descends into Palaeocene; helps found a human

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colony before humanity evolves; consorts with godlike Constructors millions of years into the future; provides himself with the blueprints and fuel for the Time Machine; saves Weena, after all; starts teaching the Eloi to grow their own food . . . While eye-popping at first, this cat’s cradle of time and causality eventually gets tiresome, so much so that one is rather relieved when the Traveller finally disappears into the Morlocks’ underworld, though by this time the plot has become so convoluted that one does not know whether the ending is tragic or comic and moreover, does not care. Nevertheless, the novel is more than the sum of its parts. While each of the Traveller’s adventures is rather a cliché (and deliberately so, since the novel is intended as a metafictional homage to the British tradition of the scientific romance), their entirety is framed within an elaborate and complex chronotope of contingency. Baxter utilizes the concept of multiverse borrowed from quantum theory (discussed at greater length in Chapter 3). This concept basically states that there is an infinite number of possible universes coexisting in a higher-dimensional continuum and that any intervention in the time stream splits off another universe. In Time Ships the Traveller glimpses the multiverse as an infinite plane, which neutralizes chronoclasms because it contains everything that can possibly exist, ‘an infinite regression, without beginning – and without paradox’ (Baxter 477). Of course, a multiverse is impossible to represent and Baxter’s attempts at doing so slide into bathos – but this is precisely the point. The romping, freewheeling, Monty-Python-like atmosphere of Time Ships differs both from the enigmatic elusiveness of Wells’ original and from the quiet claustrophobia of ‘The Hertford Manuscript’. But in its own zany way, it offers the sense of freedom and possibility lacking in both. Baxter’s omnivorous intertextuality, referencing Wells’ other novels, Golden Age American SF, Back to the Future movies and seemingly everything else under the Sun (or around it, as the case may be) creates a stylistic equivalent of the novel’s chronotope: the totality of everything. But this ‘everything’ is not a mere postmodern soup of simulacra; it is generated by, and dependent upon, human agency. The multiverse is a totality of our choices, in which every human action, no matter how outwardly insignificant, creates a new universe. Such a chronotope can only be represented as sublime or as ridiculous. Baxter wisely chooses the ridiculous, in effect admitting the limitations of his own skill. And yet the consequences of this authorial modesty are quite unexpected: Baxter’s over-the-top, baggy-monster encyclopaedia of SF clichés edges close to the very sublime it renounces. Just like the Traveller’s impulsive or insignificant choices are amplified into whole new histories, the author’s choice of pulp fiction expands into a glimpse of the grandeur of historical contingency freed from the shackles of determinism. Ronald Wright’s 1997 A Scientific Romance is as self-consciously intertextual as Time Ships. But if the intertext of Baxter’s novel is the generic tradition of pulp SF, Wright’s novel is a somewhat precious look back at the fin-de-siècle,

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referencing not only Wells and his milieu but more obscure apocalyptic fantasies of the time, such as M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) and Richard Jeffries’ After London (1885). Wright’s protagonist David Lambert is a scholar of the period who finds H. G. Wells’ unknown letter from 1945, in which the aged writer confesses that the Time Traveller is based on a woman physicist who had in fact built a time machine and, escaping her unhappy affair with Wells himself, travelled to 1999. Lambert, tormented by memories of his own love affair gone sour and facing death from a mutant version of the mad cow disease, finds the time machine sans the traveller and jumps 500 years into the future. There he discovers subtropical England created by global warming, deserted London overgrown by mangroves, and a primitive settlement of black-skinned Scotsmen far in the Highlands who have reverted to the tribal lifestyle of the legendary Macbeth. There are more allusions in the novel than there are adventures. Starting with its pastiche title, the novel becomes a veritable compilation of references, ranging across the entire history of English literature. Lambert describes his obsession with the Victorian period as ‘a mere toe in the oceans of the past’ (17). Eventually these oceans rise just like the sea-levels of subtropical England and drown the plot of the novel in the flood of quotations. If Time Ships suffers from too much action, A Scientific Romance is crippled by too little. But eventually we realize that Lambert’s immersion in the past is precisely what constitutes the novel’s vision of the future. If the shades of Shakespeare, and George Herbert, and Tennyson and Ovid hover over the desolate England, it is because ‘Time the devourer’ has finally been vanquished (147). History has died into apocalypse. The lush descriptions of abandoned cities sinking into the jungle; the slowdown of action; the voluptuous melancholy – all these constitute the secular aesthetics of apocalypse, adumbrated in the last chapter of The Time Machine, developed by Shiel and Jeffries and eventually taken over by the special-effects industry of the disaster movie. It is the aesthetics of prolonged duration, in which time reluctantly crawls towards its eventual and inevitable end. As opposed to religious and ideological millennialism there is no triumphal delight in the violence and destruction visited upon the enemy. But the renunciation of action, the willing surrender to fate, and the intoxication of despair are a sort of millennial seduction in themselves, not as overt as religious war but equally insidious. At some point, realizing that he is confronted with the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe, Lambert tries to figure out what could – or should – have been done differently: ‘But when do you suppose an end like this became inevitable? I can’t help playing “What If” a lot . . .’ (327). But the more he pushes back the beginning of an end – was it the fall of the Berlin Wall? The end of World War II? The population explosion? – the more he tends to accept that it had always been inevitable, that the ship of history could have never been steered away from the disaster. The ‘What If’ of apocalypse is

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profoundly different from the ‘What If’ of contingency, for while the latter shows the roads not taken and the destinations not reached, the former reveals that all roads lead to the same dead-end. And eventually Lambert learns to love the inevitability of it. Realizing that a technological civilization will never arise again on a depleted planet with a minuscule population, he rejoices in the vision of Nature rid of human presumptions and ambitions: Still, let us keep the bald ape’s reputation in perspective. Even if our peculiar gifts were ultimately fatal, nature will make the best of the mess we’ve left behind. She’ll make a new creation . . . The shrunken roll of creatures in our wake will ramify and replenish the earth. Time will exalt new rulers of the planet . . . (347) Extinction becomes a new utopia, just as it does in the recently published The World Without Us (2007) by Alan Weisman: a green eschatology, which revels in imagining the extinction of the most interesting mammal evolution has produced so far. But in fact, dreams of self-extinction do not indicate a genuine escape from humanism but rather the revival of its most pernicious incarnation, the apocalyptic/millenarian worldview that invites violence and destruction to reach the safe haven of ‘stationary duration, an immobilized Possible, a counterfeit of the eternal present’ (Cioran 104). Lambert ends his lament for himself and the world (in that order) with a quote from Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’, in which the immortal protagonist ‘withers’ slowly ‘at the quiet limit of the world’ (350). The mythical Tithonus longs for death to deliver him from his eternal senescence; Lambert longs for the death of history to deliver him from the pain and finitude of being human. But both linger in the slow twilight of the Tribulations, which is the closest approximation to the timeless millennium narrative can provide. The chronotope of A Scientific Romance exhibits neither the quiet claustrophobia of ‘The Hertford Manuscript’ nor the exuberant complexity of Time Ships. Its simple linearity emphasizes duration rather than order. It lightly brushes against the possibility of chronoclasm (Lambert is about to embark on a journey into the past in order to change it) but quickly dismisses it; Lambert knows that his journey is futile. The past cannot be changed but neither can the future. Apocalypse undermines agency just as it demolishes temporality. The death of time can only be accomplished through the murder of history. The heterogeneous ontological embedding of The Time Machine foreshadows the main narrative chronotopes of postmodern SF, just as it reflects the competing timeshapes of modernity. And in the next three chapters I am going to trace the evolution of these chronotopes, while determinism, contingency and apocalypse strive to define the postmodern perception of time.

Chapter 2

Strangled by the Time Loop: Paradoxes of Determinism

In the course of a life dedicated to letters and (at times) a metaphysical perplexity, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, in which I myself do not believe, but which regularly visits me at night and in the weary twilight with the illusory force of an axiom. Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time

The Ouroboros World In Robert Heinlein’s story ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ (1959) the time-travelling, sex-changing protagonist and narrator discovers s/he is his own mother, father, lover, and child. Stanislaw Lem, who admired Heinlein’s conceit, produced his own version of it in The Star Diaries (1971). In ‘The Seventh Voyage’ his hapless protagonist Ijon Tichy is caught in a time storm and splits into Sunday, Monday and so on selves, all violently arguing and beating each other up. The narrator of this story – a sort of sliding point of view that consecutively inhabits each of the quarrelsome selves –concedes ruefully that ‘a man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud’ (Lem 1971, 19). Heinlein’s and Lem’s stories can be seen as allegories of the postmodern subjectivity. The splintering of the temporal continuity of the self in time-travel narratives parallels the postmodern ‘death’ of the subject – the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual – and the accompanying stress . . . on the decentring of that formerly centred subject of psyche’ (Jameson 1991, 45). But what Heinlein’s story suggests is that the ‘end of the autonomous bourgeois . . . individual’ is not quite the ‘death of the subject’. A new modality of subjectivity arises on the ruins of the old one, glued together by space rather than time. The protagonist of ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ who in his/her female phase calls herself Jane possesses an identity that stems not from the temporal continuity of memory or self-representation but from its connection to a place.

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The entire story unfolds in a bar named ‘Pop’s Place’ where the later version of ‘Jane’ meets his/her younger self, listens to his/her tale of woe, recruits him/ her into the Temporal Service and helps him/her conceive him/herself. ‘Pop’s Place’ is where this strange act of self-creation ex nihilo becomes embedded in the minimal temporal loop that keeps all the fragments of ‘Jane’ together. There is no Derridean ‘trace’ of memory here, since all the subject’s parts are present, instantly and fully, in one eternal moment of spacetime. Nothing is deferred; nothing is lost; and yet there is no psychological coherence. If the Time Traveller compares the four-dimensional subject to a stack of photographs taken at various points of his/her life, the subject of ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ is the stack reshuffled at random and placed in a folder. This new spatial subject only superficially resembles the old temporal one. It has contiguity but no continuity; it acts but does not choose; it has experiences but no memory or anticipation. And so it generates a new form of narrative only superficially resembling the old one. Mark Currie describes what he calls ‘the narratological shipwreck: the collision of the past and the present after which the narration is no longer possible’ (123). ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ seems to contradict this assertion; it is a narrative and on the face of it, a fairly conventional one: a bar story, an encounter with a sting in its tail. But in fact it surmounts the narratological shipwreck by a narratological nuclear war. It blows the traditional narration to smithereens and assembles a new one by collapsing the two levels of narrative, the diegetic (story) and the extradiegetic (discourse). The diegetic level (which Genette calls ‘histoire’ and Rimmon-Kenan ‘story’) is the level of the text’s projected fictional world where the events unfold. The extradiegetic level is the level of discourse (Genette’s recit) concerned with the actual act of narration. ‘Narration is always at a higher narrative level than the story it narrates’ (Rimmon-Kenan 92).1 ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ is narrated in the first person by the later version of ‘Jane’ who interact with his/her younger self. In this interaction the two avatars of ‘Jane’ are like the two narrative selves in an ordinary first-person retrospective narrative, such as David Copperfield or Jane Eyre. The older narrating self and the younger narrated self are the same person but because of their separation in time they function as two semi-autonomous textual entities. Their relationship is skewed: the older self has access to the younger self but not the other way round. Most often, this relationship is presented through focalization. Focalization in narratology signifies a technique whereby the narrator describes the action from the perspective of another character. The distinction between narrator and focalizer is the distinction between the voice that speaks and the eye that sees (Rimmon-Kenan 72–5). The older self focalizes through the younger self, as happens in David Copperfield where the mature David looks at the world through the eyes of his infant avatar but verbalizes his childhood thoughts and feelings in the language of an adult.

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But in a retrospective first-person narrative the two selves interact on the extradiegetic level, the level of discourse. In Heinlein’s story they interact on the diegetic level. Within the time-loop, the diegetic and extradiegetic levels are conflated. Heinlein’s seemingly ‘normal’ narrative structure hides a deeper and more disturbing subversion that the one practised by the mainstream postmodern fictions, whose baroque temporalities Brian Richardson classifies as ‘circular’, ‘antinomic’ (reversed) and ‘dual or multiple’ (49–51). But these temporalities are purely discursive; the texts Richardson analyses do not, as a rule, purport to create a coherent fictional world. They are parodies or send-offs of realistic fiction and their narrative poetics ‘can only be understood by reference to the mimetic aesthetic [they] flout’ (Richardson 57). ‘In such texts, the discourse [the extradiegetic level] serves to erase the story [the diegetic level]’ (Richardson 52). In Heinlein, on the contrary, the story serves to erase the discourse. The narrative is perfectly comprehensible and linearly structured but only because the world in which it takes place is impossible. It is impossible not because it is unrealistic but because it is unrepresentable. Representation is based on the caesura, temporal as well as ontological, between the signifier and the signified. Language comes before or after the object it names and meaning resides in this gap between what Lacan would call the Real and the Symbolic. But in ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ the gap is closed; objects and names are the same. ‘Jane’s’ nickname of ‘the Unwed Mother’ is initially explained by the fact that s/he writes an agony-aunt column; but in fact, an Unwed Mother is precisely what s/he is. The name ‘Pop’s Place’ is not a clumsy piece of symbolism but the bar’s function because this is where the self-fathered (and mothered) subject achieves his/her self-creation. Where there is no temporal causality, representation suffers a ‘shipwreck’. The world of Heinlein’s story has no names but only things. And yet, because this is a fictional world, projected by a fictional text, created in/through representation, it undermines the conditions of its own existence. The circular causality of ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ is symbolized by the ring ‘Jane’ wears with an image of ‘The Worm Ouroboros . . . the World Snake that eats its own tail, forever without end. A symbol of the Great Paradox’ (Heinlein 127). The traditional meaning of Ouroboros, going back to Plato and the Gnostics, is of the undivided unity of All, the primordial cosmic entity without differentiation that had preceded the fall into the divisions of time, space and individuality. The ‘Great Paradox’ of time travel does not stem from the fact that it traces the postmodern fragmentation of the unified world picture. Just the opposite: it inscribes the desire, also endemic to postmodernity, to go back to this unity, to recapture, violently if necessary, the ‘constant framework’ of myth (Lyotard 1988, 67). But precisely because it literalizes the Ouroboros world of mythical unity, time travel generates the unavoidable chronoclasms that defy the narrativity and historicity of the subject. Within the framework of

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a reconstructed myth, the ‘decentring’ of the bourgeois monad results from the desire to re-centre it. The narrative fragmentation of the subject results from the cessation of temporal flux. Ursula Heise describes this process: ‘Where past and present are structured like the future there is no room for human observers, who in the process of observation would be constantly fractured into multiple versions of themselves’ (73). But for her the paradoxes of postmodernism derive from its subversive, indeed revolutionary, denial of history, its radical breakthrough into a post-temporal novum, so that there is ‘something akin to paradox in the attempt to account historically for a culture that resists the concept of history’ (ibid.). But in fact, resisting ‘the concept of history’ often results in the resurrection of myth, as Heise’s own examples of postmodern fictions clearly demonstrate. When there is no sense of direction, going forward and going back are equivalent. But instead of being loosened and shaken off, history becomes a confining loop of repetition. The subject loses its coherence in the process of trying to regain it. The chronoclasm is not merely a subversion of realistic chronology but a new temporal logic, which collapses the narrated and the narrating, the diegetic and the extradiegetic, story and discourse. Its paradoxes are generated by the fact that the text does not ‘project’ or ‘refer to’ a fictional world, as fictional texts do in the theories of Pavel and Dolezel. The text is the world; and it is a world without temporality, without movement and therefore without agency. If all art aspires to the condition of music, time travel is a narrative that aspires to the condition of still life. In his classical essay ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’ Joseph Frank discusses the ‘spatialization of form in a [modernist] novel’ (62). Modernist writers, according to him, aspired to create works that would be perceivable in a single instant as a unified a-temporal whole. Joyce’s unorthodox narrative techniques were based on ‘the assumption that a unified spatial apprehension of his work would ultimately be possible’ (64). But since narrative is temporal ‘it is impossible to approach this simultaneity of perception except by breaking up temporal sequence’ (61). Narrative space is the ruin of narrative time. The time-travel chronotope fits Frank’s description even better than the modernist chronotopes he analyses because most of them are predicated on the distortions of temporal perception, confirming McHale’s claim that the artistic dominant of modernism is epistemological, as opposed to the ontological dominant of postmodernism. But chronoclasm generates a world whose narrative articulation translates ‘the temporal flow into spatial forms’ (Moretti 224). The spatial form of chronoclasm is objective, not subjective; ontological, not epistemological; anti-representational, not anti-realistic. Chronoclasm is a narrative technique particularly apt for inscribing the psychic fragmentation of the postmodern subject. But at the same time, it reveals this subject’s dirty secret: s/he is not a rebel against oppressive masternarratives but their obedient slave as s/he trades the limitations of history for

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the stasis of myth. The postmodern subject’s a-temporality is not as a glorious liberation from the confines of chrono-logic but a slavish submission to an alternative logic of deterministic spacetime.

The Love-Life of the Fragment Among the consequences of the fragmentation of the subject Jameson lists the waning of the affect: As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings – which it may be better or more accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard to call ‘intensities’ – are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria . . . (1991, 47) ‘Free-floating’ emotions . . . At the end of ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ ‘Jane’ succumbs to a sort of nebulous melancholy, missing – s/he knows not who. All the significant others in his/her life are him/herself. S/he has never had a relationship with an Other. S/he embodies a Platonic definition of love as described in The Symposium where longing for another person is in fact a longing for the primordial unity of the self, lost when angry Zeus cleaved apart the perfect human being who was double and required no mate. Love is the search for the other half: ‘It is from this distant epoch, then, that we may date the innate love which human beings feel for one another, the love which restores us to our ancient state by attempting to weld two beings into one and to heal the wound which humanity suffered’ (Plato 62). Love here is imaged as a kind of time travel. This longing for the return to the mythical unity of the past has shaped much of the Western tradition of romance from Troubadour poetry to Mills and Boon publishing empire. But if for this tradition restoration of the ‘ancient state’ of plenitude and completeness is only a metaphor, a time-travelling protagonist can actually achieve it. And still, ‘Jane’ is unhappy, longing vaguely for some undefined shadows – the ‘Zombies’ of the title – who are not him/herself. It seems that what troubles the postmodern subject – or rather a postmodern subject such as ‘Jane’ – is not the absence of the self but of the Other. In Lacanian psychoanalysis desire is predicated on lack. One longs for what one does not have and could never have, since subjectivity is constituted precisely by, and through, the absence of the desired object. One could take

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this as a metaphor for the essential temporality of the human condition, since it is time that creates the gap between desire and its satisfaction, between the lover and the beloved, between what we want to be and what we are. Then how can desire be articulated if time stands still? What will this be desire for? The paradoxical subject Jameson describes – a subject without a self – is the product of ‘the waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality’ (1991, 48). Since identity is created through a narrative (re)construction of the subject’s life story, the weaving and unweaving of memory and anticipation, a timeless subject lacks identity. But this is not to say that s/he necessarily lacks structure. If time fails, there is always space to embed the fragments, the ‘intensities’, of individual experience in some semblance of a personhood: ‘We have often been told . . . that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time . . .’ (Jameson 1991, 47). The subjectivity inscribed through the chronotope of time travel is ‘dominated by categories of space’, since within this chronotope time is space, or rather the two are seamlessly conflated into a single changeless whole. Let us look, then, at how love and desire are experienced within the a-temporality of determinism where the past, the present and the future coexist. Though there are many time-travel love stories, from Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970) to Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003), I have chosen to focus on Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return (1975), also known as Somewhere in Time, the title of the 1980 cult film based on the book. Matheson’s short and elegiac novel is a particularly apposite example of the tension between the temporality of desire and the spatiality of determinism; and of the impossibility of affect outside the personal narrative of loss. The protagonist of Somewhere in Time Richard Collier finds out that he is sick with incurable brain cancer. Running away from his career as a scriptwriter in LA, he embarks on a journey to nowhere and ends up in an old hotel near San Diego, soaked in the atmosphere of the 1890s. Hotels are a favourite setting of time-travel stories because of their ‘sedimentation’ of the past, simultaneously intimate and impersonal; they are places where the ‘past . . . like some immense, collective ghost is present . . . beyond all possibility of exorcism’ (Matheson 48). Collier falls in love with a visible embodiment of this past, the picture of a famous actress Elise McKenna taken in 1896. Obsessed with her, Collier reads every scrap of her biography he can lay his hands on and finds out that she died in 1953, an old woman in her eighties, having attended a college party where Collier himself had been as a young man (the novel takes place in 1971). He then becomes convinced he can, and will, travel back to that day in 1896 when Elise had stayed in the same hotel where he is staying now. Paradoxically, what convinces him that time travel is possible is the biographies’ consensus that something had happened to Elise in the hotel which had accounted for her lifelong refusal to

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marry. Therefore, his time travel back to 1896 had already happened. I’ve read those books. Many of them printed decades, even generations ago. What was done to her has already been done. Therefore, I have no choice. I must go back (68). This is a perfect chronoclasm, a snake of causality biting its own tail, but it is also a very psychologically revealing moment. At the moment of weighty emotional and moral choice – for after all, Elise’s life seems blighted by their encounter – Collier is encouraged to act by his conviction that his act is predestined and therefore he has no choice and hence no responsibility for its consequences. While taking away freedom, determinism also relieves one of responsibility. When one wonders what the psychological attraction of a deterministic worldview might be, such moments are particularly illuminating. Collier needs no time machine to go back; all he has to do is to convince himself that time is an illusion; that the past is a ‘place’ where Elise is waiting for him, young and beautiful, despite his memory of the old woman at the party (65). He immerses himself in J. B. Priestley’s Man and Time, which is a veritable encyclopaedia of determinism. He avidly reads scientists and philosophers who deny the phenomenological reality of time: from Newton’s ‘absolute time, which “flows equably without relation to anything external” ’; to Einstein’s claim that ‘time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it’; to Priestley’s notion of Time 2 whose ‘scope includes coexistent past, present, and future’ (71–3). According to Priestly, entering Time 2, ‘we stand apart from chronological time and observe it as a fixed oneness rather than a moving array of moments’ (73). Fortified by philosophy, immersed in the antiquarian ambience of the hotel and fired by his love for Elise, Collier does indeed transport himself back into 1896. But a strange paradox ensues, familiar from The Time Machine. In order to travel in time, Collier has to believe that action is predetermined and choice is an illusion. But having travelled in time he has to act as if the future is openended and choice has consequences. He has to find the means of surviving in the past; he has to woo Elise; and most of all, while knowing that their love is preordained to be tragic, he has to believe it can have a happy ending and act on this belief. He tells her he is writing a love story whose end he does not know and when she expresses amazement at this, he silently rejoices in his own ability to change her carefully laid-out plans for her future (203). While in the past Collier has to live it as if it were the present because his love is oriented toward the future, which he believes he can shape, while knowing that he cannot. Time travel is possible because determinism is true; but if determinism is true, time travel is useless. This narrative knot parallels the emotional knot of Richard’s situation. He falls in love with a dead woman because he knows that he is dying but this love gives him the strength to survive. While in the past,

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Collier’s headaches recede and he begins to dream of a long and happy life with Elise forgetting that he could only reach her because they had no such life together. This creative forgetting transforms Richard’s narrative persona. While in the first part of the novel, taking place in 1971, his style is fragmented, disjointed, filled with gaps and ellipses, in the second, 1896 part, he finds a self-assured, eloquent narrative voice, which focuses on his actions and experiences rather than, as in the first part, emotional intensities and disconnected affects. In writing the story of his love Richard writes himself as a coherent temporal persona, striving to integrate memory and desire. But this persona is based on the repression of the very chronoclasm that makes it possible. The 1896 Richard Collier has to forget the 1971 Richard Collier in order to attain the narrative continuity that will enable his textual survival. Eventually, the grain of me will be so layered over by this period that I will be somebody else, forgetting my source and living only as a man of this period . . . The reason, then, no traveller has ever returned from this bourn is that it is, of natural necessity, a one-way trip. (302) But Richard has to return to his own time because if he does not return he will never have gone in the first place. The ending of the novel is a particularly ironic juxtaposition of the essential contingency of the human being-in-time and the ineluctable matrix of determinism. Everything goes well with Richard in 1896; he has won Elise’s love; his headaches are gone; and best of all, his creative forgetting is well underway. He has become an authentic inhabitant of the past-as-present, having wilfully expunged the memory of the future that ties his self-narrative into an impossible knot. But getting out of bed with Elise he accidentally finds a 1971 penny in his pocket and this tangible evidence of time travel is enough to propel him back into his own time, inexorably returning him to the disintegrating (in every sense of the word) subject that he is. But is his silly forgotten penny a random event or a fixed part of the inescapable pattern? Having returned to 1971 to die, Richard is going over this question again and again, caught between the horror of the accidental and of the inevitable: As I started to walk, all I could think was that because a penny had fallen, unseen, into the lining of the coat and gone back with me, I had lost Elise . . . Again and again, my mind went over that, stumblingly, always without result. I couldn’t understand it. I will never understand it. (310) The logical loop of the chronoclasm, the vicious circle of cause and effect, has become a painful emotional loop that Richard cannot find his way out of. But as opposed to ‘Jane’, he has met his Other. And so he keeps his hard-won coherence as a subject. Even after his return to 1971 his style does not go back

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to the fragmentation of his first entries but retains the powerful narrative drive of his sojourn in 1896. He has written his life-story, giving it beginning, middle and a tragic end, despite the logical impossibility of doing so. The chronoclasm cannot be resolved logically but it can be transcended narratively and hence emotionally. Both Heinlein’s ‘Platonic’ character and the romantic lover Richard Collier are images of the postmodern subject whose temporal fragmentation is ‘glued’ together by the spatiality and simultaneity of the chronotope they inhabit. And what both demonstrate is that the synchronic is not enough. Inhabiting the frozen continuum of the disjointed ‘intensities’, they succumb to anomie at best, despair at worst. Their only salvation lies in creating a simulacrum of temporality, writing their life-story across the chronoclasm. Both are haunted by ‘zombies’ – images of the elusive Other. But at least, for Richard Collier, the zombie has a name and a face.

The Brief History of Ahistoricity If determinism is ruinous in relation to the narrativity of the subject, it is doubly ruinous in relation to the narrativity of history. The nineteenth century is the great age of historical determinism, the age of Schelling, Hegel, Marx and Spengler. All these philosophers discerned beyond the capricious flow of events, personalities, choices and accidents, an immutable and eternal design. The attitude of historical determinism which until recently was the dominant timeshape of historiography, whether it called itself Marxist, Hegelian, materialist, or mystical, rested ‘on the belief that everything is caused to occur as it does by the machinery of history itself – by the impersonal forces of class, race, culture, History, Reason, the Life-Force, Progress, the Spirit of the Age. Given this organization of our lives, which we did not create and cannot alter, it, and it alone, is ultimately responsible for everything’ (Berlin 103). This quote is from Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay ‘Historical Inevitability’, which powerfully critiques the notion that historical events ‘occur in discoverable, uniform, unfaltering patterns’ (102). The essay deconstructs this notion as wishful thinking based on the circular argument that without such patterns history would not be intelligible, and if it were not intelligible, how would historians comprehend it? One might simply respond that history, like the cosmos in general, has no obligation to be intelligible. But in addition, Berlin offers an ethical critique of determinism as sapping will, undermining responsibility and ‘represent[ing] the universe as prison’ (155). It might seem that after the death of master narratives, which decimated the theories of the World Spirit, Racial Essence and Class Struggle, Berlin’s critique has lost its target. But in fact he connects his scathing denunciation of determinism with a no less scathing denunciation of relativism, linking both to the human desire ‘to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience,

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past, present and future, actual, possible and unfulfilled, is symmetrically ordered’ (155). Cultural relativism, according to Berlin, finds this pattern in the cultural matrix, which is just as imprisoning and determining as the ‘objective’ law of historical development. The death of master narratives was not as thorough as the extinction of dinosaurs. Many have survived and propagated. As Niall Ferguson argues in his own bid to supplant the spatial pattern of history with the temporal notion of contingency, until very recently most British and American historians subscribed to some form of determinism, postmodernist critique notwithstanding (more on Ferguson in the next chapter). But in fact even when this critique was fully internalized, determinism did not evaporate. In accepting the notions of ‘culture’ or ‘language’ as the all-powerful matrices of human action, and abjuring moral judgement as a form of cultural imperialism many postmodern theoreticians succumbed to what Berlin had described as the vision of ‘some vast, impersonal, monolithic whole . . . that will absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticize . . .’ (164). Catherine Belsey, for example, defines the project of postmodern ‘cultural history’: ‘to identify the meanings in circulation in earlier periods, to specify the discourses, conventions and signifying practices by which meanings are fixed, norms “agreed” and truth defined . . . The constraints on knowledge, normativity and subjectivity are the ranges of meaning culturally and discursively available’ (Belsey 557). The problem with this definition is the easy slippage from what Foucault called ‘power/knowledge’ to the ‘constraints on . . . subjectivity’, which in turn implies constraints on individual and collective action. Henry Giroux takes the next step by stating that postmodernism ‘rejects the notion that individual consciousness and reason are the most important determinants in shaping human history’ (467). The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt suggests that the vacant throne of ‘individual consciousness’ should be taken over by the power of discourse. But in its unquestioned acceptance of the notion that history has ‘determinants’, whatever their nature, this strand in postmodernism replicates the discursive structure of traditional historical determinism. As Heise points out, once we accept the premise that history is regulated by narrative or discursive templates, we have to admit that ‘local narratives and specialized language games are not in principle any less problematic than universalizing narratives’ (17). This refurbished determinism is, of course, only one aspect of postmodernism, balanced by what I will call the postmodernism of contingency, with its ‘total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and the chaotic . . . [that] does not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define “the eternal and immutable” elements that might lie within it’ (Harvey 303). This postmodernism is the subject of the next chapter. But it is opposed by the schizophrenic spatiality of the postmodern condition diagnosed by Jameson as

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‘an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history’ (1988a , 20). This incapacity does not necessarily express itself in the lack of interest in history. Just the opposite: the pastiche and the ‘hyper-real’ imitation of the past have become staples of postmodern culture. But just as the individual subject without a personal narrative of continuity disintegrates into an accumulation of unrelated ‘intensities’, so does history imagined as an immobile pattern or design. Paradoxically, determinism whose ostensible goal is make history intelligible ends up making it impossible. To apprehend history is to emplot it, whereby emplotment is the mediation between time and narrative, a ‘configuring’ of the phenomenological experience of temporality (Ricoeur 1983, Vol. 1, 53). Hayden White redefines emplotment more specifically in relation to history-writing as ‘encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures’, in other words, as making meaningful narratives out of a simple sequences of historical events (2002, 193). But historical determinism tends to reduce history not to a narrative but to a spatial pattern, structure or diagram, in which the specificity of the events is swallowed up in the generality of their underlying law. Thus while brilliant as philosophers, Hegel, Marx and such lesser luminaries of determinism as Spengler and Toynbee had great difficulties in coming to terms with the irreducible particularity of specific historical events. Narrative emplotment, of course, also involves imposing a predictable pattern upon the raw historical data because our narrative templates, as White tirelessly emphasizes, are generic – and therefore general – in nature. But the difference between a spatial and a temporal pattern is that the latter can be revised in the very process of its imposition. Each new text can – and often does – substantially modify the genre it belongs to. Temporal patterns are ‘weak’ unless they are underwritten by a spatial shape that does not succumb to the erosion of historical mutability. White laments the fact that ‘most historical sequences can be emplotted in a number of different ways, so as to provide different interpretations of these events and endow them with different meanings’ because, according to him, it undermines history’s status as a discourse of truth (2002, 195). But in fact, it is this very pliancy of history-writing that reflects the fundamental nature of historical process: its flexibility, contingency and openendedness. In deterministic philosophies of history, on the other hand, the universal law forecloses new emplotments and drastically limits the possibilities of new interpretation. Historical determinism commonly casts itself in a narrative form. But these narratives are spatial forms masquerading as stories. Marxism, German idealism and other post-Enlightenment forms of determinism are, according to Lyotard, ‘reconstitution of . . . mythical narratives . . . [which] retain from myth the principle according to which the general course of human history is conceivable’ (1988, 68). They ground their legitimacy in the future rather than

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the past, representing themselves as programmes of human liberation but in fact, they attempting ‘to neutralize . . . the unforeseeable effects engendered by the contingency and freedom proper to the human project’ (Lyotard 1988, 69). The political paradox of deterministic utopias invariably turning into prisonhouses is paralleled by the structural paradox of grand narratives invariably attempting to constrain their own narrativity. Time-travel SF dramatizes this twin paradox in the texts that expand the purview of the chronoclasm from individual to society and attempt to tackle the overall shape of history. The results are as structurally contrived as they are ideologically problematic. Many time-travel SF texts that expand from the individual to the collective mirror not just the individual pathology of the a-temporal subject but the collective pathology of the a-historical society; the society which has lost its capacity to perceive its own ‘present as history’ (Jameson 1991, 284). Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (1955) is an early example of the historical chronoclasm, written in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism and in the shadows of the Cold War, that is to say, at the historical juncture where all the conflicting ideologies claimed the mandate of the ‘law of history’, whether as racial destiny, class struggle, or the triumph of democracy. While stylistically bland in keeping with the ghettoized status of the Golden Age SF, Asimov’s novel has subsequently influenced many sophisticated postmodern timetravel texts. In the novel the organization or time-travelling technocrats called Eternity controls the course of history in order to preserve the status quo, eliminate wars and integrate humanity into a harmonious and stable whole. The controls are Reality Changes or chronoclasms perpetrated throughout the time period accessible to Eternity. This entire period is treated as a colonized territory, with Eternals travelling ‘upwhen’ and ‘downwhen’ and exercising a benevolent protectorate over the time-stranded ‘natives’. Eventually, Eternity decides on its most ambitious project: to create itself by sending back in time, beyond the downwhen terminus, the technical knowledge necessary for inventing time travel. But the project is scuttled by the rebellious protagonist Andrew Harlan with the help of his lover Noys Lambent, who turns out to be a secret agent of the future lying beyond the reach of Eternity. The End of Eternity reads like a hybrid of 1984 and ‘. . . All You Zombies . . .’ but the shades of Orwell are more than just a window-dressing in a Cold War thriller. They indicate an ideological connection between historical determinism and totalitarianism. The Party in 1984 controls history by falsification of documents; the Eternals control history by chronoclasm. The result is exactly the same. History cannot be separated from its representation; whoever controls the one, controls the other. But paradoxically, the more rigid the control, the greater is the resulting narrative muddle. Orwell’s Party has revised the history of Oceania so many times that it has ceased to mean anything beyond a collection of documents

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that correspond to the Party’s needs at any specific moment. Historical diachrony has been supplanted by dictatorial synchrony. Power consists not so much in a specific emplotment of history as in the weakening of the integrity of any and all plots. Similarly, Eternity has reshaped its centuries into a constantly rearranged pattern of simultaneous events with no organic connection among them beyond political expediency. With different technological means at their disposal the Party and Eternity strive for the same goal: to transform historical time into utopian space. Both have built a ‘perfect city, without an element of chance and contradiction’, which turns out to be a concentration camp (Cioran 87). But in an additional clever twist, Asimov’s novel suggests that when time becomes space, space must become time. The reason the future tries to undermine the plans of Eternity is that the tight control of history leads to stagnation and prevents humanity’s expansion beyond the Solar system. So when in the last chapter of the novel Eternity vanishes, undone by its own chronoclasm, the two protagonists lift their eyes to the stars. The End of Eternity largely disregards the intersection of historical and private time, creating a rather hallucinatory (though unintentionally so) disconnect between the linear psychology of its protagonist and the manifold loops of his chronotope. In a sense, however, the old-fashioned humanity of Harlan fulfils the same role as the old-fashioned humanity of Winston Smith, the ‘last man’ of 1984: it is a site of resistance which clings to a linear narrative of subjectivity as a challenge to the anti-narrative pressure of the ruling ideology. But the political relevance of The End of Eternity is limited by the abstractness of its renunciation of an unspecified ‘totalitarianism’. Two contemporary SF texts reveal the political implications of historical determinism in a much more striking way by explicitly referencing two great historical catastrophes of the recent past. Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and J. R. Dunn’s Days of Cain (1997) deal with American slavery and the Holocaust within the deterministic framework of the time-travel chronotope. And both end up saying something quite different to the ostensible agenda of their authors, as ‘the content of the form’ overrides ‘the content of the content’. Kindred tells the story of a contemporary African-American woman Dana who is periodically drawn into the antebellum past to save the life of Rufus, a slaveholding plantation owner and her own ancestor. From the very beginning, she is aware of the causal loop involved: Rufus’ life depends ‘on the actions of his unconceived descendant’ who will not be conceived if Rufus does not live (Butler 29). And eventually the moral implications of the chronoclasm become clear: to ensure her own conception, she has to assist Rufus in forcing a young woman slave Alice, whose husband he has killed, to succumb to his sexual advances. In order for her to exist, Dana has to become an accessory to rape. Butler brilliantly uses this loop to explore the moral ambiguities of slavery, the dense network of power, dependency and fear that bound the slaves and the masters. The more Dana tries to find a way out, the more she becomes

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complicit with the system. She eventually kills Rufus when after Alice’s death he tries to rape her but this belated rebellion does nothing to change the course of history: Dana’s slave ancestress is already conceived. Despite her resourcefulness and bravery, Dana is rendered impotent by the historical determinism, which is reflected in the circular structure of the novel: it begins at the end and tells her story as an extended flashback. Back in the present, Dana returns to the ruins of the plantation house, while remarking bitterly to her husband ‘You’d think I would have had enough of the past’ (264). But in the world of time travel one cannot have had enough of the past because the past totally determines one’s identity. Dana’s agency is hollowed out by the impossibility of meaningful action, reduced to the see-saw of collaboration and rage, neither of which leads to change. Butler devises a stunning image of this crippled agency: during her last time jump, Dana’s arm melds into a wall of her house. She is literally imprisoned by solid time. Kindred grapples with the issue of the historical inevitability of slavery. Was it just a tragic incident or a ‘necessary’ development, a stage in some overarching plot of salvation? The shape of the chronotope points to the latter but this answer is so morally repugnant that the narrative revolts against it. The multiple chronoclasms are left ‘hanging in the air’, with no attempt to resolve them or even to explain them away. Dana forcibly tears herself away from the imprisoning matrix of slave history by wrenching her arm free from the stone wall and losing it in the process. The price of the narrative revolt against determinism is a crippled plot and a wounded subject. J. R. Dunn’s Days of Cain poses the question of inevitability with regard to the Holocaust and does not shy away from an affirmative answer. The novel is an update on The End of Eternity, with its own time-travelling elite policing the entire spacetime continuum. But whereas Eternity’s goal is to improve history out of existence, the Extension, as Dunn’s time-police is called, protects the continuity and integrity of the historical process. The underlying goal, however, is the same since what is being protected is not the freedom of the future but the equivalence of the future and the past. The Extension acts as the executive arm of the Moiety, a godlike ‘union of consciousness in the late epochs of the universe’, which regards ‘all intelligent life to be . . . part of some vast but knowable pattern imbuing the continuum’ (Dunn 12). This ‘knowable pattern’ of history is what the Moiety guards: ‘The base state of timeline was sacrosanct. The pattern could not be marred . . .’ (ibid.). The protagonist Gaspar James is a ‘monitor’ of the Extension charged with righting a major violation of ‘the pattern’: an attempt to prevent the Holocaust. Alma Lewin, another monitor, becomes convinced that the Holocaust is ‘a great shadow, falling across history from its point of origin, distorting everything it touched . . . The shadow grows as time passes, tainting and debasing all it contacts, even the Moiety itself’ (32). So Alma goes rogue, trying to prevent the Holocaust, while Gaspar is working to foil her attempted history-change. As opposed to Asimov’s novel where history is perceived by the protagonistfocalizer from the outside, as a space to be colonized, regulated and pruned, in

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Days of Cain history is experienced from both inside and outside, by the godlike monitors and by the helpless victims. The focalization alternates between an outsider, Gaspar, and two insiders: Alma who willingly goes into Auschwitz as an inmate to organize a mass escape and Reber, a concentration-camp guard who eventually repents his role and tries to atone for it. Gaspar is told early in the novel by another disillusioned monitor that his outsider perspective that regards ‘the pattern’ as immutable and sacrosanct is deeply immoral: ‘Because you have seen none of these events from within. Always from an exterior viewpoint, from the viewpoint of the Moiety, our own little portion of eternity, which you always carry with you. You are free to leave. The victims are not’ (33). Alternating focalization is a means to ameliorate this immorality by providing a view from inside the historical flux rather than from the perspective of eternity, in which this flux, the temporality of history, is seen as a delusion. The manipulation of the point of view in Days of Cain is a way to evade the worst implications of historical determinism by creating a textual simulacrum of free will and historical agency within the deterministic chronotope. But this simulacrum ultimately fails to provide anything beyond the saccharine consolation of melodrama because it is contained by the ineluctable ‘pattern’ of history. Alma dreams of breaking the pattern, which she calls the ‘Great Wheel’ of ‘death and horror and blood’ (217). From the outside, however, the Great Wheel is precisely what redeems the violence of history. Even the Holocaust is slotted into its proper place in the pattern as a necessary and therefore benevolent event, a salutary demonstration of depravity that prevented even worse horrors by negative example. It is ‘because of the camps’, according to the novel, that an all-out nuclear war never broke out (254). This Panglossian view that we have the best of all possible histories is not enough to neutralize the horror of Auschwitz. And therefore Gaspar is offered an even better consolation: he is vouchsafed a revelation from the ‘Author of the Moiety’, a God by another name, who assures him that the Judgement Day is coming in which all of history, past, present and future, will be purged of evil (311). But as with most divine revelations, this only exacerbates Gaspar’s confusion since he realizes that the Author has just confirmed his worst suspicion, namely that ‘the primary metaphysical quality of the Extension was that it effectively deprived all entities within continuum of free will. Space-time had been transformed into a deterministic system, the only intelligences possessing agency those of the Extension itself. No responsibility, no blame, no credit adhered to actions taken within the continuum, only those of the beings who moved along the core of time’ (314). But since Gaspar is one of those beings, he can now choose between the damnation of being a puppet or of being a murderer. Like The End of Eternity and Kindred, Days of Cain dramatizes the moral, political and metaphysical paradoxes of historical determinism. The three novels take different stances toward these paradoxes. Asimov’s modern dystopia ends on an optimistic note, as the totalitarian determinism simply vanishes into thin air, defeated by the indomitable American spirit of free enterprise and space

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pioneering. Butler’s postmodern exploration of the painful antinomies of Black history pays its pound of flesh for the liberation, which is provisional, uncertain and perhaps even delusory. And Dunn’s Holocaust SF tries to have its cake and to eat it, to represent the phenomenological experience of history as openended and the philosophical conceptualization of history as deterministic. The result is incoherence, not just ideological but formal as well, since the two levels of the fictional world, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ time, are never reconciled in any meaningful way. All three novels link historical determinism and political violence. The connection is organic. The ‘pattern’ justifies stamping out of opposition as a historical necessity, inevitable and therefore virtuous. As historian Niall Ferguson remarks, ‘it is a striking fact that [mass] killers have so often acted in the name of deterministic theories, whether religious, socialist, or racist’ (88). Violence receives a carte blanche from the unimpeachable authority of progress, revolutionary dialectics, or God; unimpeachable precisely because it is situated outside time and therefore is not subject to its relentless erosion. Asimov, Butler and Dunn acknowledge this connection but react in very different ways. Asimov simply makes violence miraculously disappear in a blatant Cold War wish-fulfilment. Butler’s book seethes with anger that finds no outlet in social action and destructively rebounds against the narrative self of the protagonist. Dunn comes closest to justifying the violence of the Holocaust on pseudo-theological grounds but retreats just in time as Gaspar disgusted with the Extension and with himself packs his bags and leaves, to spend the rest of his life ‘inside’ time, telling fairytales to his granddaughter. None of them explicitly endorses an ideology that would underwrite their deterministic chronotope as the ‘truth’ of history. Nevertheless, they do employ a discourse of legitimization that mediates between narrative imagination and cultural paratext. This discourse is physics. Dunn and Asimov (though not Butler who relies on generic intertextuality to supply the missing cognitive element) situate a deterministic human history in the framework of a deterministic cosmic history. They appeal to the physical paradigm of deterministic spacetime to lend plausibility to their representation of historical determinism. And though this paradigm, as I will argue in the next chapter, is no longer the exclusive explanation of the physical nature of time, it is still an extraordinarily powerful one.

Frozen Rivers and Sliced Loaves Classical philosophy’s characteristic way of dealing with contingency is to avoid it. It attempts to replace contingency by necessity wherever possible. Grube 1 Martin-Dirk Grube’s summary of the philosophical attitudes to contingency emphasizes the rift between the classical (from ancient Greece to Kant and his

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heirs) and the (post)modern (the Anglo-American Enlightenment and the Continental tradition) approaches. As opposed to the classical approach, modern and especially postmodern philosophy accepts contingency in principle, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. However, until quite recently, physics was unwaveringly classical in its attitude to natural law. Classic Newtonian cosmology was based on the concept of the universal laws of nature that regulated celestial mechanics. Time for Newton was absolute, uniform and objective; a reflection of the mind of God. This ‘single, constantly flowing river of time’ encompassed all change within its banks (Galison 13). And since the flow of the time river was uniform, it carried effects and causes in a predictable, lawful and calculable succession. Determinism was the timeshape of classical physics. As Pierre-Simon de Laplace put it in 1814, for a godlike intellect, capable of apprehending the exact configuration of the universe at any given moment, ‘nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes’ (12). The common story is that determinism died with Einstein, since the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century substituted for the absolute chronologic a multiplicity of time-measurements depending on the reference frame of the observer: ‘ “Times” replace “time” ’ (Galison 13). Stephen Kern links the flexible private time of Joyce and Woolf to ‘Einstein’s theory that all temporal coordinates are relative to a specific reference system’ (18). Even the postmodern theologian David Ray Griffin invokes the ‘Einsteinian notion . . . [that] space and time are inseparable’ to explain the shift from the modern opposition of science and religion to a more flexible postmodern spirituality (374). But like any commonly accepted story, this one is only partially correct. It is true that Einstein’s special (1905) and general (1915) theories of relativity undermined the Newtonian notion of absolute time. But it does not mean that relativity killed determinism. Just the opposite, in fact. In Relativity, Einstein wrote: ‘From a “happening” in three-dimensional space, physics becomes, as it were, an “existence” in the four-dimensional “world” ’ (Appendix 2). Special relativity, roughly speaking, states that the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and time is equal to the speed of light, the latter being absolute in any frame of reference (Greene 49). Einstein’s own formulation is: ‘The principle of relativity requires that the law of the conservation of energy should hold not only with reference to a co-ordinate system K, but also with respect to every co-ordinate system K’, which is in a state of uniform motion of translation relative to K, or, briefly, relative to every “Galileian” system of co-ordinates’ (Chapter 15). Thus, though special relativity puts an end to the Newtonian absolute space and time by tying measurements of both to the relative velocity of the observer, it does not undermine the objectivity of spacetime. By merging space and time into one continuum, special relativity implies that the future exists in the same way as the past. Precisely because space and time are inextricably intertwined, time enjoys no special ontological status.

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General relativity, which explains gravity by the ‘geodesic’ curvature of spacetime, goes even further in the direction of freezing the flow of time, regarding it, at best, as an illusion produced by the strange limitations of the human consciousness. While space and time in separation are indeed flexible, malleable and relational, their union, spacetime, is absolutely predetermined. The ‘flowing river of time’ becomes ‘a giant block of ice with every moment forever frozen into place’ (Greene 141). Since the philosophical implications of a physical theory depend upon the narrativization of the non-narrative language of mathematics, it is not surprising that some creative misreadings of Einstein’s theory seized upon its relational aspect, forgetting or setting aside the determinism of spacetime. But this determinism is crucial for understanding the contrary influences of relativity upon the postmodern perceptions of time and history. The determinism implicit in Wells’ chronotope of time travel is reinforced when ten years after The Time Machine, special relativity endorses the claim that time is merely the fourth dimension of space. Kern points out that the idea of spacetime ‘broke down the distinction between age-old categories that lay at the foundations of Western thought’ and undermined the phenomenological distinctiveness of space and time in post-Kantian philosophy (206). Henceforth, the future was to enjoy no ontological privilege over the past. Among the contemporary interpreters of Einstein, Brian Greene is particularly adept at finding striking metaphors that express the deep determinism of Einstein’s thought. He compares the Einsteinian spacetime to a loaf of bread that can be sliced at different angles by differently moving observers. Each slice is unique but the loaf is always the same. In the context of relativity, past, present and future are merely ‘a persistent illusion’ since ‘every part of the spacetime loaf . . . exists on the same footing as every other, suggesting as Einstein believed, that reality embraces past, present, and future equally and that the flow we envision . . . is illusory’ (Greene 132). For reasons which I will discuss below this is not the consensus view of physics today but it was certainly Einstein’s. One of the strangest about-faces in the history of science is Einstein’s rejection of quantum mechanics, which rests on his own theories. His reasons for doing so were philosophical. His famous (and famously misquoted) statement about God not playing dice with the Universe is not a statement of belief in a personal deity but rather the rejection of contingency implicit in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s equation. His emphasis is not on God but on dice: ‘Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the “old one”. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice’ (4 December 1926 letter to Max Born; The Born-Einstein Letters; emphasis in the original). The secret of ‘the old one’ for Einstein is the immutable law of nature that has to underlie the heterogeneity of the cosmos, just as in the deterministic historiography the immutable principle of Class Struggle, Absolute Spirit, or

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whatever else the historian happens to favour, underlies the heterogeneity of historical events. His resistance to quantum mechanics centres on its radical break with the determinism of classical physics. Quantum mechanics weaves contingency into the very fabric of reality. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be measured simultaneously. It differs from Newtonian mechanics in two important respects: ‘Where human beings had no special status in Newtonian physics, in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics humans play an essential role in giving meaning to the wave function by the act of measurement. And where the Newtonian physicist spoke of precise predictions the quantum mechanician now offers only calculations of probabilities . . .’ (Weinberg 61). Richard Feynman’s sum-over-histories mathematical approach to quantum mechanics developed in 1948 describes the path of an electron in terms of a probability wave that incorporates all the possible paths the electron could have taken. Observation ‘collapses’ the probability wave but does not erase the fact that probability is not simply the result of insufficient knowledge as it would have been in classical physics but is the irreducible foundation of the physical world. Uncertainty, in other words, ceases to be an epistemological concept and becomes an ontological one. Stephen Hawking argues that ‘quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science’ (60). I will outline some of the more interesting implications of quantum mechanics in the next chapter. Here I will only point out that the happy New Age attitude of those who believe that quantum mechanics erases the prickly boundary between science and mysticism, or that it amounts to saying ‘Anything goes’, is by no means warranted. Like relativity, quantum mechanics is a mathematical way of describing reality and the deep and irreducible difference between mathematics and natural languages results in the fact that the narrative translations of exactly the same set of equations can yield quite different results depending on the translator’s narrative templates. Stephen Weinberg, for example, whose favourite writer is the gloomy late Victorian George Gissing, a determinist like Hardy and Zola, translates quantum mechanics in a way that preserves an almost Newtonian view of the laws of nature. While acknowledging that the ‘historical accidents’ seem to play an irreducible role in both cosmology and biology, he still hopes that we will discover the way ‘in which the behaviour of any physical system is completely determined by its initial conditions and laws of nature’ (28). Hawking also attempts to reconcile quantum theory with a modified version of classical determinism by arguing that universal laws exist, though they may be probabilistic in nature. Brain Greene candidly confesses that he is torn between his emotional allegiance to the narrative concept of temporality and his rational acceptance of the frozen river of Einsteinian spacetime. He refers to Einstein’s own resignation that science cannot grasp the fundamental human experience

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of time as flowing from the past to the future: This resignation leaves open a pivotal question: Is science unable to grasp a fundamental quality of time that the human mind embraces as readily as the lungs take in air, or does the human mind impose on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and that hence does not show up in the laws of physics? If you were to ask me this question during the working day, I’d side with the latter perspective, but by nightfall, when critical thought eases into the ordinary routines of life, it’s hard to maintain full resistance to the former viewpoint . . . But don’t confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deep physical laws. (Greene 140–1) Greene’s ‘day’ and ‘night’ sides argue over the appropriate narrative translation of both relativity and quantum mechanics, which, in essence, is the argument over the timeshapes of determinism and contingency. In the next chapter I will shift to the ‘night’ side and discuss the increasingly powerful models of quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology that do enable science to grasp uncertainty and open-endedness as a ‘fundamental quality’ of physical time. But here my concern is with determinism and with the way SF chronotopes respond to the deterministic paradigm in physics. And what these chronotopes often do is to seize upon an important corollary of physical determinism. If spacetime is a ‘frozen river’ and the arrow of time is an arbitrary human imposition, why should not it be reversed? And if it is, what happens to the human consciousness?2

There and Back Again Reverse-time narratives are not new. In his article ‘ “Backward, Turn Backward”: Narratives of Reversed Time in Science Fiction’ Andrew Sawyer provides a literary genealogy of the device, going back at least to Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and perhaps earlier than that (there are references to time running backwards in Plato and Blake). However, the bulk of Sawyer’s examples belong to the 1960s and beyond. In other words, there seems something about reverse-time narratives that is particularly congenial to postmodernity. They become popular just as the nature of temporality is being hotly debated in physics and the nature of historicity everywhere. Time-reverse narratives are particularly apt to dramatize the intersection of physics, politics and psychology as they struggle with the almost insurmountable obstacles time-reversal poses to the very nature of narrativity. Sawyer discusses some of these obstacles: ‘What is the nature of this future which causes the very fabric of time to retreat in apparent horror? What is happening around the corner? But above all, what is

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the nature of writing a reverse-time narrative? Both writer and reader . . . are trying to engineer a shift in perspective while themselves using the very process of “beginning, middle, and end” to tell a story that reverses the process. This leads to particular compromises and contradictions’ (54). However, Sawyer’s formulation of the reverse-time problematic is so general as to be of little use in analysing specific narrative deployments of this extraordinarily challenging device. Though he links time-reversal to some physical theories, he explicitly abjures analysing these theories in terms of their narrative and ideological form, modestly leaving it to ‘more acute minds than mine’ and preparing to ‘skim over the mathematical and symbolic logics of time and focus on how these have been manipulated in storytelling’ (Sawyer 49). This unnecessary deference of literary critic to science leads to a somewhat superficial and hurried reading of three major time-reversal novels: Brian Aldiss’ An Age (also published as Cryptozoic!, 1967), Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1967) and Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991). The latter he hesitates to classify as SF, seemingly just because it is rather well-written. I am going to discuss the same three novels but against the background of the ideological and scientific battles between determinism and contingency. The reverse-time chronotope that they share may be seen as the ultimate narrative inscription of determinism, even more extreme than chronoclasm. Like chronoclasm, time-reversal undermines the narrative emplotment of temporality and in doing so, destroys agency and ties causality in paradoxical knots. Unlike chronoclasm, however, time-reversal cannot be disguised by manipulation of the point of view (though Amis’ narrative virtuosity comes close to pulling this off). The insoluble problem of reverse causality being narrated in a linear narrative sequence is too blatant to overlook, leading to what appears to be a fatal flaw in the reverse-time chronotope. But this flaw becomes the most effective weapon with which time-reversal explodes the obfuscations of determinism to lay bare its philosophical, psychological and political dangers. Sawyer accuses the three novels of being confused – and rightly so. This confusion, however, is not a deplorable byproduct of their form but its main content. If we find time-reversal jarring, wearisome and violent, it is because we are forced to see the deterministic world as it really is, without the soft-soaping of divine voices, political casuistry, or sentimental non sequiturs. Two reverse-time novels appeared by a strange coincidence in 1967: Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World and Brian Aldiss’ Cryptozoic! Perhaps the coincidence is not that strange, considering the ambience of the period, which saw the rise of the so-called New Wave in SF. The New Wave broke with the technocratic optimism and stylistic simplicity of the pulp-magazine SF to experiment with more complex artistic forms and more daring subject matter. The influence of the New Wave is clear in the two novels, each featuring drugs, mind-bending experiences, new cults and a threat of totalitarianism. Both, moreover, reference St Augustine and other theologians of time, though the mystical streak is

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more pronounced in Dick’s work. Ultimately, however, they diverge in their focuses. Aldiss’ novel develops into a dream-like exploration of cosmic time, reminiscent of H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. Dick’s is more interested in the ethics of temporality. But for both, time-reversal functions as a means to explore the ruination of the subject and society under the sway of a deterministic worldview. Cryptozoic! begins with a ‘traditional’ time travel into the past, enabled by the drug called CSD. This form of time travel (called mind-travel in the novel) prevents paradoxes by insulating the travellers behind an ‘entropy barrier’, which bars them from interacting with the past. The protagonist, an artist named Edward Bush, wanders the beaches of the Devonian like a ghost, occasionally bumping into fellow ghosts, all encased in ‘bubbles’ of their own time. Bush is preoccupied with his love-hate relationship with his mother; a Freudian twist, so common in time-travel narratives that Back to the Future films exploit it for laughs. By positing a psychological drive to return to the womb, Freud has created an insipient time-travel chronotope; a point that was not lost on the SF writers of the New Wave, such as Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock. But the interesting thing about Cryptozoic! is the way, in which the psychological problematic of incest is expanded first into a political issue of repression and then into a metaphysical question of the freedom of will. In a sort of cultural time-reversal, Aldiss moves from Freud’s Oedipus back to Sophocles’ Oedipus whose incest is enmeshed in the exploration of power and destiny. The mind-travelling drug of Aldiss’ novel does not cloud perception but clears it. And what it reveals is the dreary desert of spacetime, in which time’s arrow is a psychological defence mechanism to shield the mind from the intolerable vacuity of determinism: . . . man had shut himself off from it . . . had defended himself from that knowledge with the concept of passing time, which managed to make the universe tolerable by cutting off . . . the immense time of it. Immense time had been chopped into tiny wriggling fragments that man could deal with, could trap with sundials, sandglasses, pocketwatches, grandfather clocks, chronometers, which succeeded generation by generation in shaving time down finer and finer, smaller and smaller . . . until the obsessive nature of the whole procedure had been recognized, and Wenlock and his fellow workers blew the gaff on the whole conspiracy. But the conspiracy had been necessary. Without it, unsheltered from the blind desert of space-time, man would still be with other animals . . . (Aldiss 1967, 35–6) Like the incest taboo in Freud, time is a civilizing necessity, at once a source of misery and of cultural achievement; a creative lie that masks the unbearable truth but that also makes the concept of truth meaningful. Time travel ‘blows

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the gaff’ on the artificiality of time; and yet like the literal incest, results in guilt, anomie and eventual self-disintegration. In the middle of the novel Bush returns to his present and becomes embroiled in the machinations of a totalitarian government to prevent a further revelation of the nature of time. At this point, both the plot and the characters seem to be going nowhere, literally fighting ghosts, as when Bush is running away from assassins through the insubstantial forms of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. History is a delusion, which the ‘overmind’ (a collective super-ego) has concocted to hide the real nature of the desert of a-temporality from the individual. But once this desert is revealed, what is there to do? Even the fight against totalitarianism becomes meaningless, possibly a hallucination of Bush made up to cover his real problem: anomie. As he points out, humanity’s greatest challenge, has always been ‘structuring time. All wars are merely parttime solutions to the problem’ (44). Wars, art, politics, love, or even survival are mere busy-making devices to keep humanity preoccupied with its own neurotic invention: time. No surprise, then, that the totalitarian government insists on the ‘co-continuous’ spacetime and denounces the very concept of time-flow as a dangerous political heresy (90). If people become convinced that revolutions are on a par with crocheting, any dictatorship can rest easy. However, at the end of the novel Bush is told the real secret of time. Time is not static; it is flowing but ‘in the direction you would call backwards’ (153). It is our perception of time’s arrow as pointing from the past to the future that is terribly misguided. ‘Our perception has been strained through a distorting lens of mind, so we see things backwards, just as the lens of the eye actually sees things upside down’ (163). What we call memory is precognition, while precognition is memory. Human beings rise from tomb and dwindle into the womb. Human history begins in the unimaginable glory of cosmic unity and ends in the desolation of the Cryptozoic where all life dissolves in primordial chaos. But this revelation fails to counteract the psychological disintegration of Bush; in fact, the novel ends with a claim by the authorities that the entire second half of the novel is a record of his hallucinations. The problem with time-reversal is that it makes no difference. In whatever way the time arrow is flipped, it is envisioned as a mere pointer across the static terrain of spacetime. Whether we shuffle the pictures of the four-dimensional subject from youth to age or from age to youth, it is still the same subject without agency, development, or history. When time’s arrow is reversed in a deterministic universe, ‘nothing has changed in the external world at all; it obeys the same eternal natural laws it always has done and always will do. It is only our perception that has suddenly changed, is suddenly clear’ (162). But what this ‘clear’ perception shows is the world with no uncertainty, no contingency and no agency. And though Bush claims that ‘the misery of uncertainty’ is what causes human immorality, it seems that the misery of certainty is far worse, since its result is not mischief but catatonia (177).

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Aldiss’ novel embodies the same paradox of anti-narrative narrativity that bedevils all time-travel stories. But if the chronoclasm stories can surmount this paradox by manipulating point of view, the time-reversal stories encounter an even greater artistic challenge. No written narrative can literally run the action backwards. In Aldiss’ novel, time-reversal is simply declared but not shown, so this challenge is avoided. Philip K. Dick, however, tackles it head-on, with some interesting and disturbing results. In Dick’s novel, the ‘Hobart Phase’ reverses time on Earth, so the dead rise out of their graves, people grow younger and are eventually absorbed into the womb, food is disgorged and libraries eradicate books. The protagonist is the ‘old-born’ Sebastian Hermes who owns a ‘vitarium’ where the reviving dead are nursed back to health and sold to the highest bidder. The plot concerns the revival of the Anarch Peak, the founder of a Black mystical movement Udi. Coming back from the dead with new revelations about the nature of godhead, Peak becomes the subject of conflicting manipulations by Udi, Rome and the eradicating Library, as the result of which he is killed along with Sebastian’s young wife Lotta. The interesting thing about Dick’s time-reversal is that it focuses on the social rather than physical time. In fact, despite the striking physical effects of the Hobart Phase, much of the ‘counter-clock world’ seems to be generated by the social clocks. The Library’s Erad squads have more in common with the Nazi book-burners than with the second law of thermodynamics. The power-struggle within Udi is unconcerned with reverse causality. The elaborate social rituals around the regurgitation of food and the imbibing of ‘sogum’ hint at cultural arbitrariness rather than physical inevitability. Even the dead come back to life in no particular order and the babies are absorbed into any convenient womb without bothering to seek out their actual parents. Dick’s world is predicated on achrony, the scrambling of temporal order, rather than on its exact reversal. This enables the novel to use a traditional narrative structure without too much strain. If Cryptozoic! eventually disintegrates into a sort of visionary incoherence, Counter-Clock World keeps a tight rein on the plot and focalization that alternates between Sebastian and the police officer Tinbane who is in love with Lotta. The time that matters to the characters is the psychological, private time of emotional and moral choices, which is unaffected by the Hobart Phase. Dick goes back to St Augustine in his insistence that the present is the only temporality we can grasp and therefore the only temporality that exists for us. The moment, rather than the sequence, is of primary importance. And since the moment is unaffected by the direction of time’s arrow, time-reversal makes no difference to the characters. ‘You never know how life is going to work out for you . . . [whether] you’re either new-born or old-born,’ Tinbane tells Lotta (104). When Sebastian fails to save the Anarch from the clutches of the Library, he is tortured by precisely the same second-guessing that bedevils any mistaken choice in our own temporality: ‘It might have worked out differently if I hadn’t run across Ann Fisher . . . If Joe Tinbane had been here it would be

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different . . .’ (125). The sense of contingency of his action, the regret, the ‘might-have-been’, are all unaffected by the direction of time’s arrow because all that is important for human agency is that this arrow has a direction. If the past and the future are different and if action in the moment has meaningful consequences, it is of secondary importance whether human beings are dug out of the soil like potatoes or birthed by their mothers like sheep. However, the psychological time of the characters in Counter-Clock World is embedded in the mystical time of divine revelation. And this mystical time is as deterministic as the physical continuum of Cryptozoic! Instead of a dark desert, it is represented as an ineffable light; but whether as light or as darkness, timelessness robs humanity of history. The Anarch’s post-resurrection sermon echoes many mystical revelations, from Erigena to Eastern philosophy: . . . there’s no death; it’s an illusion. Time is an illusion. Every instant that comes into being never passes away. Anyhow – he says – it doesn’t really even come into being; it was always there. The universe consists of concentric rings of reality; the greater the ring the more it partakes of absolute reality. These concentric rings finally wind up as God; He’s the source of the things, and they’re more real as they get nearer to him . . . Evil is simply a lesser reality, a ring farther from Him . . . And he kept quoting bits of all those old-time medieval philosophers, like St Augustine and Erigena and Boethius and St Thomas Aquinas – he says for the first time he understands time . . . (146) ‘He says . . .’ The Anarch is killed before he can deliver his revelation in person. What we hear is the second-hand recollection from an unreliable witness, Ann Fisher of the Library. And this is precisely what enables the other characters to function as autonomous narrative entities: the fact that the timeless matrix of absolute reality is represented as a possibility, not a certainty. The new head of Udi castigates Sebastian’s failure in saving the Anarch as the failure to change human history, to place religion on the basis of ‘certitude’ rather than ‘mere faith’ (134). But in fact, Sebastian’s failure preserves the possibility of history, which certitude would destroy. The end of the novel returns to the moment of ‘now’ as the only proper temporality of human agency. The past and the future may exchange places but the present is what counts. With his wife dead and the memory of the mystical revelation fading, Sebastian returns to the cemetery to dig up the struggling old-born and help them survive in the counter-clock world, which is no different from our world, after all. We make moral choices with the knowledge of our mortality as the only certain thing about the future, whether this mortality leads us to the tomb or to the womb. Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991) is perhaps the most celebrated reverse-time text – and justly so, both for its virtuous storytelling and its courage in tackling the theme of the Holocaust. Amis’ novel employs a unique point of view that

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enables it to surmount the plot obstacles posed by time-reversal. The firstperson narrator is an invisible presence who accompanies the Auschwitz doctor Odilo Undervorben (aka Tod Friendly) as he is living his life in reverse, from his ‘old-born’ emergence in an American geriatric institution to his disappearance into his mother’s womb in the early-twentieth-century Germany. It seems that the entire world history unfolds in reverse along with Odilo’s life. The narrator, however, experiences temporality linearly: Odilo’s past is his future, which is unknown since Odilo’s mind (except for an occasional nightmare) is closed to him. Everything that happens, including the stint in Auschwitz under ‘Uncle Pepi’ (based on Dr Mengele) is interpreted in terms of our own linear causality. So for the narrator the healed patients of Tod in the American hospital are needlessly tortured, while the Jews in Auschwitz are saved: excavated from ditches and latrines, resuscitated in the gas chambers, revived when phenol is drawn from their hearts with a syringe. This device functions as a powerful technique of estrangement (in Shklovsky’s sense), making us freshly aware of the horror of Auschwitz which has been dulled by the patina of pious clichés. But who is this narrator? Odilo’s soul? His conscience? A random spirit who finds himself having to accompany a war criminal in the hell of his own making? But where is this hell? This we never find out. As opposed to both Aldiss and Dick, Amis’ point-of-view technique allows him to bracket out the ontological issues involved in time-reversal. The novel’s fictional world is like an elementary particle in quantum physics: it is both is and isn’t ours. Perhaps the entire thing is the hallucination of a dying Nazi; or perhaps an equivalent of the Hobart Phase descends upon Europe, making history run backwards. The narrator is not sure; all he knows is that his own perception of time is different from everybody else’s: Watch. We’re getting younger. We are. We’re getting stronger. We’re even getting taller. I don’t quite recognize this world we’re in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it. This is a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes. All the other people are getting younger too, but they don’t seem to mind, any more than Tod minds. They don’t find it counterintuitive, and faintly disgusting, as I do. Still, I’m powerless, and can do nothing about anything. I can’t make myself an exception. The other people, do they have someone else inside them, passenger or parasite, like me? They’re lucky. I bet they don’t have the dream we have. The figure in the white coat and the black boots. In his wake, a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm of human souls . . . But Tod is sane, apparently, and his world is shared. It just seems to me that the film is running backward. (8) The clash of two opposite time’s arrows creates endless possibilities for dramatic irony, which are used to powerful effects, especially in relation to Tod’s/Odilo’s practice of medicine. The narrator sees his doctoring in the

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American hospital after the war as butchery and his butchery in Auschwitz as an act of healing. But of course, this is precisely the way the Auschwitz doctors saw themselves: as healers of the world, fighting the Jewish contagion. In the Afterword to the novel, Amis refers to Robert Jay Lifton’s book The Nazi Doctors, which analyses the ideological mindset of those murderers who regarded genocide as the fulfilment of their Hippocratic Oath. Lifton quotes one of the Auschwitz doctors, Fritz Klein, who when asked how he could preside over mass killing, answered: ‘Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind’ (in Lifton, 16). This is no different from the attitude of Odilo’s ‘passenger’ who rhapsodizes over the acts of healing and mercy performed in Auschwitz. Thus, Amis uses time-reversal to bring out the phantasmagoric quality of the ideological universe of Auschwitz. And it is only in the Auschwitz chapters that the narrator and Odilo fully merge and the first-person pronoun singular appears instead of the plural. In the kingdom of Auschwitz the Nazi ideology has created a looking-glass world, in which cause and effect, killing and healing, life and death, have exchanged places. The narrator has no choice in the matter. He is an innocent who is thrust into a nightmare he does not understand, forced to share the body of the man he fears and dislikes: ‘Suicide isn’t an option, is it. Not in this world. Once you’re here, once you’re on board, you can’t get off. You can’t get out’ (75; emphasis in the original). Time-reversal pulls him back as inexorably as the river flowing upstream. But ideology is not a physical law. The narrator may not have the freedom to choose but what about Tod himself? Some would argue that he is a product of his society and culture and therefore essentially blameless. Lifton debates the moral responsibility of those like Dr Klein and Dr Mengele who may have sincerely believed that what they were doing was justified, and comes to the conclusion that their culpability lay in their choosing Nazism as their worldview. Postmodern cultural determinism cannot explain why some other concentration-camp doctors, despite the social pressure and the obligatory ideological orthodoxy, refused to perform selections or saved some inmates. Moral choice was possible even in the looking-glass world of Auschwitz. But played backwards, the life of Tod Friendly assumes the inevitability of a film reel. Since the narrator has no access to Tod’s/Odilo’s consciousness, we never know whether he could have chosen otherwise. Forward or backward, Tod seems to be going through the inevitable stages of his career with no more self-awareness than a movie image. It is the forward-looking narrator who strives to make sense of the awful events and grotesquely misinterprets them by attributing meaning and causality to a causeless, meaningless universe. Pondering the freedom of will (which he, of course, does not have, shackled to Odilo’s lifeline), the narrator decides it is an illusion: ‘People are free, then, they are generally free, then, are they? Well they don’t look free. Tipping,

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staggering, with croaked or choking voices, blundering backward along lines seemingly already crossed, already mapped’ (63; emphasis in the original). The only dream that Odilo and the narrator share is of a baby stifled by his mother in a dark hole because it cried and endangered other lives. This, it turns out, is the memory of what really happened when Odilo was a member of Einsatzgruppen, hunting for Jews. But is the repetition of this dream a memory or a foreshadowing? Is he feeling guilty or replaying the always-already-existent scene with as little emotion as a DVD player? We do not know and neither does the narrator: ‘The real Tod. Of course, I’m curious too. The real Tod: show me it. But am I sure I really want to watch?’ (53). The subtitle of the novel is ‘The Nature of the Offence’. The offence is known but its nature remains hidden. The nature, the meaning of Auschwitz, can only be revealed in time. And time is precisely what the narrator – and the reader, forced to accompany him on his odyssey, just as the narrator is forced to accompany Odilo – do not have. The narrator longs for time, hoping against hope that he will find out the secret: ‘I will know how bad the secret is. I will know the nature of the offence. Already I know this. I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time’ (63; emphasis in the original). It is wrong in time because time itself is wrong and cannot be put right. Perhaps the most pathetic scene in the novel filled with terrible scenes is the one moment when time seems to reverse itself back, to run in the right direction, to open up the future of possibilities – only to foreclose it again. But wait a minute. The baby is crawling, only one or two panting inches at a time—but crawling forward. And the mother with the magazine, the glossy pages ticking past her face: she’s reading, or skimming, forward. Hey! Christ, how long has it been since I . . . ? Anyhow, it’s soon over, this lucid interval. The mother is reading backward again, and the baby is merely weeping. It wants its diaper changed, or it’s hungry. It wants its diaper filled, with new shit from the trash. I’m being immature. I’ve got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever. (42; emphasis in the original) Eventually, the Nazi concentration camps become the killing fields of time, the places where not only Jews but history itself is being butchered. Auschwitz, in a description echoing the famous scene from Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, is the place where ‘there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where’ (123). And Treblinka, with its painted clock-face on the fateful train station where trains only arrived to, never departed from, becomes the final image of history without direction; time without flow; atrocity without meaning: ‘How could they move? They were painted, and would never move to an earlier time. Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.

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Indeed, at the railway station in Treblinka, the four dimensions were intriguingly disposed. A place without depth. And a place without time’ (145). Nazism, with its conviction of the glorious destiny of the Aryan race, its millenarian faith in the Thousand-Year Reich, its grandiose enterprise of making history conform to an ideological design, is the ultimate political (mis)use of determinism. Auschwitz and Treblinka, places without time, are hellish incarnations of spacetime as the frozen river of secular predestination. They are historical sites where history is murdered in the name of myth. No surprise, then, that postmodernity has turned away in revulsion from determinism and toward contingency, willing to embrace the dangers of chaos rather than submit to the order of the camp. And still, those sites of timelessness are being revisited obsessively – as a warning, but perhaps also as a temptation.

Chapter 3

‘My Name is Might-Have-Been’: Contingency, Counterfactuals and Moral Choice

We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity

Unborn Worlds, Aborted Subjects In his Introduction to the anthology The Way It Wasn’t, Robert Silverberg, confesses his boredom with the future and his disillusionment with the past. The temporal dimension that holds him spellbound is the contingent: It is an infinitely seductive theme, for every moment of our lives is a convergence of potential infinities, and every trifling decision we make sends a billion billion unborn worlds into oblivion. And so any moment at all in the world’s history can give rise to a quite literal infinity of possible stories as the writer recaptures some of those lost possibilities. (1996, viii) Silverberg finds this vision of infinite possibilities branching away from every moment of choice intoxicating but others have found its nauseating. In his House of Life (1881), Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes the fearful stupor induced by a vision of unrealized possibilities that lie like ‘the dead-sea shell’ upon life’s shore: Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell; Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell Cast up thy Life’s foam-fretted feet between; Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen Which had Life’s form and Love’s, but by my spell Is now a shaken shadow intolerable, Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen (‘A Superscription’).

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The same emotional polarization attends every discussion of contingency. Stephen Jay Gould is exuberant that ‘contingency sets the basic pattern of nature’, seeing it as ‘joy and wonder’ (1988, 284–5). But his ‘joy and wonder’ are balanced by Bernard Shaw’s anger and despair when precisely the same evolutionary contingency prompts him to condemn Darwinism as ‘ghastly and damnable’ (Shaw 33). Shaw’s and Rossetti’s reactions are probably more representative than Silverberg’s and Gould’s. One of the innumerable creationist pamphlets that spring from the fertile ground of American fundamentalism asks rhetorically: ‘Could the undirected element of chance that is thought to be a driving force of evolution have brought all these parts [of the human eye] together at the right time to produce such elaborate mechanisms?’ (Life – How Did It Get Here? 18).1 ‘Chance’ is such an emotionally loaded word that the authors of the pamphlet are confident that the vacillating reader will instantly yell: ‘NO!’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed that some people are natural Platonists and some – Aristotelians (Coleridge 95). Similarly, some people are inclined to revel in contingency and some – fear it. And the reason is that contingency is central to the way we understand our own life-choices. All timeshapes are intimately bound up with the issue of agency. Chronotopes, as Bakhtin reminds us, are not just abstract configurations of time and space; they are also shapes of humanity: ‘The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic’ (2002, 15–16). What we are is what we are in time. Within deterministic timeshapes, as we have seen, agency is an illusion. But on the positive side, they offer the consolation of a known and fixed pattern and the absolution from the pain of moral responsibility. People who find determinism reassuring, whether in the form of religious predestination, Karma, or Hegelian historical necessity, recoil from contingency, which they equate with chance, randomness and chaos. With the same irrational fear with which Pro-Lifers react to the idea of aborted foetuses, determinists react to the idea of the unborn worlds sent into oblivion with every choice we make. Contingency, however, is not randomness; it is a separate timeshape, which is predicated on the ontological distinction between the past and the future. The past is actual, while the future is virtual. Each moment in the present can be visualized as fanning out into a very large, perhaps infinite, number of potential timelines. But these timelines, even if infinite, are not jumbled together without any rhyme or reason. Nor are they all equally likely to occur: theory of probabilities and statistical analysis are sophisticated tools to probe the inner structure of contingency, which is highly organized. In this organization, it is opposed both to the straight line of determinism and the pell-mell of chaos. Contingency does not deny causality but it does deny a strict one-toone correspondence between cause and effect, positing instead a probabilistic

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connection, in which any event may have multiple outcomes with different degrees of probability. Stephen Jay Gould’s definition of contingency differentiates it from both determinism and chance. Contingency generates ‘chains of events that did not have to be but that occurred for identifiable reasons’ (1989, 284). Contingency is irreducibly historical and temporal: ‘A historical explanation does not rest on direct deduction from laws of nature but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. The final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before . . .’ (Gould 1989, 283). Retracing a causal chain back in time, it might seem inevitable; but in fact, it is only one of the many possible or virtual routes history could have taken: ‘When we realize that the actual outcome did not have to be; that any alteration in any step along the way would have unleashed a cascade down a different channel, we grasp the causal power of individual events’ (Gould 1989, 284). Because contingency is irreducibly historical, it is also irreducibly narrative. Its modality of explanation, as Gould tirelessly emphasizes, is to construct a story of how a particular situation came into being by retracing its antecedents. Narrative requires a highly structured, hierarchical relation of its constituent events, which is the antithesis of randomness. Classic narratology has introduced the distinction between kernels and satellites: ‘those [events] that advance the action by opening an alternative (“kernels”) and those that expand, amplify, maintain or delay the former . . . [called by Chatman] “satellites” ’ (RimmonKenan 16). This distinction can be usefully applied to contingent history. Historical kernels are the events that Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans. A Black Swan is an event with three characteristics: ‘First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable’ (Taleb xvii-xviii; emphasis in the original). Black Swans of history periodically peck to death would-be prophets and forecasters with such surprises as 9/11 or the collapse of Communism. But some swans are white. There are predictable trends, average values and fulfilled expectations. Contingent history is structured by the interaction between bland flocks of ordinary events, whose consequences tend to average out, and the sudden spectacular swoop of a pivotal catastrophe. Contingency is the only timeshape within which human choice, whether individual or collective, is possible and has real effects. The enabling power of contingency lies in the fact that the future is both infinitely malleable and partially predictable. Within the timeshape of determinism, choice is impossible because the future cannot be changed. Within the timeshape of total chaos (or what Gennette called achrony, the a-temporal (dis)organization of narrative), choice is impossible because nobody can evaluate the probable consequences of one’s actions and therefore any action is as good as any other. But while Black Swans, the kernels of history, cannot be predicted in advance, their

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consequences are causal and can be shaped by individuals and societies acting within an intelligible matrix of culture and ideology. Having occurred, the Black Swans are incorporated into the ongoing narrative of history, in which humanity acts as both character and author. SF dramatizes the timeshape of contingency in chronotopes of alternate history, resuscitating Silverberg’s ‘unborn worlds’. But it also demarcates the boundaries of contingency by confronting its enemies: randomness and determinism.

Between Scylla and Charybdis In 1968, no doubt a good year for pondering the nature of history, two SF writers, writing in different languages and under different regimes, came up with stories in which agency was shown to be impossible. Both stories gutted contingency by denying one of its two basic constituents: either causality or flexibility. In each case, the result was a narrative without an agent, in which the protagonist’s choices only underscored the futility of his attempts to influence the future. In Larry Niven’s ‘All the Myriad Ways’ a Crosstime Corporation finds the means of travelling across ‘timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute’ (Niven 166). But these travels, while bringing technological rewards, unleash an epidemic of senseless murders and suicides. Detective Trimble, investigating this epidemic, uncovers its philosophical roots in the vivid realization that every action is futile because anything that can happen, does happen. Therefore, why not? ‘If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion . . . You can do anything, and one of you will or did’ (175). Eventually, Trimble kills himself; why not? Trimble’s suicidal anomie stems from the fact that in a random history there is no connection between cause and effect. Action is futile because it is disconnected from both the future and the past. If all outcomes are equally (im)possible and equally (in)valid, why to choose? But without choice, subjectivity disintegrates. This disintegration is represented in the story by a shift from a diegetic to extradiegetic point of view. Throughout the story, Trimble is the focalizer, firmly located within his own fictional world. But in the last section describing his suicide, his point of view merges with that of an extradiegetic omniscient narrator, capable of tracking the actions and thoughts of several Trimble avatars. Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not? And he ran out of the office shouting, ‘Bentley, listen, I’ve got the answer . . .’ And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head . . . And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer . . . And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head and fired. (175–6)

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Once his point of view merges with that of the omniscient narrator, Gene Trimble the character can no longer exist. His suicide is a narratological necessity. The Soviet SF writer’s Sever Gansovsky’s ‘Demon of History’ is shaped by the Marxist philosophy of historical determinism totally opposed to the randomness of Niven’s universe. In the story an unnamed time traveller, having read a book about the atrocities of World War II, decides to eliminate its instigator, the self-proclaimed Father of the Nation. Going back to Vienna in the 1910s, the traveller shoots the future Father of the Nation, only to come back to his own time and to find that even though the details of the atrocities have changed – gas chambers instead of death vats – the war and the genocide have occurred anyway. And he also realizes that a Viennese bum who helped him to assassinate the Father of the Nation was Adolf Hitler. Gansovsky’s story has the form of a philosophical fable, with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, in which the temptation to change history is represented as a devil’s bargain. Its ultimate message with regard to the possibilities of meaningful individual action is just as pessimistic as Niven’s, though for opposite reasons. The traveller motivated by honest indignation eliminates a tyrant – and brings a worse tyrant to power. Not only history but his own mind is beyond his control, since after the death of the Father of the Nation his memory obligingly shifts to accommodate the new historical path. Though the traveller is the focalizer, in the last section of the story the omniscient narrator directly speaks to the reader, hammering in the lesson that history is ruled by the ‘ineluctable laws’ and not amenable to individual meddling. Just as in Niven, in Gansovsky’s story the diegetic agency is dissolved by the extradiegetic knowledge of the overall shape of the historical chronotope. And whether this chronotope represents the future as an infinite pile-up of all possible outcomes of a single action or as the rigidly demarcated path that cannot be deviated from, meaningful choice becomes impossible. If causality does not exist, we are not free agents; but if it is strictly deterministic, we are not free agents either. Martin Gardner succinctly describes the dilemma: When we try to define [free will] within a context of determinism it becomes a delusion, something we think we have but really don’t. When we try to define it within a context of indeterminism it becomes equally delusory, a choice made by some obscure randomizer in the brain which functions like the flip of a coin . . . A free-will act cannot be fully predetermined. Nor can it be the outcome of pure chance. Somehow it is both. Somehow it is neither. (428) The extreme emotional polarization occasioned by the notion of contingency now becomes clear. It goes to the very heart of what we are and how we conduct our lives in the context of historical events. If contingency is understood as randomness, it threatens us with the suicidal anomie of Trimble, the dissolution

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of choice in the chaos of chance. If contingency is denied altogether, fatalism becomes the only rational worldview. In the first case, we are careening billiard balls; in the second – puppets on the string. It is perhaps a matter of one’s basic psychological type which one of these two unattractive alternatives appears more palatable. But are these really the only possibilities? In the next section I will briefly look at the way the paradox of agency has been tackled by theology and moral philosophy to emphasize that our notion of what a human being is, is inextricably intertwined with the timeshape of history. In the sections following, I will provide a bird’s eye view of the developments in sciences and historiography that underpin the emergence of contingency as the primary timeshape of postmodernity. And finally I will come back to SF chronotopes of alternate history and argue that they inscribe a new ‘historization’ of subjectivity that surmounts both determinism and chaos.

Ills of Wills St Augustine in The City of God tackled the most intractable issue in theology: the contradiction between God’s omniscience and man’s free will. God’s omniscience is assumed to be a-temporal, extending both into the past and the future. If spacetime is a loaf sliced at different angles by differently positioned observers, God sees the entire load at a glance. But if so, our actions in the future are predestined and predetermined, which seems to make nonsense out of the Christian notions of free will, sin and retribution. Thus, the key moral issues in theology depend upon the physical shape of time. St Augustine tries to preserve the spacetime loaf and to eat it; to argue for God’s foreknowledge of the future and for man’s free will: Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it. The statement hinges upon the distinction between foreknowledge and predestination. Wherefore our wills also have just so much power as God willed and foreknew that they should have; and therefore whatever power they have, they have it within most certain limits; and whatever they are to do, they are most assuredly to do, for He whose foreknowledge is infallible foreknew that they would have the power to do it, and would do it. (Book V, Ch. 9) However, it is hard to escape the conclusion that if we are foreknown to do what we do, we are not free agents in any meaningful sense of the word.

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St Thomas Aquinas tried to resolve this difficulty. First, he unequivocally states that the will is free: ‘Man has free will: otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain’ (Part 1, Question 83). In order to reconcile this with divine foreknowledge, he postulates a God outside time who apprehends the entire course of human history at a glance and therefore the question of foreknowledge is, in a sense, meaningless. This has been developed by two schools of thought within the Catholic Church, each trying to preserve the view that free will is compatible with divine omniscience. The Thomists argued that the will is ‘moved’ by God’s grace while retaining the capacity to reject the divine gift. The Jesuits adopted the Molinist concept of Middle Knowledge (after sixteenth-century theologian Luis de Molina) that states that God knows the future as contingent, thus including all the possible counterfactuals. Perhaps this was too subtle since the Protestant Reformation solved the conundrum by rejecting the freedom of will altogether. Calvin most famously but Luther as well were firm believers in predestination: the notion that each human being from the beginning of time was predestined to be saved or damned by the omniscience of God. The Counter-Reformation promptly declared this a heresy and the debate dragged on, occasionally resolved by judicious application of torture. Otherwise, the parties always reached the impasse, succinctly summarized by David Hume in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding: ‘To reconcile the indifference and contingency of human actions with prescience; or to defend absolute decrees, and yet free the Deity from being the author of sin, has been found hitherto to exceed the power of all philosophy’ (quoted in Wootton, 23). In postmodern theology (as distinct from the religious fundamentalism, of which more in the next chapter), the freedom of will receives a different treatment. Developing the Jesuit theology of Middle Knowledge, some Catholic traditionalists point out that a believer in predestination must logically deny God’s own agency: if for God ‘there is no distinction between past and future, he can no more change what for us is the future than he can change what for us is the past’ (Cowburn 129). To avoid rendering God impotent one must concede that ‘God does not predetermine or even foreknow the free acts of persons’ (Cowburn 138–9). The movement known as Radical Orthodoxy that attempts to unite a postmodern sensibility with the traditional Christian doctrine goes even further. It argues that Christianity may become uniquely postmodern, not in the bland sense of the New Age spirituality but as a way to articulate the paradoxes of humanity’s existence in the temporal and contingent universe, while eschewing postmodern nihilism and violence. One of its founders John Milbank writes: First it may be argued that it is possible to construe Christianity as suspicious of notions of ‘fixed’ essences in its approach to human beings, to nature, to community and to God . . . Through its belief in creation from nothing it

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admits temporality, the priority of becoming, an unexpected emergence. A reality suspended between nothing and infinity is a reality of flux, a reality without substance, composed only of relational differences and ceaseless alterations (Augustine, De Musica). Like nihilism, Christianity can, should, embrace the differential flux. (51) Theological disputes are mirrored in the disagreements of moral philosophy, proving that it is not so much the nature of God as the nature of time that is the crux of the matter. The equivalent of God for philosophers is the laws of nature. And if these laws are assumed to be deterministic, as they were in nineteenthcentury positivism, the conclusion must be that human autonomy and free will are a delusion. Gary Watson sums up the argument: . . . free will . . . looks to be inconsistent with a prevalent view about how the world is causally structured. The most familiar version of this outlook is determinism, according to which the state of the world at any given time is fixed in all of its details by prior states and by laws of nature. This appears to have alarming implications for our understanding of our own behavior . . . First, if a deterministic explanatory scheme is valid, it looks as through I do not originate my actions; I am merely a confluence of causal processes that were initiated long before my existence. So antecedent conditions, not I, determine my behaviour. Autonomy is then an illusion. Another way to put it is to say that determinism entails that I had to do what I did; there were no other possibilities. On the second formulation, I am not a free agent because I am not free to act otherwise; on the first, the problem is to see how we can be agents at all. (2; emphasis in the original) Denial of free will, whether theological or philosophical, hinges on the nature of temporality; we are what we are because time is what it is. In his ‘Dilemma of Determinism’ (1884) William James makes the possibility of agency dependent on the pliancy of the future, in which multiple alternate outcomes coexist in a virtual state until one is chosen and becomes actual: Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous. Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one becomes impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and, somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.2

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Ian Watson’s SF story ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’ (1978) presents a chronotope that can be interpreted either as deterministic or as contingent and suggests two entirely different modalities of agency depending on the interpretation. In the story a mad messiah arrives in 1985 imprisoned in a device, in which time runs backwards. While the scientists scramble to understand the principle of the device, the world is held spellbound by the man who is visibly growing younger, saner and more imposing, declaring himself (with the help of handheld signs) to be ‘the Matrix of Man’ and having the world greet him as the Second Coming (Watson 17). Eventually it turns out that the device is the Very Slow Time Machine that has to ‘crawl’ backwards through time to accumulate a sufficient momentum to jump into the future. So in the moment of his appearance in 1985, the self-proclaimed God will in fact have travelled into the future, to come to the people who have been conditioned by his presence and incorporate them into his own omniscient mind. But since at the moment of his arrival/departure, he will have been driven mad by privation and loneliness, the minds that he sucks into himself will be pulverized. ‘What then, when God rises from the grave of time, insane?’ (29; emphasis in the original) What indeed? Whether the messiah is literally God or some telepathic Ubermensch is immaterial. The point is rather that the world is presented with two alternatives, corresponding to the two theological interpretation of free will. If God comes back insane, ‘he will suck us into him as dummies, as robots’: a hideously accurate description of the world of Calvinist predestination. But if he is sane, then unity with the divine will not erase individuality but enhance it since he will ‘incorporate us, unite us, as separate thinking souls’ (28). Within the deterministic template of reverse-time, only the first alternative is possible, since the narrator (the rare first person plural, the ‘we’ of humanity) knows that God will in fact go insane. And yet, perhaps time is not fixed; perhaps what has been witnessed is only one probabilistic scenario; perhaps the past can be changed, so that the future will be different: ‘if time is probabilistic (which we can never prove or disprove concretely with any measuring rod, for we can never see what has not been, all the alternative possibilities, though they might have been), we have to wish what we know to be the truth, not to have been the truth’ (Watson 29; emphasis in the original). The ending of the story is open, leaving both reading of the chronotope, the deterministic and the contingent, side by side like the two possible paths of an electron. And this very open-endedness tilts the hermeneutic scales toward the contingent pole: if we can envision probabilistic time, perhaps we can make it happen. And yet there is no escaping the logical impossibility of ‘believ[ing] the world to be other than what it was’ (29). This impossibility parallels Hume’s impossibility of reconciling ‘the indifference and contingency of human actions with [divine] prescience’; the paradox that seemingly can only be resolved by faith. Watson’s story ends with the slogan of fideism: ‘Credo quia impossibilis: we have to believe because it is impossible’ (Watson 30; emphasis in the original). It is a way out for religion but not for moral philosophy.

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As long as the laws of nature are conceptualized in terms of strict Newtonian causality with its concomitant image of absolute time, philosophy cannot accept either free will or even more ominously, moral responsibility. As Galen Strawson succinctly points out, if our actions are predetermined by causal chains over which we have no control, ‘we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions’, and this is all there is to it (213). So-called compatibilists, such as the legal scholar Hilary Bok, try to contest this conclusion without attacking its underlying timeshape. But this is a mission impossible. While a determinist can be emotionally revolted by the notion that we are mere robots or dummies, emotions cannot trump reason. Thomas Nagel is a case in point. He eloquently describes the emotional recoil from the secular predestination of deterministic philosophy. But eventually he cannot escape the logic of his own postulate that ‘there is no room in an objective picture of the world for a type of explanation of action that is not causal’ (234). Thus, the defenders of autonomy inevitably lapse into incoherence since the ‘alternative form of explanation [that of free choice] doesn’t really explain the action at all’. The reason for it is that whatever choice one makes there can always be constructed, in retrospect, a causal chain that leads to it. The theory of free will (which Nagel refuses to recognize as a coherent theory at all) ‘cannot explain on grounds of intelligibility why one of two intelligible courses of action, both of which were possible, occurred’ (234–5). If physical determinism leads to such a gloomy conclusion, one almost wishes that secular philosophers would embrace the Radical Orthodoxy’s creed of ‘the differential flux’ on faith alone. Certainly, Thomas Aquinas appears to be more of a postmodern thinker than Thomas Nagel. But perhaps one does not need to abjure reason to believe in the ‘probabilistic time’ that would enable human agency. Science comes to the rescue.

In Dice We Trust Not so long ago Stephen Jay Gould had to defend the epistemological basis of evolutionary biology and palaeontology against the widespread claims that they were not ‘real’ sciences because they relied upon historical narratives rather than universal laws: ‘Many large domains of nature – cosmology, geology and evolution among them – must be studied with the tools of history. The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as usually conceived’ (1989, 277). Nineteenth-century physics often derided the ‘softer’ sciences for their narrative bias – offering ‘just-so’ stories instead of hard deductions from first principles – and many biologists even hoped that their science would in time reach the rarefied pinnacle of physics’ precision. Even Gould conceded that laws of nature are immutable and invariant across time and space and only insisted that some sciences, primarily evolutionary biology, must be exempt from the requirement to reduce its findings to abstract formulae because these

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sciences deal with ‘the results of history, those inordinately complex events that can occur but once in detailed glory’ (ibid.). Just a couple of years after Wonderful Life, Lee Smolin suggested a new cosmological model, in which black holes spawn ‘daughter’ universes that differ from their progenitor in details of the basic physical laws, thus instigating a cosmic version of evolution by natural selection. Smolin explicitly acknowledged the Darwinian basis of his theory: ‘the similarity to biological evolution is then not spurious. There is a precise analogy, which depends on the fact that exactly the same formal structure as I’ve used here can be used to describe the workings of natural selection in biology’ (103). A revolution in cosmology is shifting the style of explanation in physics away from the a-temporal, deterministic universal laws and toward a narrative, particular and contingent style of evolutionary biology. As opposed to the nineteenth-century hopes of making biology into a branch of physics, it is now physics that is turning into ‘a branch of natural history’ (Drees 224). The reason why cosmology today is more inclined toward a natural history style of explanation has to do with the elusiveness of the ‘dream of the final theory’, which is supposed to unify gravity and quantum mechanics in a simple and elegant whole. The existing approximations, such as the so-called Standard Model, work but they are very far from the classic notion of the natural law as ‘mathematically simple and beautiful’ (Weinberg 131). Instead of reducing the fabric of the cosmos to a few simple constituents whose precisely describable interactions create the seeming complexity of the observable phenomena, the way it was in Newtonian physics, the Standard Model lists a whole zoo of elementary particles whose weird behaviour is matched only by their whimsical names (strange quarks and gluons, for example), adds a slew of arbitrary constants, and only then does a fairly good job of describing the physical world. Stephen Weinberg still hopes that ultimately it might be possible ‘to eliminate the accidental and historical elements’ from physics, though he concedes it might be impossible to do with biology (27). But other scientists are beginning to argue that the fundamental laws of nature are historical in essence, resulting from the accidental configuration of the infant universe in the first couple of seconds after the Big Bang. It is possible, for example, that the direction of time’s arrow is the result of this nascent universe’s unusually low entropy. However, taken by itself, this notion may lead to a sort of rarefied creationism, known as the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle states that certain physical conditions of the Universe are fine-tuned to enable the emergence of intelligent life.3 If the cosmological constant were much higher than its present very small but non-zero value, the planets and galaxies could not have formed, thus precluding the emergence of life4. But there is no fundamental law that requires that the cosmological constant be what it is; in fact, some equations of quantum theory require it to be much higher, while others suggest it should be zero.

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The Anthropic Principle seems to imply the presence of an intelligent design, which understandably makes most physicists wince. However, evolutionary biology has shown how a semblance of deterministic design can emerge from the tortuous path of contingent history. Some physicists now have begun to follow its lead by introducing a sort of cosmological natural selection. This is precisely Smolin’s idea of infinitude of ‘daughter’ universes generated by black holes, each with a slightly different set of physical laws. We live in one of the few universes whose laws happen to enable human life, while there are many others that are empty of life of any kind or even of stars and planets. The Anthropic principle, then, becomes a historical, rather than ontological, statement: it describes what happened rather than what had to happen. Leonard Susskind suggests that these multiple universes coexist in the same continuum, which he calls ‘megaverse’ (others prefer the name ‘multiverse’). The resulting picture is of a ‘biological’ cosmos, filled with as many differently adapted universes as there are (at least potentially) many differently adapted biological species, ‘a concept of a megaverse, filled with a prodigious number of . . . “pocket universes”. Some pockets are microscopically small and never get big. Others are big like ours but totally empty . . .’ (Susskind 20). In each universe the basic laws of physics are different. There is no First Principle, no overarching universal law underpinning the flux of possibilities. Instead, using the string theory, Susskind introduces a mathematical Landscape of possibilities ‘with so many values that almost anything can be found somewhere in it’ (125). This Landscape of contingency is the cosmic garden of the forked paths, elevated from a literary metaphor to a scientific picture of the universe. Such ideas still make many physicists unhappy on aesthetic – which means ideological and philosophical – grounds. They still hope to describe the Universe as a simple and elegant whole, without the untidiness, unexpectedness and particularity of narrative models. Lisa Randall, for example, views with distaste what she regards as a cop-out by the proponents of the multiverse who ‘no longer try to find a unique theory’ (300). In her view, the goal of physics is ‘connect[ing] a beautiful symmetric theory to the physical realities of our universe’ (300). For her, as for Stephen Weinberg, the beauty of a theory is measured in Classicist values: harmony, elegance, simplicity. But the universe has not been created by Alexander Pope. Perhaps the Dickensian aesthetics of the sprawling, vibrant, irreducibly complex ‘baggy monster’ of the novel is better suited to the irreducible complexities of the physical world. While some try to squeeze the bulging body of the cosmos into ‘the beautifully designed suit’ of science (Randall 300), Susskind argues that it is not the cosmic physique but the sartorial taste of physicists that requires an adjustment. His is a Rube Goldberg universe, in which chaos, randomness and contingency are not the annoying exception but the general rule. Once the aesthetic paradigm shifts, ‘the inelegance and lack of uniqueness will eventually be seen as strengths of the [string] theory’ (Susskind 127).

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The aesthetics of the contingent universe hinges on grandeur rather than elegance; on infinity rather than proportion; on the sublime rather than the beautiful. And this accounts for the polarizing responses the concept of contingency provokes. The allure and its terror are one and the same, just as the aesthetic response to the sublime, awe, dread and admiration are inextricably mixed. Whether we react with the enthusiasm of Gould or with the horror of Shaw to the picture of a contingent universe in which seemingly universal laws are a product of a particular historical development, we only focus on one aspect of the whole. The whole is that, which in Kant’s terms, evokes both enthusiasm and terror, a mixture of awe, repugnance and admiration, ‘a negative pleasure’ of the sublime. As opposed to the harmony of the beautiful, the sublime is generated by that which ‘may appear, indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account.’ (Kant, Book 2, 23). The current upheaval in physics is a revolution of taste as much as it is a revolution of knowledge. SF had explored both the concept and the aesthetics of the multiverse long before the latter became a respectable scientific theory. One example is the work of Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), a great writer in the British tradition of scientific romances whose work straddles the boundary between philosophy and literature. Olaf Stapledon’s epic The Star-Maker (1937) is a study in the sublimity of universal contingency that brings together theological, scientific and aesthetic implications of the multiverse. In the last section of the novel, which is narrated by the collective ‘I’ of all the intelligences of the universe, the creation confronts its creator, the Star-Maker of the title. The chapter titled ‘The Maker and Its Works’ is perhaps the most astonishing tour-de-force in SF (and not only in SF) for it attempts to recast Paradise Lost and Divine Comedy in terms proper to the age of science. The Star Maker – God – is presented as a developing spirit who endlessly generates new universes in a plethora of dazzling inventiveness. There are universes with no life and those where life is based on musical variations; universes where time is circular and where it is branching or ‘zigzagging’; universes whose inhabitants are totally predetermined by their environment and universes where they have a free will; a universe where intelligent creatures cannot perceive the objective reality but are capable of creating ontological simulacra for themselves; and even a universe patterned after the medieval Christian concept of the universe . . . All these are expressions of the Star Maker’s creative spirit, which is neither good nor evil but is capable of a whole range of emotions, including love and destructiveness, frustration and yearning, and which, moreover, is evolving through the generation of, and interaction with, its cosmic artwork. The narrator is both appalled and fascinated by this inexhaustible creativity which results in the uncounted multitudes of

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sentient creatures suffering and dying in pain: the same question of theodicy that tormented Darwin and Huxley as they confronted the contingency of evolution. Following their example, Stapledon refuses the facile consolation of finding some ‘universal good’ beyond the particularities of individual evil. Rather than seeking harmony of the beautiful, he is reconciled to living with pain of the sublime. The narrator’s final word on the Star Maker is a recasting of Kant’s ‘outrage on the imagination’, which ‘is judged all the more sublime on that account’: But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it ‘spirit’ was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it this name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, no less, than spirit; more, no less, than any possible meaning of this word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this ‘more’, obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration. (Stapledon 430) Perhaps, after all, the God that plays dice with the universe is the only God worth worshipping.

The Trains of History Run on Time If physics is tilting toward a historical mode of explanation, history is becoming more ‘physical’, in the sense of utilizing sophisticated models of chaos theory, evolutionary development and environmental impact. The interaction between the sciences and humanities has to be conceptualized in terms of convergence/ divergence rather than of ‘influence’. Right now the postmodern predilection for contingency is evident in both physics and history just as earlier both physics and history were under the sway of determinism. Niall Ferguson’s groundbreaking book Virtual History (1999) epitomizes this shift. Ferguson’s trenchant critique is directed at history’s long flirtation with determinism. All the great nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history, from Hegel and Herbert to Kant were motivated by the desire, as Hegel put it, ‘to eliminate the contingent’ in favour of the belief that the ‘world history is governed by an ultimate design’ (Hegel 30). Marx’s revision of Hegel in socio-economic terms only enhanced the deterministic character of his philosophy, since it now could claim the authority of Newtonian physics. Both Hegelianism and Marxism presented history as an arena of the universal laws that propelled human beings with as little regard for their free will as the laws of motions propel billiard balls. This appropriation of scientific authority enabled Marx to chart the future course of history with the same assurance with which a physicist could chart the future course of a two-body system (even

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though society is vastly more complex than a three-body system that presents problems for celestial mechanics). As Ferguson puts it, ‘we can at least set Marx’s philosophy of history in its proper context: as the most compelling among many brands of determinism’ (38). The emotional allure of determinism did not wane even as the uncomfortable failure of Marxist predictions was becoming blindingly clear. Many twentiethcentury British and American historians adopted a neo-Marxist approach to continue their search for the Holy Grail of the ‘laws’ of history. Marx is not a necessary inspiration for such a search. Francis Fukuyama went back to Hegel in his confident prediction of the end of history, which history (no doubt inspired by some version of Poe’s Imp of the Perverse) took particular delight in refuting as soon as possible. Ferguson also points out that when grand narratives failed, some historians went to the opposite extreme, envisioning history as completely random. Hayden White’s famous argument that history books are ‘verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’ (2002, 192), tacitly assumes that history has no intelligible structure and can therefore be forced into any narrative mould whatsoever. History is a chaotic flow of unrelated events, diverted into arbitrary channels by the omnipotent historian. This assumption, however, leads to some peculiar narrative consequences which have not been sufficiently remarked upon in the debate over White’s claims that centred on the tired issue of ‘historical truth’. But even if chaos were indeed the true timeshape of history, writing it, is a hard task. Historical truth and narrative truth are not the same. We instinctively require agency in a story. This creates difficulties for narratives of cosmology and evolution which have to guard against what Gould describes as the tendency to personification that endows nature with goals and desires (1991). ‘Random’ historiography, however, has to perform the opposite manoeuvre, practising a sort of ‘de-personification’, the denial of agency to human beings. The results are as narratively misshapen as they are philosophically problematic. Again, SF demonstrates why random history is no more narratively satisfying than strict determinism. Stanislaw Lem’s The Chain of Chance (1975; published in Polish as Katar) is a wry nightmare of a stochastic universe, in which ‘mankind has multiplied to such an extent that it’s now starting to be governed by atomic laws’ (Lem 1975, 176). The protagonist is an astronaut-turnedprivate detective who is investigating a particularly convoluted series of deaths, only to come to the conclusion that no crime has been committed or even contemplated. An unlikely concatenation of chance events came together to create a perfect storm of mortality: ‘a person would die if he used the hormone ointment [a cure against baldness], took Ritalin and mineral baths, and ate the Neapolitan-style roasted almonds’ (Lem 1975, 172). This is no Kafkaesque riddle, concealing some profound metaphysical truth. The horror

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of Lem’s vision is that there is no metaphysical truth beyond the physical explanation. Human beings are mere molecules buffeted by the Brown motion of random history. In Virtual History, Ferguson offers a narrative alternative both to the paradoxes of determinism and to the ‘de-personified’ stories of chaos. This alternative is the use of counterfactuals, the ‘what if’ scenarios, that assume an alternative outcome of some pivotal historical event and then work out logically all its consequences. Counterfactuals are a narrative representation of historical contingency, which differentiates itself from determinism and randomness. Andrew Roberts, the editor of another collection of ‘what if’ scenarios, compares history to ‘a locomotive capable of reversing, being shunted into sidings, or even smashing up in a ghastly crash’ (4). But while a train can get derailed, it cannot suddenly decide to leave the tracks and glide over meadows and fields. History is malleable but not infinitely so. While counterfactuals had been used before Virtual History (a famous example is the anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History (1931), containing essays by such luminaries as G. K. Chesterton and Winston Churchill), most professional historians were unremittingly hostile to the idea, calling it a parlour game. Ferguson’s successful introduction of counterfactuals into historical discourse is part of the trend that Gavriel Rosenfeld calls ‘allohistorical thinking’ (6). Allohistorical thinking, according to him, reflects the cultural shift from determinism to contingency: ‘In insisting that everything in the past could have been different, in stressing the role of contingency in history, and in emphasizing the open-endedness of historical change, alternate history is inherently anti-deterministic’ (ibid.). While White calls histories ‘verbal fictions’, Ferguson incorporates fictions into the overall shape of history. The essays in his volumes depict what Gould in a similar exercise calls ‘alternative worlds that didn’t emerge, but might have arisen with slight and sensible changes in some early events’ (1989, 309). These alternative worlds are plausible; some, in fact, are more plausible than the one we live in, such as the world in which the Soviet Union did not collapse, since such a collapse had been flatly dismissed by all Sovietologists as a pipe-dream prior to 1991. They are also fictional in the sense of never having come into being. But their proliferation problematizes the distinction between fiction and truth that underpins White’s argument. Just like the path of an electron prior to being collapsed by observation is the sum of all the possible paths it could have taken, history is the sum of all possible choices individuals and societies could have made. Virtual history is closely related to the SF sub-genre of alternate history, constituting another example of the ‘science-fictionalization’ of postmodern culture. As opposed to the contingent scenarios of evolutionary theory and cosmology, both virtual history and its SF counterpart have to develop strategies for articulating not only time and space but the third ingredient of narrative chronotope, agency.

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Actants and Agents Classical narratology makes a distinction between actants and ‘acteurs’ or agents. Actant is defined by Algirdas Greimas in relation to a specific event within the plot structure; in Rimmon-Kenan’s gloss on Greimas’ definition, actant is ‘conceived as accomplishing or submitting to an act . . . and can include not only human beings (i.e. “characters”) but also inanimate objects (e.g. a magic ring) and abstract concepts (i.e. destiny)’ (34). I will limit the notion of actant only to the latter two categories: objects (including in most cases animals and plants) and abstract concepts. Agents, on the other hand, are self-aware initiators of action. Cosmic history has actants but human history has agents. When in Wonderful Life Gould describes seven possible worlds in which human intelligence has not arisen he constructs narratives without agency; narratives, in which abstract entities, such as species and climate, become formal actants but without the one characteristic that distinguishes the human agent: selfconscious choice. In such narratives contingency functions on the level of time and space (plot and setting) but not on the level of character because, properly speaking, such narratives do not have characters. The only agency inscribed in Gould evolutionary ‘what ifs’ is the agency of the narrator/author. Now we can glance back at Niven’s and Gansovsky’s stories and to see their shifts from the diegetic to extradiegetic point of view as the formal demotion of their characters to actants instead of agents, objects, not subjects, of history. In order to emphasize the role of human agency in history, Ferguson and his contributors consider only the ‘what if’ scenarios that were actually contemplated by the participants in whatever event they choose as the kernel of their narrative. They analyse ‘only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered’ (Ferguson 86; emphasis in the original). At first glance, this seems an unnecessary restriction. There are events whose participants had no clear idea of their nature and therefore could not calculate the likelihood of different outcomes. The Black Death comes to mind as a perfect example; nobody in 1348 understood the epidemiology of Yersinia pestis. However, this is not to say that the fourteenth-century populations decimated by the plague had no cultural and narrative matrix to situate the events in. Whether seen as a divine punishment or a natural occurrence, the plague was incorporated into different cultural narratives and individuals could – and did – act on the basis of these narratives. Their actions undoubtedly influenced the eventual outcome of the epidemic, though perhaps not in the way they had intended. And then the Black Death itself became a paradigm of disaster in the European cultural memory, influencing future representations of, and reactions to, similar events. Even acting on the basis of mistaken or incomplete information, human beings are capable of shaping the course of history and then, in retrospect, modifying their cultural narratives to include the consequences of their actions.

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The key words are ‘in retrospect’. The authors of the ‘what if’ scenarios in Virtual History know what their subjects do not, which is what choices will eventually be made. The characters’ future is the authors’ past. Moreover, the characters’ present is the authors’ conditional. By describing a possible world in which Hitler won World War II, the historian knows that this world is unborn but the Hitler of his/her text does not know it. There is always an inevitable split between the agency of the characters and of the author/narrator. For the former, the narrative is open-ended; for the latter, it is closed, already-written. One might object that it is true about any kind of fiction. Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment agonizes over the dilemma of killing or not killing the old woman but the very title of the novel makes it clear what he is going to do. However, for Dostoyevsky with his Christian agenda the decision to kill is less important than the psychological dynamics of repentance and atonement. Since we are all sinners, the wrong choice is all but guaranteed by human nature. This is not the case in texts that make the freedom of choice into their thematic core and the malleability of the future into the organizing principle of their chronotope. What narrative techniques can such texts use? In ‘Essential Narrative’ Morson considers at length the formal features of what he calls ‘processual works’, in which the ‘past affects but does not exhaustively determine the present and future’ (307). He lists several such features: the author must operate in the mode of ‘processual intentionality’, not knowing for certain how the story is going to turn out (like Dickens who published his novels in instalments and often changed his plot in the middle of publication); many loose ends and unanswered questions remain in the plot; the reader must adopt the position of reading ‘in terms of potentials’ rather than structures (308–9). All together, these features will create the sense that ‘the story as it develops is one of many possible stories; that if it were possible to play the tape again, there are many points where something else might have happened’ (310). Morson’s list, while illuminating, is a mixed bag of narrative analysis and unenforceable demands. No one can know for sure whether the author of a particular text is a happy-go-lucky improviser or an anal-retentive plotter-ahead. Dickens’ earlier novels seem to be more haphazard than the latter ones but this is just as easy to correlate with his growing skill and bank account as with a shift in intentionality. The reader may, or may not, adopt a particular stance in relation to a particular work unless there is something in the work itself that forces him/her to do so. And loose ends may be the result of a looming deadline rather than of a philosophical choice. Contingency, in short, has to be represented through the shape of the chronotope rather than sought in the worldview or the author or the mood of the reader. The chronotope of contingency inscribes two levels of subjectivity within the text: that of the implied author and/or narrator, and that of the character(s). This is largely true about all narrative chronotopes but what is special about contingency is the huge epistemological gap between the diegetic (character)

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and extradiegetic (the implied author and/or omniscient narrator) subjectivity. The implied author/omniscient narrator knows which of the plot events are kernels and which – satellites; he knows what choices the characters are going to make. But the characters themselves do not know it and are always operating under the conditions of uncertainty. As Morson points out, in contingency narratives there can be no ‘leakage’ of information from the extradiegetic to diegetic level; foreshadowing and prophecy are outlawed. The omniscient narrator can share his knowledge with the reader but not with the characters. Moreover, the narrator knows not only the history of his fictional world but also the history of our world, and the effect of his narration hinges upon the implicit juxtaposition of the two. But this knowledge is inaccessible to the characters. The diegetic and extradiegetic agents in alternate histories inhabit different timelines. Robert Silverberg’s alternate-history SF Roma Eterna (2003) is the history of the world as it might have been had Moses not led the Exodus from Egypt and consequently Christianity had never arisen. The novel beautifully demonstrates the split between the extradiegetic and diegetic narrative agency. It consists of a series of narratives situated at the pivotal moments of the alternate history, in which the Roman Empire never falls and continues to rule the world, while going through political, ethnic and technological transformations. Each narrative is either focalized through, or narrated in the first person by, an actor in the pivotal event that is unfolding at a specific historical juncture. The timeline of the novel covers 1500 years, from 1203 AUC (ab urbe condita, ‘from the founding of the city’, 753 BC in our calendar) to 2723 AUC. The protagonist of the novel is Roma itself, both the city and the Empire, a vast and growing network of spaces and stories, shifting from the ‘benighted kingdom of magic and terror’ in the first episode, in which an old soldier wanders the Roman catacombs with a young and wily emperor’s heir who is about to take over and transform the empire (48) to the ‘status quo, the holy stability of the world government’, which is being challenged by a tiny band of Hebrews in the last (439). But Roma is an actant, not an agent. Its trajectory from a semi-oriental city torn apart by assassination and intrigue to the world Imperium is shaped by the actions of all the multiple characters, narrators and focalizers that constitute the novel’s human population. Silverberg constructs a dazzling panorama of their conflicting interests, motivations and beliefs. Neither has any precise knowledge of the consequences of their actions; in fact, in most cases their vision of the future is wrong. The old soldier Faustus in the first story, on the cusp of the event that is about to transform the Empire, muses: ‘perhaps now that we have created so much past for ourselves, we have very little future, and really are wandering toward the finish now, and will disappear into our own softness, our own confusion, our own fatal love of pleasure and ease’ (49). But it is Faustus’ own guiding of the future emperor Maximilianus the Great through the pleasure underworld of Roma that helps to shape him into a ruthless and politically savvy ruler who ensures the future of the Empire by

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consolidating power and beating off the barbarians. In ‘Via Roma’, a Briton named Cymbelin, a loyal admirer of the Emperor, is unwittingly embroiled in a conspiracy that briefly substitutes a Second Republic for the decadent Empire. And even when an action leads to the desired results, there is often a dissonance between motivation and choice. In the second episode ‘A Hero of the Empire’, an empty-headed and boastful Roman exile to Syria Palaestina Corbulo casts about for the means to appease the Emperor, angry at his sexual indiscretions, and comes up with a plan to assassinate a man named Mahmud who is about to preach a new monotheistic faith in the backwaters of the Empire. Corbulo, who is the narrator of the story, is such an unpleasant, silly and self-deluded character that we unconsciously expect him to be set up for a fall. And yet his evaluation of the situation is correct: he realizes that monotheism is a deadly danger to the secular Roman civilization: ‘We of the Empire have only the statues of our gods, and no one of any intelligence has taken those gods seriously for hundreds of years. How can we withstand the fiery onslaught of the new faith? It will roll down upon us like the lava of Vesuvius’ (118). Knowing the role of Christianity in the downfall of Rome, we realize Corbulo is right but nobody in his own world, least of all the still peeved Emperor, accepts his boastful claim of being ‘a hero of the Empire’. Yet the choices made by the characters, no matter how chancy, dangerous, or wrong, are precisely what shapes the historical narrative of Roma Eterna. And at the same time, this narrative, the overarching ideology of the global Empire of peace and prosperity, is what frames their choices and makes them intelligible. For Silverberg acting in the context of history means being aware of this context. His characters are not just psychological and moral subjects, but more importantly, political and ideological subjects. The disproportion between means and ends; the unforeseen consequences of choices; the swerves and sharp curves of history are eventually incorporated into the unfolding narrative of Roma, which in turn conditions and frames choices made by individual Romans. In this dialectical and dynamic relation between cultural matrix and individual choice lies the true power of contingency, which is neither the chaos of randomness nor the straightjacket of determinism. When in ‘Waiting for the End’ the Romanized Greek Lucius has to make a choice between the temporarily triumphant Byzantium, which is about to take over the Western Empire, and the exiled Western Emperor, his choice is ideological: contrary to his own origin and that of the woman he loves he chooses to be a Roman, to go west. And it is this choice, made in the last sentence of this story that explains the next story set 250 years in the future, in which decadent Byzantium is once again ruled by the Roma, newly inspired by the belief that without Pax Romana, ‘the world would fall into chaos’ (232). But the characters’ unfolding historical narrative is framed by our own, just as their agency is framed by the extradiegetic agency of the implied author. While struggling to make sense of their past and shape their future, the characters are unaware of the virtuality of their own world, which is communicated, above

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their heads as it were, between the author and the reader. The pleasure of the novel lies precisely in this extradiegetic dialog, which creates multiple ironies, inaccessible to the characters. We know, as Corbulo does not, that the ‘legions of Allah’ will indeed march ‘through Italia and Gallia and Britannia’ (or at least will attempt to do so throughout ‘our’ Middle Ages) (119). We know, as Faustus does not, that his relationship with Maximilianus mirrors the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal. We know, as Dr Ben-Simeon in the last story does not, that his belief that the Hebrew Exodus would not have changed the course of history, that the Jews ‘would always have been a special people . . . a small and stubborn tribe, clinging to our knowledge of the One God amidst the hordes who needed to believe in many’ is both right and wrong, since the offshoot of Judaism, Christianity, brought down Roma (433). This process of evaluating and deciphering an alternate history against our own constitutes a unique pleasure of the genre and this pleasure is predicated on the two-tiered structure of subjectivity within the chronotope, in which the characters and the author/omniscient narrator inhabit different timelines. Moreover, the dialog between the author and the reader creates the possibilities of delivering a political, moral, or philosophical message, which would be unintelligible to the characters. In realistic fiction, on the contrary, the didactic message of the text is very often channelled through the characters and internalized by them. The reader of Crime and Punishment is supposed to learn the same moral lesson of repentance and atonement as Raskolnikov does; the female reader of Pride and Prejudice internalizes the moral and social transformation of Elizabeth Bennett by identifying with her. But the topicality of Roma Eterna belongs to our world. The dangers of monotheism; the advantages and pitfalls of a world government; the dynamic of violence and technological progress – all of these are necessarily read in the context of 9/11, American dominance and nuclear proliferation. But this context is an imaginary counterfactual for the inhabitants of the Eternal Empire. The characters in an alternate history can make choices precisely because they are not privy to the extradiegetic information reserved for the author and the reader. But the author and the reader cannot penetrate the closed world of the alternate history chronotope; they can watch from the outside, drawing conclusions but barred from action. On no other genre the omniscience of the omniscient narrator is so literal; and in no other genre is this omniscience so clearly paired with impotence. Agency is contingent on the irreducible uncertainty and open-endedness of the future, which textual agents possess in their world and we – in ours.

A Thousand-book Reich In the Prologue to Roma Eterna, two Roman historians discuss a counterfactual, in which the Jews do reach Syria Palaestina and spread their cult through the

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Empire. One of them is enthusiastic about such speculations, while the second one is sceptical and bored. The enthusiast tells the sceptic: ‘I find speculating about such possibilities very stimulating’ and the sceptic replies: ‘I prefer to deal with matters as they really are’ (4). We are back to the division between those who find contingency enthralling and those who find it abhorrent. But if this particular division may be a matter of some basic psychological type, the question of what possibilities are seen as stimulating by those who tend to be stimulated by possibilities is less easy to write off as an individual vagary. Alternate histories, theoretically speaking, may start off at any fork in the historical road. The rise of Christianity, the fall of Rome, the Black Death, the Spanish Armada, the American Civil War . . . History is filled with such decisive ‘kernels’ and SF would never run out of new counterfactuals to explore. And indeed, for each scenario outlined in Virtual History it is possible to find a corresponding SF novel or short story. The scenario of the Spanish Armada conquering England, for example, is the foundation of Keith Roberts’ classic novel Pavane (1966), while the consequences of the Black Death depopulating Europe are explored in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt (2002). But outnumbering any other event a hundred to one as the foundation for an alternate history is Hitler’s victory in World War II. Gavriel Rosenfeld’s 2005 book The World Hitler Never Made documents hundreds of novels, short stories, comic books, TV series and movies dedicated to a Nazi victory. And since 2005, their number has only grown. The question is: why this particular fork in the road? It is hard to argue on general grounds that Hitler’s victory would have been more momentous than the rise of Christianity. Nor is its historical proximity to our own time sufficient to explain the astonishing potency of this counterfactual. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, much more recent, to the best of my knowledge, has not generated any alternate histories in the West and precious few in Russia. Rosenfeld’s answer to this question is that the proliferation of alternate histories of Nazism ‘point to a growing normalizing trend in the Western memory of the Nazi era’ (25). But this is a strange claim, considering the fact that ‘normal’ history quickly passes out of the ken of popular culture. It seems that precisely the opposite trend is going on. Rather than being ‘normalized’ into history, Nazism is elevated into mythology. Nazi references are everywhere in politics, culture and the arts. Posters of Obama with Hitler’s moustache are carried by the conservative protesters who compare the health care reform to the Holocaust. Quentin Tarrantino graduates from ‘Kill Bill’ to ‘Kill Jews’/’Jews Kill’ in Inglourious Basterds. A routine thriller, Sara Rayne’s Roots of Evil (2005), is set in Auschwitz . . . and so on. ‘The Holocaust has become a fixture of American culture’, wrote Jeffrey Shandler in 1999, documenting the representations of the Holocaust and Nazism in every possible TV genre, from melodrama (Holocaust miniseries) to SF (Star Trek) (xi). In the ten years since, the number of such representations, references and

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images has snowballed. Adorno said: ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’. Sometimes it seems that it has been misread as ‘No poetry but Auschwitz’. The roots of this mythologizing of Nazism are complex, but the consequences are all around us. Nazism and the Holocaust have become the emblematic moment of (post)modernity, the locus of its political, ideological and cultural anxieties. Nazism is no longer an ideology, no matter how dangerous; rather, it is the signifier of political tyranny and social perversion. The Holocaust is no longer a genocide, no matter how terrible; rather, it is a distillation of all the cruelty and violence humanity is capable of. Lyotard in Heidegger and ‘the jews’ assimilates the Jewish people to the ‘unspoken’ and ‘the forgotten’ within the Occidental psyche, to the misery of being human, which is predicated on the feeling of lack. ‘Now, the final solution consists in exterminating this feeling and along with it the secret of thought, even of occidental thought’ (Lyotard 1990, 27). The problem with this analysis is not that it is wrong but that it is always right. Any genocide, whether of Jews, Tutsis, enemies of the people or any other social or ethnic minority, may be construed as a revolt against the misery and incompleteness of the human condition. But then, any genocide can stand for any other; and the Holocaust becomes a one-size-fits-all signifier of the revolt against ‘the unconscious anxiety’ of being human through mass violence (Lyotard 1990, 27). It is no longer a historical event but a lofty abstraction, belonging to everybody and nobody. Perhaps the most ironic consequence of this mythologizing of the Holocaust is that it has achieved the opposite results from what its theoreticians intended. There was much discussion in the 1980s and 1990s of the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust. Alvin Rosenfeld, Dominick La Capra, Saul Friedlander and most provocatively, Claude Lanzmann, the author of Shoah, insisted that any artistic or fictional representation of the Holocaust, beyond the victims’ testimonies, was immoral and exploitative. Alvin Rosenfeld denied the legitimacy of imaginative treatments of the genocide, stating ‘one of the abiding laws’ of Holocaust literature: ‘there are no metaphors for Auschwitz, just as Auschwitz is not a metaphor for anything else’ (27). By keeping strictly to the literal; by limiting Holocaust literature to survivors’ testimony, it was hoped that ideological and commercial exploitation of the Holocaust could be avoided and its memory kept intact. As Lyotard points out: ‘Only that which has been inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten because it could be effaced’ (1990, 26). Thus, ‘bearing witness’ was best done in silence or with as few words as possible. But the sanctification and reification of the Holocaust as the metaphysical black hole of history paradoxically resulted in a veritable flood of ‘witnessing’, ‘commemoration’ and representation, done with scant regard for historical accuracy or appropriateness. Cut loose from its moorings in the particular and contingent history of mid-twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust could be freely (mis)used. It has become a secular equivalent of scriptures, endlessly interpreted, quoted and relied upon to support mutually exclusive positions.

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The grotesque spectacle of the Iranian President debating the Holocaust in order to lambaste Israel testifies to the unfortunate consequences of making the Nazi genocide of the Jews into the moral cornerstone of postmodernity. Lawrence Langer opposed the profane ‘history’ of the Holocaust to its sacred ‘memory’. It seems that the more the Holocaust becomes part of our cultural memory, the less does it have to do with actual history. Alternate histories of Nazism (which, by definition, involve the Holocaust, even if they do not deal with it directly) seem to be part of this mythologizing tendency. What can be more a-historical than taking the Holocaust out of the actual and transferring it into the virtual? What can be more disturbing than considering whether the Holocaust may not have happened or may have happened on a smaller scale? Are we not skirting perilously close to Holocaust denial in such exercises? Gavriel Rosenfeld’s negative assessment of the ‘allohistorical’ Holocaust literature is based on the positive answers to these questions. ‘Normalizing’ for him means precisely the dying-down of moral outrage and the gradual acceptance that the Holocaust is a contingent historical event, subject to the same rules of ‘might have been’ as any other. But this acceptance, as I have argued above, is in fact unusual in the atmosphere of the gradual reification of the Holocaust. Alternate histories of Nazism may be more or less successful, more or less politically astute, but they differ from any other popular-culture representation of Nazism by explicitly, rather than implicitly, distancing themselves from the facts of history. And this explicitness, paradoxically, grants them a higher moral ground. Almost any ‘realistic’ representation of Auschwitz, for example, can be impugned on the grounds of historical accuracy for showing the death camp as more bearable than it in fact was. But counterfactual representations, by definition, deal not with the history of the Holocaust but with its historicity. The emphasis on historicity allows alternate histories to function as a cultural counterweight to the pervasive sanctification and reification of the event, in which a specific group of people (the Nazis) attempted to exterminate another group of people (the Jews) for specific and intelligible reasons. By testing ‘what if’ scenarios, alternate history returns Nazism to its place in the concrete sequence of twentieth-century events, with all their contingency, chanciness and choice. If Hitler could have won World War II, it becomes possible to analyse the actual reasons why he had not, instead of falling back on the clichés of the inevitable defeat of evil. If we can imagine a world without Hitler altogether, we can pinpoint the actual factors that had enabled his rise to power, instead of sinking into the gloomy fatalism of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’. As opposed to grand deterministic schemes, in contingent history individual agency and choice matter. The history of Nazism and the Holocaust is a fertile testing-ground for pondering the issue of agency and moral choice: not because of the exceptionality of the events but because of their typicality. Moral choice within a perilous political situation is an everyday occurrence. The Third Reich typifies the dynamics of this choice only because of the dramatic brevity and moral clarity

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of its historical narrative. Nazism is not a demonic possession but it is undoubtedly a peculiarly evil and dangerous ideology, all the more so because of its deep roots in nineteenth-century European culture. The Holocaust is not the only mass murder in history but it is undoubtedly exceptionally atrocious and exceptionally chilling because of its purely ideological nature and because it utilized science (biology) and technology in service of its irrational goals. Thus, whenever historians and philosophers have pondered the issue of agency and responsibility Nazism was often the primary arena for their debates. Daniel Goldhagen’s famous and controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust starts with a powerful denunciation of the deterministic explanations of the Holocaust. Such explanations ‘treat them [the perpetrators] as if they had been people lacking a moral sense, lacking the ability to make decisions and take stances. They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills, but as beings moved solely by external forces or by transhistorical and invariant psychological propensities, such as the slavish following of narrow “self-interest” ’ (13). As opposed to this image of Nazis as puppets of some evil design, Goldhagen poses the self-evident question: why did so many ordinary people choose to kill other ordinary people? His answer – because of a particularly virulent anti-Semitic ideology – has been criticized by other historians on (often political) grounds. But caveats with regard to the answer do not invalidate the question, which assumes that people, Nazis or not, make decisions based on an internalized ideological/cultural narrative, which provides them with a moral and epistemological compass for action. And just as they have the agency to navigate within this narrative, they also have the agency to accept or reject it. The question ‘Why?’ refuses to go away. Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler documents the numberless attempts to deny the subjectivity of the Führer himself, to explain away his actions by attributing them to the Enlightenment, German militarism, a taint of Jewish blood, or sexual pathology. But as Rosenfeld points out, such deterministic explanations, no matter how scandalous or bizarre, shield us from a much more shocking possibility: that Hitler was one of us, an ordinary human being, who chose to act as he did. Quoting Milton Himmelfarb, Rosenbaum suggests that ‘ “Hitler murdered Jews not because he had to”, not because he was impelled by abstract historical forces toward an inevitable end but because of his own personal will and desire, “because he wanted to” ’ (xiii–xiv; emphasis in the original). In explaining (or explaining away) Nazism, we try to explain (or explain away) our own agency. Adolf Hitler is Everyman: . . . one’s way of understanding or explaining Hitler can reflect a characteristic way of understanding the nature of the self. In particular, a position on the decisiveness of Hitler’s personal role in the Holocaust frequently reflects a position on the possibility or relevance of autonomous agency, or free will, of freedom to choose evil, and responsibility for consequences of such choice. (Rosenbaum xli)

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In the next section I am going to look at three famous alternate histories of Nazism written over the period of 40 years. The question I am going to ask is: what is the connection between the shape of the chronotope, the representation of history and the inscription of agency? And I will argue that only one of these celebrated texts is actually an alternate history, based on the notion of contingency. Not surprisingly, it is also the only one that inscribes agency as autonomous and will as free.

Saintly Nazis and Conspiratorial Jews The first alternate history of Nazism was written when Nazism barely had a history. Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, published in 1937, depicted a triumphant Third Reich, 600 years into the future, where the Final Solution of the Jewish Question has long ago been accomplished and the women have been reduced to the breeding machines of the eugenic super-race. This amazing prophecy highlights the crucial role of Nazi ideology in the Holocaust. Anybody who had read Mein Kampf (1923) could have guessed what was coming. But after the war this crucial insight was lost. Many alternate histories of the Reich triumphant in the 1960s–1980s treated the Nazis as simply ‘bad guys’: morally corrupt, hungry for power and in general the perfect villains to the noble English or American protagonist. A wildly popular 1970s British thriller SS-GB (1978) by Len Deighton demonstrates how the shift toward a more moralistic rather than ideological view of Nazism weakens the ethical problematic of the text. In Deighton’s novel taking place in an alternate 1941, Hitler avoided what many historians consider to be his crucial mistake, the invasion of the USSR and honoured the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, invading and conquering England instead.5 Situating the novel so close to the crucial point of divergence, Deighton achieves a certain gritty authenticity, drawing on the memory of the actual wartime London, with its shortages and blackouts. But the plot, involving complex machinations of the Resistance and of various factions inside the German military machine to obtain the secret of the atomic bomb and to involve the US in the war, ultimately degenerates into a routine cat-and-mouth spy game. The protagonist, who is doing his best to survive without compromising his public-school code of honour, is sympathetic but no more than that; his Nazi antagonists are unpleasant but no more than that. The stakes are national rather than ideological and the entire novel has a curiously old-fashioned feel, as if it were an alternate history of World War I rather than II. References to the Holocaust are limited to the fact that the Nazis put ‘the signs that said “Jewish Undertaking” ’ on shops but nobody pays attention to them anyway (14). The novel has a third-person omniscient narrator and is consistently focalized through the protagonist. As opposed to Roma Eterna the narrator does not communicate with the implied reader; there are very few instances of dramatic irony caused by the disparity of timelines between the narrator and the characters. But instead of making the novel more ‘authentic’, this only makes it fairly

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boring. By failing to provide a cross-temporal historical context for his characters’ actions the author vitiates the significance of their moral choices to the point where they are no more momentous than the moral choice of a cop in a police procedural. But where the failings of SS-GB are mostly generic (the attempt to write an alternate history as if it were a spy thriller), the failing of a far more famous ‘Hitler Victorious’ novel are ideological. I refer to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which preceded Deighton’s by 15 years. More artistically accomplished than almost any other alternate history of World War II, Dick’s novel, nevertheless, is problematic both in terms of its form and its message; or rather, its message is problematic because of its form. Dick’s novel portrays the aftermath of the Axis victory, in which the West of the United States is ruled by the Japanese, while Europe has become a Nazi domain and Africa is depopulated by a German genocide. It follows the intertwined lives of several characters in San Francisco, including a secret Jew and jewellery-maker Frank Fink, his estranged wife Juliana, a Japanese mission representative Mr Tagomi and others. In many ways, it is a very 1960s novel, pervaded by a sort of benign Orientalism, with the ‘good’ characters admiring to I Ching and Zen Buddhism, while the Nazi villains are possessed by the Teutonic will to power, ‘overcome by some archetype’ (42). The puzzling characterization of the Japanese as peaceful Taoist contemplatives despite their record of wartime atrocities in China and Korea stems not only from the lack of historical data but also from the general orientation toward the ‘passive’ and ‘receptive’ East. But beyond this flower-child paraphernalia Dick’s novel expresses the sense of history not as contingent but as random and chaotic. History is fragmented beyond any possible integration; it is a concatenation of random events with no meaning. The Nazis’ madness is the belief that history can be understood and controlled: ‘They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history’ (41). Wisdom, on the other hand, lies in accepting the Moment, in living in the perceptual ‘now’, in adapting to the flow of events without trying to direct it. I Ching serves as an incarnation of this attitude of acceptance and passivity, which is shared by the Jew Fink and the Japanese Tagomi. History is irredeemably evil, not because of its many atrocities but because it offers a temptation to understand, and thus to control, its flow. The sub-plot concerning fake historical artifacts underscores the need to free oneself from ‘the cloud of the past’ (223). Historicity is a construct, randomly attached to a collection of memories and objects. At best, one can make local and particular choices without trying to envision the entire historical sequence, of which one is a part. ‘We can only hope. And try’ (246). The novel includes its own alternate history, a novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen, which depicts the Allies’ victory in World War II. However, this history is equally alternate to our own, since neither the victory nor its aftermath is the same as in our timeline. The characters reading the

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book try to decide whether this counterfactual presents a world better or worse than their own. The answer seems that it is pretty much the same; or rather, that the question itself is meaningless because history cannot be evaluated. This metafictional strategy induces a similar reading of The Man in the High Castle. Dick’s counterfactual aims neither to condemn nor to normalize Nazism but rather to disable the reader’s political and moral judgement of history. The Nazi victory is atrocious but so would have been its defeat. ‘Hopeless wherever one looks,’ as Mr Tagomi decides, contemplating the ‘might-have-beens’ of Japan’s choices in the war (222). The evil of Nazism in Dick is the evil of the modern technological state and its ‘instrumental’ reason rather than of a specific political movement that made use of both. It is not that Dick’s novel is non-ideological. Rather, its ideology is the reduction of the specifics of history to a random accumulation of abstract signifiers, in which any event can stand for any other. The ‘postmodernism’ of The Man in the High Castle is the postmodernism of political anomie. Written before the current sanctification of the Holocaust, the novel barely refers to the Final Solution of the Jewish question, substituting for it the Nazi depopulation of Africa and their planned nuclear attack on Japan. Any atrocity is like any other. Paradoxically, Dick’s disinterest in the Holocaust achieves the same result as its reification. Removed from history, it becomes an empty cliché of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. The book has an omniscient extradiegetic narrator who focalizes through a number of characters (Fink, Juliana, Robert Childan, Mr Tagomi and some others). The frequent shifts of focalization within a relatively short text create the sense of fragmentation. Eventually it seems that each character veers off into his or her alternate reality. While there are some moments of irony (the description of the terrible fall of Berlin in Abendsen’s book as ‘cheap popular fiction’, for example), they are far less central than in other alternate histories (125). Since our history is just as random and inconsequential as any other it cannot function as a yardstick by which to measure the alternate history of the Nazi triumph. The only source of extradiegetic textual authority in the novel is I Ching, which might be regarded as a ‘voice’ of the implied author (it turns out that it ‘wrote’ The Grasshopper book through Abendsen). And what this voice is saying is deliberately ambiguous and obscure. Dick’s characters, despite engaging in a great deal of activity, from making jewellery to trying to prevent a Nazi nuclear attack on Japan, are ultimately powerless. Their plots (in both sense of the word) come to naught because nobody is in control of events that happen ‘for no real reason’ (241). Generically speaking, Dick’s novel is not an alternate history. It is closer to Lem’s The Chain of Chance as a representation of a chaotic universe, in which time brings neither reprieve nor understanding but merely senseless repetition of random actions. The 1990s was the first time when alternate history, hitherto languishing in the SF ghetto, went mainstream with the publication of an explosive bestseller, Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992), which took as its point of divergence – what

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else? – Hitler’s victory. The novel was fiercely criticized: Gavriel Rosenfeld echoes some of the criticism when he faults Harris for choosing as his protagonist an SS officer, Xavier March (Rosenfeld 85–7). But it is precisely this risky artistic decision that allows the novel to approach the Holocaust as a matter of human choice rather than of the inexorable laws of history or the blind roll of dice. Both by deploying the conventions of the detective story and by focusing on the perpetrators rather than the victims, Harris’ novel moves human agency to the centre of historical debate. Xavier March, an officer in the Criminal Division of the Gestapo in an alternate 1964, is not a proverbial ‘good Nazi’. He is a disillusioned noir detective, a Philip Marlow in jackboots. Investigating the murder of a high-ranking Nazi official, he stumbles upon the evidence of the Holocaust (which in this timeline has been completed). From that moment on the plot unfolds as a combination of the classic detective story and thriller, as March untangles the complex web of official lies and evasions and forms a liaison with an American journalist Charlie Maguire. Eventually he forfeits his life in order to enable the smuggling of the evidence of the Holocaust to the US, which is on the verge of establishing a détente with the Third Reich. The ending of the novel finds him on the site of a razed Auschwitz, pursued by the SS and groping in the grass for the evidence that the death camp had been there. The generic heterogeneity of the novel (alternate history, thriller and the detective story) is not unusual; it is found also in SS-GB. But Harris makes a particularly effective use of it. The detective story is an epistemological genre, structured by what Roland Barthes calls ‘the code of the enigma’ Alternate history, like the rest of SF is an ontological genre, concerned with the questions of being and being-in-history. What March investigates is the nature of history. In the detective story, the detective has to answer a specific set of questions: ‘whodunit’, ‘how’ and ‘why’. March successfully answers the first two but it is stymied by the third one. And yet, instead of the aporia of Dick’s novel, in which motivation and action are sundered by the futility of attempting to control history, in Harris, the impossibility of answering the question ‘why’ actually highlights the freedom of individual choice. One is reminded of the famous incident in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, in which a sadistic guard answers Levi’s question as to why he is not allowed to drink with ‘there is no why here’ (Levi 25). Often taken as a sort of emblem of the sublime incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, this episode can be read in an entirely different light if the focus shifts to the guard himself rather than to the helpless prisoner. No ‘why’ means that the guard is free to allow the prisoner a small mercy – or not. And the fact that he does not indicates that Goldhagen is right in emphasizing the perpetrators’ ‘ability to make decisions and take stances’ (Goldhagen 27). The guard decides to inflict this additional torture upon the prisoners; and whether he is motivated by an anti-Semitic ideology or simple pleasure of power, this motivation is always insufficient to

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explain his decision fully. In this irreducible gap between motivation and action lies the freedom of will. March investigates the genocide as he would any other crime, seeking an individual perpetrator with an intelligible cause for his actions. He finds a hierarchy of them: from the mid-level bureaucrats, such as Josef Buhler and Martin Luther, to the political and military movers and shakers, Reinhard Heydrich, Herman Goering and the Führer himself. All these characters are, of course, real people whose fictional biographies after the ‘fork’ of 1942 are entirely plausible. But their motivations for their crime are as opaque as they are in our history. March uncovers a spectrum of ‘causes’: bureaucratic blindness, ideological fervour, sheer thuggishness. But they are as inadequate to the magnitude of the Holocaust in the Third Reich triumphant as they are in the aftermath of its defeat. Eventually, March realizes that he himself is complicit in the genocide; not just in a metaphysical sense of ‘German guilt’ but in a very practical sense that in the case of an ordinary murder would land him in jail as an accessory. Speaking to his superior Krebs who tells him he did not know about the Final Solution, March insists: ‘Of course you knew! You knew every time someone made a joke about “going East” . . . We knew when we moved into their houses, when we took over their property, their jobs. We knew but we didn’t have the facts’ (512). And yet March himself does not know why he looked the other way and condoned the genocide and why he finally rebels when confronted with the documented facts. This psychological inconsistency, often criticized as one of the novel’s weaknesses, is in fact its greatest strength because it dramatizes the gap between the causal/deterministic explanations of human behaviour and the freedom of choice. Within the deterministic scheme of the detective story March is both the detective and the criminal, doggedly following the chains of cause and effects. But these chains snap when it comes to moral decisions. If March did not have to be a saint, neither did the real-life Nazis have to be criminals. The centrality of individual agency in Fatherland is emphasized by the fact that it is consistently focalized through March. Just as he does not know at the end whether Charlie will succeed in smuggling the evidence to America, neither do we. And yet the omniscient narrator/implied author, while never speaking in his own voice, is an overarching presence in the novel. Instances of dramatic irony generated by the juxtaposition of two histories, far more numerous in Fatherland than in The Man in the High Castle, create a dialog between the implied author and the implied reader ‘above’ the head of March who cannot appreciate the impact of ‘a group of young Englishmen from Liverpool who were playing to packed audiences of German youths in Hamburg’ (66) or of the EU flag drooping below a swastika banner. But instead of distancing us from the protagonist, this split between the two levels of narrative agency in the novel brings us closer to him. We know what March does not: that his world is

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provisional, imaginary, tottering on the hinge of one or many individual decision(s). But he knows what we do not: that our world is exactly the same. Probably the most celebrated recent alternate history is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). And it is also the most disappointing. Roth, a latemodernist writer, tries his hand at a postmodern genre but brings with him the assumptions and artistic techniques of his previous semi-realistic explorations of the Jewish experience in America. The result is both structurally incoherent and ideologically problematic. The novel is based on contingency, yet it embraces historical determinism as wholeheartedly as does ‘Demon of History’. A similar contradiction inheres in its narrative voice. The focalizer is an eight-year-old alter ego of Roth growing up in an alternate Fascist America. But the narrator is a mature Roth, living in our own timeline. This unexplained shift serves to tame the disturbing implications of contingency, while ensuring the ultimate return to what had to be. The novel’s alternate history becomes merely a game, a short swerve away from the highway of historical inevitability. Roth’s fork in the road is the election of Charles Lindbergh as the Republican President instead of Roosevelt in 1940. Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite, promptly signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler and institutes a series of anti-Jewish measures, which adversely affect the Roth family in their haven of Jewish Newark. The scenario is not implausible and seems to lead in the same direction as Dick’s and Harris’: the Nazi victory and the completed Holocaust of European (and perhaps American) Jewry. And since, as opposed to Dick and Harris, it is specifically the Jewish experience that is the focus of Roth’s novel, it is hard to see how he can avoid tackling the contingency of the Holocaust head-on. But avoid it he does, by the deus ex machina device of Lindbergh’s disappearance in the middle of his presidency. Suddenly and with no explanation whatsoever, history resumes its familiar course. Roosevelt is elected by landslide; the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour; the US enters the war; and ‘six million European Jews . . . cease to exist’, no more and no less (4). Since we find this out at the very beginning of the novel, any suspense as to the future history of either the narrator or his world is eliminated. The narrator’s response to the contingency of history is fear and loathing. He describes his child alter ego’s reaction to Lindbergh’s election: ‘the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything . . . The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic’ (113–14). But in fact, ‘turning a disaster into an epic’ is precisely what Roth’s novel attempts to do. The epic has a predictable ending and a predictable hero; and so does Roth’s version of history, with the hero being America. The antiSemitism of the Lindbergh episode is quickly forgotten and America resumes its familiar role of the self-appointed defender of liberty. But if this role is inevitable, how could have Lindbergh become President? And if it is not, why was the alternate history so suddenly aborted? By trying to

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reconcile contingency and determinism, Roth’s novel disintegrates into structural and ideological incoherence. It is left with a conspiracy theory as the only intelligible model for history. Lindbergh’s presidency, it turns out, was a sinister and totally implausible plot engineered by the Nazi masterminds. Considering the unsavoury role of conspiracy theories in anti-Semitism, this development is rather alarming. And yet, it is in a sense inescapable. Roth is trying to have his cake and to eat it: to show that a Holocaust could have happened in the US and yet at the same time to sanctify the Holocaust. Perhaps he feels that by historicizing the Holocaust he risks trivializing it or undermining one of the cornerstones of the Jewish-American identity. But as the result of his own formal and ideological impasse he is forced to flirt with the conspiracy theories that absolve Lindbergh himself from the responsibility for his actions. Nobody in the novel has any agency; everybody is a victim of forces beyond their control and comprehension. The 8-year-old Roth becomes a model of the historical subject: a snivelling child in a world spinning out of control and brought back to the historical ‘normalcy’ by the fiat of the omnipotent author. That the actual Holocaust becomes the measure of this normalcy is perhaps all that needs to be said about the novel’s philosophy of history. These three alternate histories of World War II demonstrate that neither determinism nor randomness offers a satisfactory narrative model for emplotting history. The Holocaust is only one of the cataclysms whose magnitude defeats both the serene reliance on the necessary laws of history and the impotent resignation in the face of historical chance. In between necessity and chance, however, lies the realm of contingency, in which human choices have predictable outcomes but the choices themselves are free and undetermined. And though it is, perhaps, emotionally hard to contemplate the Holocaust in the context of the ‘what if’ scenarios, it is, I believe, a morally valid view and ideologically liberating of the genocide. Alternate history brings the Holocaust from the realm of myth back into history.

Posthuman Choices The very notion of agency is problematized in postmodernism by its linkage to the notion of humanism, which is ‘viewed not as progressive but as reactionary, on account of the manner in which it “appeals positively to the notion of a core humanity or common essential feature in terms of which human beings can be defined and understood” ’ (Badmington 2). The human subject, ridiculed by Roland Barthes in his early essay ‘The Great Family of Man’ as a reflex of liberal ‘Adamism’, is to be supplanted by the posthuman (1957, 102). The posthuman has been conceptualized by Donna Haraway as a ‘cyborg’: fragmented, self-contradictory, protean, straddling the conceptual boundaries between human and animal, human and machine. The posthuman is plural rather than

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singular; a process rather than an entity. ‘The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’ (Haraway 150). The cyborg is the postmodern subject writ large and augmented with the full panoply of implanted computer chips, genetically engineered immunities and radical cosmetic modifications. The cyborg is here. It is mostly here in SF. SF is the genre where the theoreticians of posthumanity go in search of their future subjects. From the androids of Blade Runner to the Borg of Star Trek; from the Forged of Justina Robson’s Natural History (2004), which contain quasi-human minds in bodies the size of mountains to Reynold’s Slashers going about in a cloud of nano-machines in Century Rain; and to the virtual bodiless minds of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Greg Egan’s Permutation City, SF vividly displays what postmodern theoreticians only dimly dream about. I will have more to say about posthuman subjects in the Conclusion. Here I only want to problematize the connection between agency and humanism and to suggest that it is precisely the free-choice agent of contingent history who is truly posthuman. Barthes points out that humanism and historicity are mutually exclusive, since humanism, in positing an ‘eternal’ human nature, is deterministic and anti-evolutionary: ‘I rather fear that the final justification of all this Adamism is to give to the immobility of the world the alibi of a “wisdom” and a “lyricism” which only make the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them’ (1957, 102). Similarly, Haraway argues that the political foundation of the cyborg is the postmodern recognition of the historical flux of all identities, including biological, gender and species identities: ‘We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body’ (155). It is ‘historically constituted’ in two senses of the word: as the contingent result of the historical process of evolution; and as the discursive construct ‘filtering’ the biological reality within a specific cultural and historical matrix. The two are inextricably linked. The first posthumans are the Eloi and the Morlocks. Haraway is sceptical of the concept of choice because according to her ‘choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology’ (173). But this is refuted by the very SF texts she implicitly references in her depiction of the human-machineanimal hybrid. The Eloi and the Morlocks did not choose to be what they are but their ideologically deluded ancestors chose for them in their pursuit of a utopia of security and plenty. In Blade Runner the androids, deprived of longevity by their makers, start a revolution to wrest away choice from the Tyrell Corporation. They construct makeshift identities and virtual pasts for themselves by choosing to forget their origin. Robson’s Forged also mount a liberation movement against the ‘monkeys’, the unevolved humans, while the Slashers in Reynolds have as active a political life as the US Congress. And so on. Choice in fact is precisely what distinguishes posthumans from ordinary humans, who are bound by their unreconstructed biology, their fearful ignorance and, most of all, their ideology of ‘Adamism’.

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I want to conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the modality of posthumanity generated by alternate history. The historical cyborg differs from the biological cyborgs of other SF sub-genres because it seldom displays the extreme bodily modifications of other posthumans. But precisely because of this, it clearly incarnates posthumanity as a historical and ideological construct rather than as simple result of biotechnological interventions. The historical cyborg constructs its subjectivity not just in time but in possibility, across multiple timelines. Thus, it transcends the postmodern subject’s inability ‘to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience’ precisely because the historical cyborg has at its disposal not just one ‘temporal manifold’ but many (Jameson 1991, 56). Just as the biological posthumanity of the Eloi and the Morlocks precedes the advances of bio-engineering, the historical posthumanity in SF precedes the postmodern debate on history. Again, SF shows its potential as an index of the cultural poetics whose ‘uneven developments’ do not coincide with the neat chrono-logic of pre- and post-modernism. Fritz Leiber’s novella ‘Destiny Times Three’ (1945) was written at the very close of World War II and bears unmistakable scars of its historical genesis. Unlike the novels of Dick, Harris and Roth it is not an alternate history of the war but rather a meta-history, pondering the issues of contingency and agency within a schematic, even allegorical, chronotope. And in doing so, it delineates a modality of historical posthumanity, all the more interesting because it involves psychological rather than corporeal heterogeneity. The novella starts in a utopian world of the future where the protagonist, Thorn, is bothered by recurrent nightmares involving a world uncannily similar to his own but choked by a totalitarian government of paternalistic despots who call themselves the Servants. There is another Thorn in this world but bitter, twisted and rebellious; and the protagonist is torn by the sense of guilt toward his unlucky double. It turns out that many people in the utopia are tortured by similar nightmares and that there is an occasional exchange of minds, in which the utopian and the dystopian versions of the same person take over each other bodies. The plot unfolds toward a revelation of yet another multiverse, in which multiple versions of Earth coexist in the temporal continuum: worlds of sudden catastrophe and worlds of slow decay; a world ruled by ‘a science-powered religion’ and a world of complete social disintegration; ‘a world where men lived in idle parasitism on the labour of submen they had artificially created – and another world in which the relationship was reversed and the submen lived on men’ (Leiber 138). As opposed to Stapledon’s multiverse, however, and to most other SF multiverses, this one is a purely social domain as there are no physical differences among the parallel worlds, only divergences created by human choices. Leiber projects the physical multiplicity of possible temporalities upon the social multiplicity of possible histories. And indeed, it turns out

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that this multiverse is a human creation. This is a plot twist that shifts the novella’s emphasis from ontology to ideology. The splitting worlds are created by a group of eight men who have stolen a Probability Engine from some superior intelligence and have misused it to steer the course of history toward the anaemic utopia of Thorn’s world. They have used alternative worlds as rough drafts of their ‘main trunk’ of history, creating and destroying them to check the possible outcomes of various choices. When they realize that the discarded worlds were not destroyed, they decide to treat them as a scientist treats old Petri dishes, instigating a sort of genocidal clean-up across the temporal continua. Observing these would-be masters of history, Thorn sees people so committed to their ideology that they are blind to the horror of their deeds: ‘They were so frantically convinced of the correctness of all their past decision as to the undesirability of the alternate worlds, that they were even completely blind to the apparent success of some of those worlds . . . They could only see the other worlds as horrible deviations from the cherished main trunk’ (Leiber 139). It is not hard to hear the echoes of the Wannsee Conference or the Moscow show trials in this passage. But the real creators of the Probability Engine come to the rescue, taking away their dangerous toy but leaving the social multiverse intact despite the fact that its ‘many-branched time-stream is unique among the cosmoses’ (146). At the close of the great cataclysm of Western history Leiber imagines the future as a multiplicity of broken and fragmented histories, never again to be unified in the grand utopian narrative such as the Nazi myth. Nor is the subject ever to be unified again. Though Thorn briefly merges with his doubles from two possible Earths, this integration is short-lived. Thorn 1, 2 and 3 fall apart once again, creating a time-dispersed subjectivity, three different trunks growing from the same root (since all share the same childhood before the split). And yet instead of mourning the lost unity, Thorn embraces his multiplicity, eagerly accepting the gift of the Probability Engine creators, which enables him to rotate the selves across the timelines: Henceforth, the three Thorns would exchange bodies at intervals, thus distributing the fortunes and misfortunes of their lives. It was the strangest of existences to look forward to – for each, a week of the freedoms and pleasures of World I, a week of the tyrannies and hates of World II, a week of the hardships and dangers of World III . . . But was it really stranger than life? (149–50) Instead of being consumed by nostalgia for the lost unity (which perhaps has never existed in the first place), the triple Thorn revels in the multiplicity of choices, activities and experiences enabled by his fragmentation. But he does so not in the solipsistic chamber of simulacra but as a social agent fully engaged in the revolutionary change in the three societies he inhabits. This change is not a utopian reunification of branching histories but rather the social acceptance

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of their multiplicity and diversity. Thorn’s refusal of utopia is on a par with his acceptance of his own irreducible self-difference. He is a cyborg of history, held together not by the memory of the past but by the openness to the future. And perhaps in this he adumbrates the possibility of a posthuman agent, neither as the impossibly unified Universal Man of determinism, nor as a heap of conflicting desires and identities of the postmodernism of chaos, but rather as a pure possibility of action, the node of temporal choice at the sliding point between the fixed past and the virtual future.

Chapter 4

Everyday Apocalypse: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the End of Time

Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day. Albert Camus

Charlie on the Edge In the latest end-of-the-world blockbuster 2012 (2009), a half-mad conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) has his beliefs spectacularly vindicated when the Earth, obedient to the Mayan calendar, erupts in a spectacular display of special effects. Dancing with glee as Yellowstone goes up in flames, Charlie is urged to run away by the family man Jackson Curtis (John Cusack). Charlie refuses; the scene is just ‘too beautiful’. Curtis obligingly leaves him alone and rushes to save his estranged wife, two children and the wife’s boyfriend. Charlie is swallowed up by a volcanic firestorm, while Curtis, oblivious to the fact that the entire western seaboard of the US is sliding into the ocean, focuses on getting the family into China where the new Noah’s arks are being built. We know from the beginning that Curtis is slated for salvation and reunification with his wife and kids, while the wife’s hapless boyfriend is slated for destruction (along with 99% of humanity). We know it because the director Roland Emmerich who has also given us Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow follows a script far older than the clumsily stitched together sequence of ridiculous pseudo-science and cliché cliff-hangers that is 2012; older even than the Mayan calendar, resurrected by the omnivorous New Age. But as opposed to the Mayan calendar, the script that structures 2012, Independence Day (1996), Day After Tomorrow (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), Cloverfield (2008), The Happening (2008), Knowing (2009) and other end-of-the-world joyrides, is perfectly familiar to every churchgoer in the United States. It is called the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine, the last book of the Christian Bible. But before we turn to this fateful (in every sense of the word) text, let us spare a last glance for Charlie, capering and cackling on the edge of the caldera as volcano bombs hiss through the incandescent air. This wild-eyed male

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Cassandra is, in one sense, a pop-culture spoof of the flourishing sub-world of America’s conspiracy theories, similar to the revelation in Independence Day that a UFO really did crash in Roswell, unbeknownst even to the President of the United State. Such wink-and-nudge hints are a way for Hollywood to have its cake and to eat it, to pretend to ridicule the conspiracy sub-culture and yet to intimate that perhaps people who file a map of salvation between Roswell and Marilyn Monroe, as Charlie does in 2012, are right, after all. Since they constitute a non-insignificant portion of the disaster films’ audience, they must not be offended. But Charlie differs from others of his ilk by the spectacular manner of his death. He is a true aesthete of the end of the world, even unto death. And if he misnames the feeling that holds him spellbound on the edge of the volcano, his limited vocabulary is to blame. He calls the sea of fire and the flying stars of flame ‘beautiful’. But they are not; they are sublime. Not the sublime of contingency, though; not the mathematical sublime, which Kant describes as attending the contemplation of infinity and eternity. In Critique of Judgment Kant distinguishes the mathematically sublime from the dynamically sublime, which is occasioned by the contemplation of ‘nature regarded as might’ and ‘represented as exciting fear’ (Second Book, paragraph 28). Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) links the same kind of sublime to pain and violence: ‘the idea of bodily pain, in all modes and degrees of labour, pain, anguish, torment, is productive of the sublime’ (79). Not our own pain, however, but somebody else’s pain contemplated from a safe remove, just as in Kant: ‘he who fears [for himself] can form no judgement of the Sublime in Nature’ (paragraph 28). We get our fix of the sublime, just like Charlie does, by avidly watching (or imagining) San Francisco sliding into the San Andreas fault, the Statue of Liberty decapitated by a gargantuan monster, hostile aliens blasting NYC to smithereens and any other likely or unlikely disaster of the disaster-saturated pop-culture. We are all junkies of the sublime. But Charlie goes one step beyond his fellow conspiracy theorists. He dies for his beliefs. Swept into the volcanic inferno, he becomes a martyr of the secular – or is it secular? – apocalypse. His spectacular death is given preeminence over the billions of Chinese, Indians and other Third World bit players who are swept into oblivion en masse, to make way for the brave new world of the Elect saved in the arks (the last section of the movie is dated Year Zero). Those billions are merely damned, deserving of no interest or compassion; nothing more than animate props in the grand spectacle of the destruction and rebirth. But Charlie is different. He is a stand-in for the audience who can thrill to his spectacular demise, while safely reaching for their popcorn. But he is also a subtle warning. He dies because as opposed to Curtis he does not have the wherewithal to warrant his salvation in this nondenominational apocalypse. He does not have a family. And just as in the Book of Revelation one needs to be ‘sealed’ by the divine hand to withstand the

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horrors of the Tribulations, in its superficially secularized descendants one needs to be touched by a baby’s hand to warrant the scriptwriter’s mercy. Of course, 2012 is only entertainment and not very entertaining either. But it is also a cultural symptom, whose reinterpretation of the apocalyptic plot is a fascinating ideological slip-of-the-tongue. It sheds light, among other things, on the rapid plunge in American self-confidence when compared with the brash jingoistic millennialism of Independence Day, created by the same director only 12 years earlier. In 2012 the arks are made in China, like so much else today. But apart from its topical references, the movie reveals how deeply entrenched in postmodern culture the apocalyptic desire is. Charlie is us and the End Times are now.

Delirium and Destination But what happens next? What happens after time is over? The logical absurdity of this question does not diminish its cultural and ideological resonance. Postmodernity is spellbound by the idea of being perched on the very edge of a universal cataclysm. But while some are lingering in the moment before all hell breaks loose, others try to hasten the end. And for both groups apocalypse provides an inexhaustible source of narrative inspiration, stimulating everything from blockbuster movies to religious treatises. The postmodern temporal imagination feeds on the energy of its own impending demise. Apocalypse, the catastrophic end of history to be followed by an eternal and immutable millennium, is one of the most ubiquitous timeshapes in the Western arsenal of temporal representation. Like all timeshapes, it creates a humanly meaningful narrative of historical change. But apocalyptic narratives are peculiarly self-destructive because they deny what they pretend to explain: time, history and mortality. Apocalypse is time’s bomb; a conspiracy against history; an attempt to defeat death by genocide. Perhaps the truest representation of the apocalyptic mindset is the terrorist group in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), plotting to murder time by blowing up the Greenwich Observatory. The apocalypse is a chronic disease of the Western politics and poetics of temporality, infecting it with what Derrida called ‘the disorder or delirium of destination’ (1984, 24). This phrase captures the combination of unshakeable determinism and giddy exaltation that characterizes apocalyptic beliefs and ideologies: the end is nigh and true believers have to work hard to make it happen. Their work is violence. The ‘delirium’ of the approaching cataclysm has motivated some of the most destructive religious and political events in history, from the Crusades and the Jewish expulsion from Spain to Nazism and Stalinism, not to mention innumerable schisms, sects and cults. The apocalypse has remained a central (if not the central) timeshape of postmodernity, promising, just as it did in ancient

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times, ‘the key to human history’ (Weber 5). With equal ease, apocalypse shapes religious sermons, ecological scenarios and SF novels. But if religious and political discourses hide the narrative skeleton of the apocalypse under the protean flesh of prophecy or propaganda, SF literature and cinema uncover its bare bones. Despite its many guises, the narrative of End Time is surprisingly uniform across the immense range of apocalyptic literature. No matter how the end is visualized, whether brought about by divine wrath, the inexorable law of history, the hidden workings of nature, or any combination thereof, it proceeds along the same well-trodden path. This path, the apocalyptic/millenarian plot, has been summarized by cultural scholars, literary critics and students of religion in very similar terms. The apocalyptic plot consists of two stages: destruction and renewal. In her lively analysis of the end-of-last-century millenarian fever, Lee Quinby describes it as the transition from the ‘world destruction’ to ‘a new, transformed earth’ (4). Looking at nineteenth-century American literature, David Ketterer finds a tight ‘correlation between the destruction of the world and the establishment of the New Jerusalem’ (7). And Robert Jay Lifton who studied the political praxis of apocalypse in the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo that released poison gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 uncovers ‘a loosely connected, still-developing subculture of apocalyptic violence – of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet’ (2000, 4). Emotionally speaking, apocalypse links fear and hope, since ‘tribulation and horror will usher in public and private bliss, free of pain or evil’ (Weber 31). The origin of the apocalyptic plot (at least in its Western incarnation) lies in the last book of the Christian Bible, the Revelation. This esoteric text, a combination of the Jewish prophetic tradition with the nascent Christian eschatology, has had a cultural and political influence quite incommensurable with its shaky theological position within the Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches. The book barely achieved inclusion in the canon (due to the mistaken belief that its author was John the Apostle). Its burning immediacy that appealed to many early Christians was defused by St Augustine who insisted that it should be read allegorically, with the millennium referring to the reign of Christ within his Church, while the Tribulations represented the struggle of good and evil in the hearts of believers. In 431 AD the Council of Ephesus officially adopted this doctrine, declaring that the date of the Second Coming was unknowable and that the apocalyptic promises of salvation referred to individual souls after death, not to humanity in the material world. Needless to say, countless gurus, sectarians and heresiarchs, from twelfth-century Joachim of Fiore to twentieth-century David Koresh, disagreed. For the contemporary evangelical movement in the United States the ‘final book of the New Testament, rejected by many Catholics as inauthentic prophecy, became the centrepiece of theology’ (Shorris 119). The Revelation has shaped ‘a way of life’ imposing

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structure and meaning upon the evangelicals’ perception of both pubic and private time (Quinby 2). St Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the Book of Revelation voided it of its narrative referentiality. Instead of representing the temporal sequence of future history, the apocalyptic events became a series of disconnected tableaux, illustrating static moral and theological precepts. By shifting the referentiality of the Revelation from time to eternity, St Augustine neutralized its political implications. But these implications surfaced again and again in a breathtaking variety of millenarian and apocalyptic movements. The medieval schismatic struggles described by Norman Cohn in Pursuit of the Millennium were about the proper reading of the Revelation: whether it is to be construed as a narrative or as a collection of allegorical images. In the contemporary American evangelical movement, largely dominated by dispensationalist premillennialism (of which more later) the issue has been decisively settled in favour of a narrative reading. For the evangelicals the Revelation is not just a narrative but the narrative, since it subsumes all other representations of the past and future history. What is particularly striking about the apocalyptic plot is the way in which it separates time and space by linking the former to the horror of the Tribulations and the latter to the perfection and quietude of the millennium. Most chronotopes, as Bakhtin points out, combine time and space in ‘indissoluble unity’. The apocalyptic chronotope is an exception; not merely does it break this unity but it actually sets time and space against each other. The stage of world destruction is dynamic and temporal, consisting of a series of cataclysmic events with constantly increasing level of violence. But the millennium is static. Situated beyond history, the millennium is free of flux, contingency and chance; its representations are always couched in spatial terms, as avatars of the New Jerusalem, the eternal and unchangeable City of God. In the Book of Revelation the millennium is represented through a verbal map of New Jerusalem: ‘And the city lieth foursquare and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal . . . Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal’ (Revelation 21.17; 19). The most striking aspect of this description is, as Catherine Keller points out, its ‘gemology’ (81). There is no change in the City of God; no time, and no life either. By inexorably leading toward the millennium the apocalyptic plot allows space to devour time, ‘rendering spatial what is essentially temporal’ (Kermode 124). Apocalyptic time is the distance between history’s beginning and ending, laid out in advance by either a supernatural designer or a natural design. The spatiality of millennialism makes it attractive to those social and cultural forces whose history fatigue finds an expression in the ‘rush to imagine the end’ (Pippin 4). Jameson’s postmodern spaces that erase their own historicity and Baudrillard’s Disneyland of the simulated past are adumbrations of the millennium, a utopian dream of finding refuge from time in ‘the play of desire’ in space (Friedman 217).

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But as opposed to the refurbished postmodern myth, with its historical passivity and fatalistic denial of agency, apocalypse is a politically charged timeshape that often spurs its adherents into frenetic action –though mostly of a wrong kind. The reason lies in the fact that apocalypse does not simply conflate time and space but separates them, relegating space to the millennium and preserving time as an arena of personal agency, activity and choice. It is impossible to separate totally space and time within a narrative chronotope. Even in the spatial chronotope of determinism time is present, albeit as a corpse rather than a living body. In the apocalyptic plot, however, the space of eternity exists as an unreachable horizon or a perpetually deferred promise of ultimate redemption; while time is distended, stretched and distorted to postpone the moment of its (and narrative’s) death. And this distended, durational time allows a significant scope for individual action, which, however, is circumscribed by the overarching plan of salvation and damnation. No matter how chock-filled with events and actions, the apocalyptic time is subservient to the millennial space. It functions as a purgatory, in which the saved, the Elect, are being separated from the damned in preparation for the always-postponed Second Coming. Apocalypse lures its devotees with the intoxication of the dynamic sublime whose hangover is tomorrow, in the sterile splendour of New Jerusalem. And tomorrow, as Alice in the Wonderland discovered when asking for jam for breakfast, is always tomorrow. Uniquely seductive, apocalypse enables one to wallow in violence and to worship purity; to believe in predestination and to engage in feats of derring-do; to act in history and aspire to utopia. Lee Quinby describes this heady ideological brew as ‘the millennial seduction’. It can be found in such seemingly heterogeneous phenomena as repeated claims of the end of history; the rise of apocalyptic religious fundamentalism; the clockwork appearance of a new disaster blockbuster roughly every six months; and even the popularity of such couch-potato’s apocalyptic delights as Doom, Spore and Bioshock video games. The web is abuzz with apocalyptic chitchat, which attaches itself with equal avidity to Y2K, prophesies of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar or global warming. Some even see the Internet itself as a millennial space, with temporality having been painlessly abolished in the sparkle of this virtual New Jerusalem. But this giddy talk of a technological Singularity that will propel us straight into the posthuman paradise runs into the unyielding structure of the apocalyptic timeshape.1 The violence cannot be skipped. The Tribulations are the necessary and unavoidable prelude to the millennium. In order to be liberated into space, one first has to murder time. In this chapter I will analyse the timeshape of End Times, first by considering an unusual and rapidly developing sub-genre of Christian SF. If this sounds like an oxymoron, it is because SF, despite its concern with theological and philosophical issues, has been a staunchly secular genre in the sense of seldom owing allegiance to any particular religion and exhibiting a sceptical and rationalistic attitude. Suvin considers SF to be an intrinsically rationalistic genre and favourably compares its ‘cognitive’ approach to the mysticism of fantasy. Despite

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the fact that many SF writers have been religious believers the genre itself has largely preserved its rationalistic and scientific worldview, even in such cases as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game where the author’s Mormonism subtly colours the text. But Christian SF breaks away from the secular ethos of the genre and boldly appropriates its narrative devices to deliver an anti-scientific, fundamentalist message. What enables this manoeuvre is the fact that Christian SF’s baseline reality, its ‘zero world’ of ontological consensus, is different from the world of a secular majority. In its own terms, Christian SF is as rational as any technological extrapolation from ‘our’ world. But it applies its own brand of rationality to its own brand of ontology. If to the secular reader it appears uncanny, it is because its deployment of the familiar conventions of SF is done in service of an extreme and unfamiliar ideology. And this ideology is imperialistic. Not content with generating its own fictional universe, Christian SF aspires to remake the secular reality in its own image. Following the discussion of the bestselling Christian series Left Behind, I will shift to ordinary catastrophic SF, to show how its apocalyptic ‘content of the form’ militates against its rationalistic ‘content of the content’. The ideology of the End Times is inscribed in such texts through their deployment of the apocalyptic/millenarian plot, regardless of what particular species of ‘warning’ they ostensibly present. In this sense, Christian SF is the political unconscious of ordinary apocalyptic SF, speaking loud and clear what its secular twin only hints at. And finally, I will discuss the four SF novels of J. G. Ballard, collectively known as the Four Elements Quartet. Ballard’s mastery of the End Times vocabulary makes the Quartet a perfect example of the narrative poetics of apocalypse. But the Four Elements Quartet is not just a set of variations on the theme of the end of the world. It is also a critique of the ‘delirium of destination’. By going through narrative permutations of the apocalyptic plot, Ballard forces his readers to consider not what happens after the end of time but rather their own desire for time to end.

The Pleasures of Being Left Behind z Political crisis z Economic crisis z Worldwide epidemics z Environmental catastrophe z Mass disappearances z Military apocalypse

And that’s just the beginning . . . of the end of the world. It’s happening now.2

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This is how the official site of the Left Behind media empire greets a surfer, helpfully offering a YouTube explanatory video in preparation for an apocalyptic shopping spree that includes several book series (including one for children), audios, videos, computer wallpaper and the End of Time calculator. The Left Behind that started as a series of 16 bestselling books authored by the evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye and journalist Jerry Jenkins and has developed into a cultural Juggernaut is a useful primer of apocalyptic narrativity. But no matter how powerful, it is only a small part of the American evangelical culture. According to Amy Frykholm, ‘. . . evangelicalism is an increasingly significant part of American popular culture. Scholars identify 10 to 15 million Americans who are “doctrinal” believers in dispensational premillennialism and another 10 to 15 million who are what Susan Harding calls “narrative believers” ’ (25). Dispensational premillennialism, also known as the pre-Tribulation Rapture theology, takes the Book of Revelation literally and insists that the end of time is around the corner. It introduces the Rapture, the momentous breaking-point of history, when all the true believers will be bodily lifted into the air to meet Christ while those left behind will be subjected to the full horror of the Tribulations. The theology of dispensational premillennialism was developed by John Nelson Darby (1880–1882), an Anglican priest who left the Church of England to join the Plymouth Brothers and predicted the Second Coming in 1882 (as with all such prophecies, its failure seemed only to have convinced the believers of its veracity). ‘Dispensationalism’ refers to Darby’s belief that history is divided into successive ages or ‘dispensations’ and that salvation will not be achieved in the current age. This is in stark opposition to postmillennialism that was the dominant Protestant theology of the nineteenth century and that profoundly influenced various ameliorative social movements, including liberalism, abolitionism and trade unionism. Postmillennialism believes that the Second Coming will only occur after humanity has achieved a millennium by its own efforts. But postmillennialist theologies were gradually tarnished by the social and political upheavals of the fin-de-siècle. Emblematic of the transition from post- to premillennialism was the career of the feminist pioneer Christabel Pankhurst who eventually turned to Adventism and became a fervent believer in the imminent Second Coming (Weber 188). An additional shift to premillennialism occurred during the Cold War when many Christians turned from ‘thinking that good deeds of universal Christianity would bring about the millennium and the Second Coming (postmillennial) to expecting Armageddon prior to the Second Coming (premillenial)’ (Shorris 13). Darby introduced the notion of the Rapture that has become central to American evangelicalism despite its somewhat dubious scriptural foundations. After the Rapture the future history will tick off as briskly as a clock: the two witnesses; Antichrist; Tribulations; Armageddon; millennium, Satan’s comeback and his final defeat; resurrection; the Last Judgement. Bolstered by the

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continuing success of C. I. Scofield’s First Reference Bible (1909) that linked Old and New Testament prophecy into a seamless timeline, the Rapture has firmly captured the imagination of the American evangelical movement. While some lip-service is paid ‘to post- and mid-trib’ positions (with additional mindboggling classifications such as pre- and mid-Wrath), a majority of the evangelicals support the Left Behind theology, which is briskly summed up on another ‘prophecy’ site, ‘Rapture Ready’: The rapture is an event that will take place sometime in the near future. Jesus will come in the air, catch up the Church from the earth, and then return to Heaven with the Church. In 1 Thessalonians 4.13–18, we are given a clear description of the rapture: ‘the dead in Christ will rise, then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord.’ The main thrust of this web site is to prove that the rapture will occur prior to the beginning of the tribulation. This has been well researched and documented throughout the site.3 The site is keeping abreast of the current events, publishing a daily news summary and a weekly Rapture Index, which it defines as ‘a Dow Jones Industrial Average of End Time activity’ or a ‘prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we’re moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.’4 The Rapture Index is calculated on the basis of a somewhat eccentric selection of news categories (including Liberalism, Apostasy and Volcanoes) and at the time of writing, it is standing at 166. It is easy to ridicule the Rapture Index (though there is nothing funny about the growing influence of the evangelical right on American politics). But the impulse behind it is profoundly entrenched in Western culture. It is the desire to link history and prophecy into one narrative whole, to make the apocalypse part of human time rather than relegating it to the a-temporal realm of the sacred. In this sense, it is indeed a continuation of the Biblical notion of a God acting in history. But what makes it peculiar – and peculiarly postmodern – is that this integration of sacred and profane temporality is predicated on the concept of a radical break, not unlike Foucault’s epistemic transition or Thomas Kuhn’s scientific revolution. Besides satisfying the believers’ schadenfreude by enabling them to watch from the high the tribulations of assorted infidels, the Rapture marks the beginning of the end of time. The Rapture ‘starts the end time clock ticking’ (Weber 182). It ushers in a peculiar twilight period, in which time is being devoured by space, stretched and attenuated, as it reluctantly drags toward its inevitable and predetermined demise. The durational temporality of the apocalypse is amply demonstrated in the Left Behind series, the unchallenged bestseller of Christian SF. The series opens with a book also called Left Behind, in which the series primary characters, pilot

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Rayford Steele and journalist Cameron ‘Buck’ Williams, are confronted with the Rapture on a commercial airplane. This takes place on the book’s first page. Instead of the exegetic hair-splitting of other evangelical compositions, Left Behind plunges straight into action. The first chapters read like a workmanlike thriller (it is not even immediately clear that the event is the Rapture rather than, say, a more mundane alien abduction). This energetic beginning and brisk pace instantly draw the reader, whether religious or secular, into the development of the plot, which unfolds in a linear succession, with minimal flashbacks and flashforwards, thus generating – at least at the beginning – considerable suspense. But as one ploughs through the interminable length of the Left Behind, with its wooden atrocities and underwhelming miracles, suspense is supplanted by its opposite, foreknowledge. After all, once the theological parameters of the initial disaster become clear, nobody in the intended audience can have any doubt about the future developments. And yet, instead of inducing boredom, this foreknowledge becomes the source of an even more potent readerly pleasure. Left Behind flouts Shklovsky’s view that the main function of art is defamiliarization. The goal of the series is to familiarize prophecy by repetition. The re-enactment of the familiar sequence of the future events, in which chronology becomes a series of milestones to be passed on the way to redemption, is one strategy of spatialization, of transforming narrative time into narrative space. There are two others: narrative slowdown and intertextuality. Together, they radically change the relation between the two aspects of narrative temporality, order and duration. Since every volume in this interminable series is packed with events, featuring a proliferating cast of major and minor characters, it seems unjust to accuse Left Behind of action slowdown. But since the end is known in advance, in fact the end is what causes the entire sequence in a rigid teleology characteristic of what Kermode calls ‘endism’ (120), one can justifiably ask what the point of this feverish activity is. The End Times cannot be averted; in fact, nobody in the Tribulation Force, the underground militia battling the UN-appointed world dictator (AKA the Antichrist) Nicolae Carpathia, would want to avert the Second Coming. So since the result is fixed by the unimpeachable authority of the Bible, what is the Tribulation Force fighting for? The answer lies, paradoxically, in the inordinate length of the Left Behind series. The Book of Revelation, like most prophetic writings, is very brief, allowing the reader to flesh out its basic sequence of events in a variety of possible scenarios. To use the narratological terms, Revelation provides the story (fabula), or the basic sequence of events, which its interpretations clothe in different discourses (sjujets). But Left Behind, with its full-length 16 volumes, strives for a kind of narrative plenitude that undermines the distinction between story and discourse, fabula and sjujet. When its protagonists finally reach the millennium,

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the authors launch several new series, the Kids series, the Underground Zealots series, the Military series and so on, each as capable as the original one to stretch out almost infinitely the rigidly predetermined sequence of apocalyptic events. The stark chronology of the End Times is bogged down in the slow-motion violence of the Tribulations. The second significant strategy by which time is slowly killed in Left Behind is intertextuality. The entire series and its numerous spins-off, including the additional series, three movies and a video game, are steeped in Biblical allusions. The Biblical scholarship of Left Behind has been criticized by some evangelicals who do not share the theology of dispensationalist premillennialism and huffily dismissed by most Catholics who get a short shrift in the series. The ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ theology may be poor exegesis but it is relentlessly literal, basing each event on a specific scriptural passage, often wrenched from its context and reinterpreted to suit the needs of the plot (Dart). In doing so, it exemplifies the notion of intertextuality as central to the aesthetics of postmodern literary production. Julia Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality, based on Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, argues that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (37). Intertextuality subsumes the diachronic dimension of the text in its synchronic dimension. Susan Friedman describes intertextuality as a synchronic or ‘horizontal’ axis of the text and suggests a reading strategy along this axis which impedes the plot progression in favour of multiple interconnections between the text and its cultural and psychological paratext. According to her, ‘spatializing narrative gives us a systematic way of approaching the various forms of narrative dialogism and of (re)connecting the text with its writer and world’ (Friedman 226). Intertextuality is a space in which the reader’s language of desire meets the desire in/ of language. The intertextuality in Left Behind creates precisely such a space, in which its readers’ fervent desire for the apocalypse weaves back and forth between the fictional text and the scriptural intertext, postponing its own narrative fulfilment in the voluptuous sense of anticipation. Diachrony becomes a mere pretext for elaborating the textual continuum, in which past and future, fiction and (Biblical) fact, history and prophecy are united in synchronic simultaneity. This simultaneity reinforces the reader’s pleasure of lingering in the extended ‘now’ of the violent Tribulations, while knowing that his/her salvation is as assured as the inevitable and foreknown ending. In classical narratology narrative temporality is described as having two aspects: chronology and duration, ‘the first concerned with the relationships between the temporal order of the events that are being told and the pseudotemporal order of the narrative; the second concerned with the relationships between the duration of the events and the duration of the narrative’ (Genette 25; emphasis in the original). While traditionally these two aspects are relatively independent of each other, they are tightly correlated in the apocalyptic plot,

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which takes place in what Kermode calls ‘the third order of duration’ between the fixed and unalterable beginning and ending (70). Apocalypse translates chronology into duration. Since the end is known in advance, the narrative possibilities of the apocalyptic plot are reduced to the embellishment of its basic stages. Spatial elaboration takes the place of temporal suspense. The closest approximation of the narrative aesthetics of Left Behind is the visual aesthetics of the secular disaster film, in which plot and character are subordinated to the visual pleasures of special effects. The lightless sky and the skull-crashing machines of the Terminator trilogy; the fractal mechanical cities of Matrix; the beheaded Statue of Liberty of Cloverfield; and the empty London of 28 Days Later dominate these films and stretch the predictable chronology of their plots. Despite being misnamed ‘action movies’, the focus of these films is not on the actions performed by the characters (which in many cases, as in Matrix, follow the apocalyptic plot, with more or less explicit scriptural references) but on the setting. The accumulation of disasters does not constitute a true narrative sequence, in which events are linked by causality. Instead there is a reiteration of the basic event of the catastrophe with a progressively ratcheted-up intensity of violence. The slowed-down, durational time of Christian SF is what Lawrence Langer calls ‘traumatic time’, frozen in the perpetual ‘now’. Traumatic duration is yet another incarnation of the postmodern aesthetics of the dynamic sublime, the sublime of power and violence, which shatters the order of temporality. Langer believes that traumatic time is an authentic expression of the victim’s sense of loss and bereavement and argues that its deployment in Holocaust testimonies is ethically superior to the emplotments of the Holocaust in dynamic, structured narratives, such as the alternate histories I discussed in the previous chapter. But Langer’s defence of durational, as opposed to chronological, temporality rings hollow when confronted with the cynical industry of the sublime that the apocalyptic pop-culture has become. Left Behind manufactures trauma and uses it as a ploy of ‘millennial seduction’. Since the trauma is not in the past but in the future, the text generates a sort of instalment-plan sublimity whose purchase is indefinitely postponed by the writing-off of temporal debts. The connection between Left Behind and the disaster movie indicates how powerfully the narrative templates of SF have penetrated evangelical ideology. Left Behind and other similar Christian texts are SF, first and foremost, employing all the familiar conventions of the genre. But more than that; they are specifically postmodern SF. Their postmodernity does not stem solely from the fact that they tap into what is, arguably, the most popular and influential of the postmodern timeshapes, apocalypse. Christian SF is also uniquely postmodern in the way in which it re-forms its readers’ consensus reality and redefines the distinction between the fictional and the real worlds. In doing so, it deftly sidesteps the historical dilemma that has bedevilled postmodern representations of history.

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Hayden White’s critique of the veridical claims made by traditional historywriting is based on the distinction between fiction and fact, even if the latter is inaccessible to narrative representation. According to him, histories are ‘verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’ (2002, 192). But Christian SF simply collapses the distinction itself. Left Behind is fictional in the minimal sense that all its characters are people who have never existed. Nor do the authors make any claim, for example, that the true Antichrist when he soon appears will be a Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia rather than the current Pope or the US President.5 However, at the same time the series narrates what its audience regards as the true story of both the past and the future. Instead of emplotting the contingent material of actual events into ‘verbal fictions’, the series dresses up the true plot of history in a fictional narrative. Thus, the relation between the baseline reality and the fictional world of the text is quite different in Christian SF from ordinary SF. No matter how bizarre or outrageous the ‘Rapture Ready’ world-view may appear to the outsider, it is true for the believer. The SF elements in Christian SF are not the piles of empty clothes left on the airplane seats, the man-sized locusts, or the revelation of the Antichrist. Rather, it is precisely those moments which might appear ‘realistic’ to the unbeliever: the spectacular weaponry employed by the Tribulation Force or the political squabbling over plans to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Such moments are what in relation to ordinary SF would be called extrapolation: fictional inventions which are congruent with the consensus reality of the text’s implied audience. But for Christian SF, the secular reality is fiction at best, demonic deception at worst. What we would consider fantasy, on the other hand, is the true essence of the world, which the secular culture is too blind to see. In the Afterword to another Christian SF The Fourth Reich (1997) which tracks the same sequence of events as Left Behind with the important theologically (but negligent narratively) distinction of subscribing to the post-trib chronology of the Rapture, its author Robert Van Kampen writes: Some of what you read will seem very current with the worldwide political events going on today, not because I want to sell books but because this is what the Scriptures teach. Some of it will sound like futuristic science fiction, and it will be all of that and worse once the biblical signs begin to signal the meltdown of society as we know it presently. (551) Science fiction is not the opposite of current events but their inevitable sequel. The apocalypse offers not only a guide to the future and an elucidation of the past but also an interpretation of the present. Frykholm, who interviewed

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Rapture believers, points out that instead of being consumed by anxiety, most of them are smugly self-confident. Their faith in the imminent end of time allows them to dismiss the alien perturbations of history as the familiar signposts toward the millennium: Political events, diplomatic missions, wars, earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters are not random, but woven into a complex narrative about the world’s approaching end. This method of interpretation highly structures readers’ understanding of the world they live in. It offers coherence to what might otherwise appear random and secures for them a very specific and special place in world history. (106) Uniting the past and the future, fiction and truth, history and prophecy, the apocalypse culminates in the millennium where all such dualities cease to exist because time, responsible for the painful instability of the human condition, ceases to exist as well. Time dies into utopia, which E. M. Cioran describes as ‘a kind of stationary duration, an immobilized Possible, a counterfeit of eternal present’ (104). Narrative representation of this ‘eternal present’ is, of course, not an easy matter because it militates against the very nature of narrativity, its timeliness. Even in The Divine Comedy, the Paradise is far less memorable than the Inferno. With considerably less talent at its authors’ disposal, the Left Behind vision of Kingdom Come in the last book of the series is rather bathetic, though admittedly, not more so than its secular counterparts, glimpses of utopian spaces that end adrenaline-pumped action of disaster movies, such as a pseudopioneer village at the end of the last cinematic version of I Am Legend (2007) or the closing credits of The Happening floating over the vision of a happy suburban home. No matter how disappointing or scaled-down, the millennial space is necessary to signify not just the end of this particular narrative but the end of all narratives, the end of time. But its representation creates significant artistic problems, which Christian SF tries to overcome with the narrative tools at its disposal. The transition from the Tribulations to the millennium enacts what a New Age philosopher Gary Eberle calls ‘transition to sacred time’ in which ‘the percipient loses all sense of clock time and feels . . . lifted from the normal flow of history into a timeless realm of . . . eternity’ (65). Related to what Freud called ‘the oceanic’ and Lacan ‘jouissance’, this ‘timeless realm’ may, perhaps, be experienced by the individual in special moments beyond language and narrativity (though Freud characteristically confessed that he never experienced it nor particularly wanted to). But ‘sacred time’ and pure space, just like the oceanic and ‘jouissance’, lie beyond language, in the Lacanian realm of the Real, which exceeds the capacities of the Symbolic. Even without Lacanian terminology, it is self-evident that ‘the timeless realm’ cannot be conveyed by the time-bound techniques of narrative. Christian SF solves this problem by adumbrating the

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timeless glories of Kingdom Come through the ritual re-enactment of the killing of time. This ritual is evident even in the works of Christian SF which precede, or stand apart from, the rise of dispensationalist premillennialism in America. C. S. Lewis’ Narnia cycle for children and his Space Trilogy for adults adumbrate many of the strategies of the American Christian SF. In the last book of Narnia, The Last Battle, for example, the young protagonists die at the beginning of the story, thus figuring the millennium through violence done to both chronology and causality. In Perelandra, the second book of The Space Trilogy, the protagonist Ransom prevents the repetition of the Fall of Man on Venus, thus short-circuiting the entire course of human history and transitioning straight from Paradise to Paradise. But it is contemporary Christian SF that offers the most elaborate examples of apocalyptic/millenarian chronotopes, in which the timeless space of the millennium is represented through the tortuous convolutions of narrative temporality. Ted Dekker’s Circle trilogy, comprising three novels Black, Red and White, is a perfect example, especially since the trilogy (with its inevitable sequels and prequels) is better written and more artistically sophisticated than Left Behind. Like the Narnia series, the trilogy posits two separate and independent ontological realms and a protagonist who shuttles between them. Thomas Hunter falls asleep in our world and wakes up in a mystical realm where the Christian story of the Fall and Redemption is unfolding as a speeded-up fairy tale. However, as opposed to Narnia, the relationship between the two worlds is not only allegorical (based on metaphorical correspondence) but also historical (based on temporal contiguity). The world of ‘Elyon’ is the ‘spiritual dimension’ as opposed to the mere ‘natural dimension’ of human history (1171). But at the same time, this world is also our post-apocalyptic future, the millennium, in which the knowledge of our time is inscribed in books of ‘histories’. Inadvertently, Hunter brings about a classic chronoclasm, time-travel paradox, by revealing his knowledge of the deadly ‘Raison strain’ (the name, of course, is allegorical) to an apocalyptic coalition of mid-eastern terrorists and French freethinkers who use it to unleash the Tribulations. However, the apocalypse is aborted; Thomas saves humanity and postpones the Second Coming, despite the fact that the inviolability of St John’s prophecy is affirmed at the end. At the same time, his appearance in the ‘spiritual’ realm prompts the second Fall and jumpstarts a new history, in which he becomes a central player. Instead of actually representing the millennium, the Circle bends history into . . . well, a circle, in which apocalyptic time and paradisiacal space endlessly chase each other. The circular chronotope of the Circle trilogy is a reflection of the millennium’s un-representability. The only way for the end-of-time to be narrativized is through the repetitive transformation of the narrative of End Times. ‘A re-reading/ replaying of the Apocalypse means a cycle of sealing, cracking open and resealing over and over again’ (Pippin 1–2). The Circle’s extreme distortion of chronology and a convoluted ‘braiding’ of sacred and profane temporalities

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create an image of the millennium as the unreachable horizon of dying history, of time being bent and hammered into the stasis of space. One might argue that Christian SF is a special and unique brand of apocalyptic SF because of its literal reading of the apocalyptic plot. But in fact the structural continuity between religious and secular apocalyptic SF is acknowledged by the grand master of the former, C. S. Lewis. In the preface to That Hideous Strength he writes: ‘Mr Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow’ (1945, 7–8). Olaf Stapledon is the author of future histories The Last and First Men and Star Maker which extensively deploy the apocalyptic plot. The same is true about H. G. Wells’ disaster novels, in particular The War of the Worlds. From C. S. Lewis’ point of view, all he has to do is to clear away the detritus of Wells’ and Stapledon’s scientific and secular philosophy to reveal the bedrock of the Revelation. Whether secular or religious, apocalypse is the same. Like a glove, it may be turned inside out but it always conceals a striking fist.

The Coming of the Overmind Despite the resurgence of the religious apocalypse, most of postmodern apocalyptic culture is still secular. The never-ending stream of disaster movies; the perennial popularity of the world catastrophe in SF; and the deafening volume of the apocalyptic rhetoric around the admittedly serious issues of global warming, economic collapse, disease and overpopulation testify to the fact that neither the Tribulation schadenfreude nor the millennial seduction is an exclusive property of the religious right. But the secularity of this apocalyptic culture is only skin-deep; its narrative skeleton is a direct evolutionary descendant of the Revelation. A comparison between secular and Christian apocalyptic SF reveals deep similarities that override the ostensible antagonism of science and religion, proving that the text’s chronotope is the real carrier of its ideological meaning. While end-of-the-world stories were ubiquitous in the Golden Age American SF (1930s–1950s), it is its British counterpart that has created the most coherent and continuous tradition of apocalyptic writing. Going back to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, this tradition has been profoundly influenced by Olaf Stapledon’s work of the 1930s and acquired its dystopian cast from Orwell’s 1984. More philosophically engaged and artistically sophisticated than the American pulp-originated SF, British SF, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, became so preoccupied with apocalypse that Brian Aldiss, himself an SF writer, christened it tongue-in-cheek ‘the British catastrophe’ (1973, 338). In the works of such popular purveyors of cosy Armageddon as the appropriately named John Wyndham, John Christopher and John Lymington, the world in general and Britain in particular are destroyed by perambulating plants,

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undersea monsters, the death of grass, giant beasts, assorted plagues and all manners of alien invasions. J. G. Ballard’s early SF belongs in this tradition, which continued to be a profound influence on his mature writing as well. But perhaps the most interesting of these secular apocalypses and the one that has best withstood the test of time is Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953). Not surprisingly, it is also the one that most clearly exhibits structural parallels with Christian SF, despite the author’s declared agnosticism and the book’s non-Christian agenda. In the novel the Earth is stopped on the brink of nuclear self-destruction by the arrival of powerful aliens who impose disarmament, institute far-reaching social and economic reforms and usher in ‘the long, cloudless summer afternoon of peace and prosperity . . . the age of reason, prematurely welcomed by the leaders of the French Revolution’ (109). The aliens who call themselves the Overlords refuse at first to be seen; the reason for this becomes clear later when it is found that the Overlords resemble the traditional representation of the Devil. But by this time, the enlightened and unified humanity is no longer afraid of old superstition. It turns out however, that just as the Devil in Christian and Jewish theologies is ultimately a servant of God, the Overlords are servants of the Overmind, a transcendent entity that is ‘the sum of many races [that] long ago left the tyranny of matter behind’ (184). The human race, lulled into false security by its decadent Golden Age, is about to undergo a wrenching transformation, in which its children become absorbed into the Overmind (appropriately appearing as a cosmic pillar of fire), while the adults are discarded, Left Behind. The Overlords act as midwives to the apocalyptic transformation, the Total Breakthrough, though they themselves are barren, unable to join the Overmind, unable even to understand its nature. The novel ends with the destruction of the Earth as the transformed children shed their earthly garments, both of flesh and of stone. The novel is filled with Biblical allusions and parallels (for example, the red-lit city of the Overlords resembles medieval depictions of Hell). Just as he does in his screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: The Space Odyssey, Clarke freely utilizes Christian discourse and symbolism without endorsing an explicitly Christian message (the Overmind is not identified with the God of the Bible). But more important than the symbolism is the overall shape of the novel’s chronotope, in which, as in the Revelation, the time of history dies into the space of the millennium. The millennium in the book is split into two parts: the secular utopia and the Total Breakthrough, which is the Rapture, Second Coming and Judgement Day rolled into one. In the utopia history slows down, painlessly dying into a decadent autumnal age of amusement. The death of history is perceived by intellectuals, those who ‘among all the distractions and diversions of a planet, which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground . . . still

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found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: Where do we go from here? (111; emphasis in the original) For the apocalyptic mindset, however, the answer is clear: abolish the question! If you do not know where to go, make going anywhere meaningless. The concerned intellectuals of Clarke’s secular utopia found a New Athens of arts and sciences whose endeavours are focused on the nature of temporality. But their attempts to jump-start human history are cut short when the first transformed child is born to one of their members and then the End Times are just around the corner. Proceeding without the usual spectacular bloodshed, they are, nevertheless, horrifying enough, as the transformed children prior to their ascension into the Overmind strip the planet of all life, while their parents commit mass suicide. The book’s secular utopia could only achieve what E. M. Cioran calls a ‘counterfeit’ of the eternal present. The metaphysical Total Breakthrough is the real thing, the revelation of a power, which ‘is not subject to the usual limitations of time and space’ (176). But the apocalyptic plot does more than ends time; it insists that time never existed in the first place. The contingency and open-endedness of human history is a mirage; the unyielding teleology of the End Times uncovers the fixed design underlying its seeming flux. At the end of Clarke’s novel, one of the Overlords explains to the last man on Earth that the human fear of their demonic appearance is the memory not of the past but of the future; ‘a distorted echo [that] reverberated round the closed circle of time from the future to the past’ (209). The closed circle in which ‘the future and the past [are] one’ is the ultimate image of the static chronotope of the apocalypse; the timeshape of no-time. As opposed to Christian SF, secular apocalyptic SF claims no prophetic role. It does, however, reinforce the apocalyptic mindset by reiterating the End Times plot until it becomes as natural as breathing in comprehending history. As Eugene Weber points out, the ‘secular adaptation of religious terminology’ in utopian and socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was more than skin-deep; it created a template for understanding and transforming the human condition until a secular ‘apocalypse as fantastic, fabulous and mythological as the old had come to vie with John’s visions’ (159; 165). If the historical matrix for St John’s longing to end history was the Roman persecutions of Jews and Christians in the turbulent first century AD, the historical backgrounds of apocalyptic SF are easily discernible within the text: the Cold War for Clarke (the novel begins with the Soviet-American space race interrupted by the Overlords); Fascism and Stalinism for Stapledon; and the social disruptions of the 1960s for the ‘British catastrophes’. But whatever specific crisis prompts the desire to escape from history into the millennium,

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the result of it is the apocalyptic timeshape that spreads like a virus into both public and private relations with temporality, infecting them with the ‘delirium of destination’. The easy slide from SF fandom to apocalyptic cults demonstrates that the content of the form is more important than the content of the content. The Manson Family, the Heaven’s Gate and the Aum Shnrikyo cult are examples of the convergence of apocalyptic belief and apocalyptic SF that blends into a poisonous brew of ‘science, occultism and science fiction, with little distinction between the fictional and the actual’ (Lifton 2000, 24). Interestingly enough, though Aum was a Japanese cult, originally based on a mixture of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism and some Shinto, it also imported a hefty dose of Christian eschatology, including virulent anti-Semitism: the Revelation going global! While traditional theories of SF stress its rationalistic side, trying to represent the genre as a beleaguered heir of the Enlightenment, the accelerating syncretism of apocalyptic cults that adopt SF plots and imagery testifies to a more ancient genealogy. The ‘cognition’ of apocalyptic SF is much closer to the epistemology of prophecy than to that of science. It is based on a tight correlation between the seeming disorder of history and the hidden order of teleology. Nothing happens ‘just so’; everything has a place in the secret design of the Revelation (or a revelation), in which ‘the future and the past [are] one’ (Clarke 209). In the recent film Knowing, the epistemological omnivorousness of the apocalypse is unwittingly caricatured in the protagonist’s triumphantly vindicated conviction that the scribbles of a 1950s’ schoolgirl contain the exact timetable of the end of the world. This epistemological paranoia treats everything as grist to its mill. Rapture sites are better than networks in keeping up with the latest news because any event, from the momentous to the mundane – the stimulus package, swine flu, an Israeli election or a failed Miss America – is instantly incorporated into the unfolding narrative of End Times. Similarly, in Childhood’s End, as in any apocalyptic SF, seemingly random events (a private séance; a child’s nightmare; a local tsunami) are revealed as the signs and portents of the Total Breakthrough. The apocalyptic thinking applies the Biblecode hermeneutics to everyday life. The apocalyptic timeshape closes the gap between ‘the temporal order of the events’ and the ‘pseudo-temporal order of the narrative’ (Genette 25) by claiming that the two are exactly the same. Commenting upon American apocalyptic groups, journalist Alex Heard writes: ‘Start reading and studying and you quickly realize that anything can be a sign of the End’ (89). If for ordinary historical narratives ‘what is not there in a discourse’ is ‘constitutive of what is’ (Currie 80), the apocalyptic narrative is structured not by exclusion but by inclusion. Anything that ‘is not there’ may be easily transformed into ‘what is’ by the ever-expanding apocalyptic hermeneutics. The pleasure that the apocalypse offers its readers is the pleasure of transforming the troubling contingency of time into the reassuring stasis of space.

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The apocalyptic chronotope is essentially a configuration of two spaces; the space of the Tribulation and of the millennium. But it would be a mistake to argue that the apocalyptic plot consists in the transition from the one to the other. Such a transition would introduce the possibility of a different outcome, contaminating apocalypse with contingency. Rather, the two spaces, outwardly opposite, are in fact the same. The Tribulations and the millennium are superimposed upon each other, constituting the unified textual/ideological terrain, in which the end of time is ritually re-enacted as a murder of history. In this sense, apocalypse is not the opposite of utopia; apocalypse is utopia.

The Four Elements Ideologically, J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) is situated at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Rapture believers. One of the best-known and most controversial contemporary British writers, the author of the scandalous Atrocity Exhibition and Crash (made into the much-debated film by David Cronenberg), Ballard has been accused of nihilism and pornography of violence. There is even an adjective ‘Ballardian’, indicating a peculiar mixture of dystopia, lyricism and violence that characterizes his writings. Nevertheless, many of his writings explore the apocalyptic plot, none more so than the four novels, collectively known as the Four Elements Quartet. The Quartet comprises The Wind from Nowhere (1961), which was Ballard’s first published novel, The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). Each novel presents a version of the apocalypse linked to one of the four traditional elements: air, water, fire and earth. Ballard started his career as an SF writer, and the conventions of the genre have remained a potent influence on his imagination. The Quartet belongs to the so-called New Wave in the SF of the 1960s that attempted to push the stylistic and thematic boundaries of the genre, while continuing and even intensifying the apocalyptic tradition of the ‘British catastrophe’. Many critics regard Ballard’s early science fiction as inscribing a quasireligious longing for the millennium. Andrzej Gasiorek, for example, writes: ‘The post-apocalyptic worlds [that the Quartet novels] envision, in which socalled civilized life is stripped bare by drought, deluged by floodwater, or frozen in time by the crystallization of living matter, are all in limbo, awaiting rebirth to a radically new dispensation’ (11). Even if such millennial longings are limited to individual characters’ ‘inner changes and self-discovery’ rather than on the communal salvation in the mould of the Left Behind, they are seen as the only way to counteract the ‘allegations of pessimism and nihilism’ that have dogged Ballard’s work (Delville 9). I shall argue the opposite. It is not the intimations of the millennium but precisely its radical rejection that constitutes the ethical and political thrust of Ballard’s work. Just as narratively the Quartet deconstructs the apocalyptic

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chronotope by laying bare its formal devices, so ideologically it undermines the Salvationist scheme of universal destruction by taking it to the extreme. Roger Luckhurst points out the importance of the ‘enigma of the interval,’ the catastrophic duration of Ballard’s texts, and it is precisely in this in-between narrative space that the poetics and politics of the apocalypse are questioned (72). From the first to the last novel, the Quartet develops into a deconstruction of its own formal premises. It is not just a series of apocalyptic texts but also a text about the apocalypse. The Quartet’s deconstruction of the apocalyptic chronotope starts with the history of its writing. It is almost irresistible to see the four novels as a pleasingly symmetrical whole, imbued with a mythical significance (the four elements; the four Horsemen of the Revelation; the Four Zoas of William Blake and so on). Characteristically, David Pringle regards the symbolism of the Bible as the foundation of the ‘fourfold symbolism’ of Ballard’s early SF (49). But this symmetry obscures a messy historical path. The novels were not originally conceived as a series at all. The Wind from Nowhere was a potboiler that Ballard wrote to break into print. Far less accomplished than the rest, Ballard’s first novel was intensely disliked by its author and often excluded from his bibliographies. Nor did he ever state that the Quartet is in fact based on the four elements or on any other four-fold mystical scheme, which has not prevented endless speculations by his critics and fans on the subject. But precisely because the Quartet is a hodgepodge of influences, allusions and inspirations, post factum unified into a seamless mystical whole, it provides a perfect example not only of apocalyptic writing but also of apocalyptic reading, which substitutes synchronic signification for diachronic contingency

‘The Idiot Offspring’ The Wind from Nowhere is sometimes dubbed Ballard’s ‘idiot offspring’, though a review charitably points out that it already has the ‘undefinable atmosphere that marks Ballard’s best work’.6 But this atmosphere is rather too definable. The novel is a holocaust by numbers, featuring a monstrous gale that reduces the Earth’s surface to rubble. It is a textbook incarnation of the disaster scenario, which merits attention precisely because of its formulaic nature, offering a model example of the apocalyptic chronotope. The apocalypse is seemingly natural, vaguely explained by solar flares and meteorological conditions. But it is structured by the traditional stages of the eschatological progression. The first chapters detail the signs and portents of the coming Tribulations: the freakish weather and the pervasive dust as the constant wind begins to strip off the soil. The main characters are mere ciphers, Everymen and Everywomen, meant to represent the spectrum of the collective response to the catastrophe. The difference between the damned

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and the Elect is not theological but moral: selflessness and fortitude are rewarded by survival. The ‘sedimentation’ of eschatology is clear in the scene, in which a Meteorological Office scientist, failing to explain the wind’s origin, grimly jokes that ‘maybe it’s the deliberate act of an outraged Providence, determined to sweep man and his pestilence from the surface of this once green earth’ (55). Even while ostensibly abjuring a religious justification, a secular apocalypse smuggles it in through allusions and stock imagery. The novel also references another Biblical story, that of the Tower of Babel. In a sub-plot, the demented millionaire Hardoon builds a giant tower, which he believes will be able to withstand a 500-miles-per hour wind. Hardoon describes his project as an attempt ‘to challenge the wind, asserting Man’s courage and determination to master Nature’ (165). This hubris does not go unpunished: the tower is uprooted and then the wind miraculously dies down. The eschatological re-inscription of the natural disaster is complete when it is personified into a supernatural force that scourges man’s vanity and ambition. But alongside its reliance on the Christian myth, the novel also references recent historical events: World War II and the Blitz of London. The beleaguered governmental headquarters ‘reminded Marshall of the last hours in Hitler’s fuhrer bunker’ (sic; 117), while the scenes of the packed London Tube where people are hiding from the deadly air attacks are modelled on similar scenes during the Blitz. These war allusions create a sub-plot of historical contingency, subtly undermining the formulaic unfolding of the meteorological apocalypse. This doubleness of the plot is reflected in the doubleness of the setting. Like any apocalyptic text, The Wind from Nowhere embellishes its predictable chronology of destruction with voluptuously rendered scenes of ruined cities, drying seas and people flying through the air like rag-dolls. But this ‘Ballardian’ landscape of the apocalyptic wasteland is offset by the drab scenes of people patiently waiting underground for the wind to die down and for ordinary life to resume. Unusually for an apocalyptic novel, its space is structured vertically, by the opposition of the exposed surface that is ‘being stripped to its seams’ and of the underground (117). The unattractive ‘sub-world of dark labyrinthine tunnels and shafts crowded with countless thousands of almost motionless human beings, huddled together on the unlit platforms with their drab bundles of possessions’ becomes a space of human endurance and solidarity, a space of history (142). It is the underground City of Darkness, rather than the millenarian City of Light, that offers a possibility of survival. Dissent from the apocalyptic plot becomes evident at the end of the novel. The Wind from Nowhere offers no glimpse of a millennium, even on a purely personal level. The main characters survive but in a field of rubble. The last sentence of the novel mocks millenarian hopes: ‘Like a cosmic carousel nearing the end of its run, the storm wind was slowly losing speed’ (186). The homely image of the carousel with its circular motion undermines the

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relentless drive toward the end of time. The denial of the millennium is explicitly spelled out in the episode in which one of the characters contemplates the child of his friend born in an underground shelter: Maitland considered the baby’s small wizened face. He would have liked to think it symbolized hope and courage, the new world being reborn unknown to them in the cataclysmic midst of the old, but in fact he felt grimly depressed. Dora’s courage, her pathetic little cubicle with its makeshift shelves and clutter of damp clothes, make him realize just how helpless they were, how near the center of the whirlwind (145) The extradiegetic images of the whirlwind and the carousel are premonitions of the baroque literal shapes into which the setting is distorted in the next novels of the Quartet, as space and time fuse to create the nightmare terrain of the millennium.

The Terminal Lagoon The Drowned World (1962) is a far more self-conscious exploration of the apocalyptic spacetime. The novel departs from the pop-disaster formula and develops a rich tapestry of lush metaphors, literary allusions and dream-like landscapes characteristic of Ballard’s mature writing. The novel’s apocalypse is brought about by water: solar flares cause global warming, the melting of the ice caps and universal deluge. The drowned cities of Europe and America are hidden under tropical lagoons and humid jungles. Ballard explores the symbolic connotations of water as the medium of death and rebirth by projecting them onto the diegetic plane, creating a chronotope, where the boundary between the psychic and the physical is erased. This is the terrain of ‘archaeopsychic time’, in which ‘the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah’ (43; 72). His lost characters do not band into a group of survivors, the secular Elect, as in The Wind from Nowhere. Just the opposite: social ties and obligations fall apart as each of them, in his or her solitary way, explores ‘the buried phantoms’ of the personal and the biological past, ‘uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs’ (43). The protagonist Kerans eventually embarks on a doomed trek south, into the primeval Eden of the wet Triassic jungles populated by giant iguanas. Attempts by the deranged leader Strangman, a caricature of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, to ‘revive’ civilization by draining the flooded London are treated by others with mockery and revulsion. Instead, the individual quests of Kerans, Beatrice, Bodkin and other characters are for ‘the entire ransom of the Unconscious’ hidden in the depth of liquid time (100).

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The time arrow of the watery apocalypse points backward; the catastrophe is experienced not as a prelude to the millennium but as a journey back in time. Bodkin the psychologist explains: . . . as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would to be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. (43) But even this reverse flow turns out to be only a prelude to a complete cessation of temporality. In the chronotope of The Drowned World time has fused with space, creating a dream-like simulacrum of ‘total present’. The terrain of languid lagoons and steamy jungle that covers up the ruins of London is a liquid chaos, in which ‘the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist’ (82). Like the characters of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for whom the journey up the river is a travel in time, Kerans and others explore the past by diving into the water of the ‘temporal lagoon’. Strangman wryly jokes that Kerans and his lover Beatrice suffer from ‘a touch of time-sickness . . . the chronoclasmic bends’ (91). The Drowned World takes the durational aspect of the apocalyptic plot to its (il)logical extreme. There is no more chronology, only intensity. The Tribulations have come but not gone and never will. They are not a step toward the millennium but a permanent state of being, the dream-time of the perpetual ‘now’ (70). The simultaneity of the apocalyptic chronotope is emphasized in The Drowned World by the elaborate system of literary and artistic allusions, including, but not limited to, Heart of Darkness, H. G. Wells, fin-de-siècle decadent poetry and the surrealistic paintings of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux: Ballard’s novel substantiates Kristeva’s and Friedman’s point that intertextuality is a spatial dimension of the text. In the watery simultaneity of the ‘archaeopsychic past,’ literature and reality, dream and waking, past and future blend together into an undifferentiated flood of impressions and experiences that washes away the old chronological order of history. But as time drains away, so does life. All the characters in the novel perish, either physically or psychologically, having lost not only the will to survive but even the capacity to distinguish between life and death. The doomed Kerans becomes ‘a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun’ (171). The apocalypse is figured as a collective return to the womb, the gradual disintegration of the self through immersion in the waters of time. By the time death comes, the characters are no longer conscious of having lived. The novel’s New Jerusalem is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Like most of Ballard’s novels, The Drowned World, with its combination of sublimity and violence, or sublimity-as-violence, has often been seen as purely

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nihilistic or as uncritically reflecting the postmodern quest for intensity. But in an on-record interview Ballard himself emphasized the ideological aspect of the novel, relating it to the Katrina disaster: ‘There are many kinds of war and terror, but the worst thing is that violence holds a subliminal attraction for us. If we want to combat it successfully, we have to admit that humanity is not completely civilizable. Regrettable, but true.’7 In another conversation, recorded on 23 November 2004 and dealing with Islamic terrorism and the Iraq war, Ballard clarifies his point by courageously describing political and religious terrorism as ‘elective (that is, voluntary) psychopathy . . . willingly embracing psychopathic behaviour because of its energizing potential’ that may affect not individuals but entire nations (Vale 100; emphasis in the original). Unless we combat the voluntary psychosis of violent millennialism with the awareness of its roots and consequences, we are likely to be rendered impotent by the false belief in the essential rationality of humanity or the essential goodness of religion. Thus, The Drowned World becomes a political critique of the apocalypse by refusing the false consolation of the millennium, or rather, by showing that the millennium and the Tribulations are one and the same.

Sea of Bones What The Drowned World did for the durational aspect of the apocalyptic plot, the next, 1965, novel in the series, The Drought (also published as The Burning World) does for its chronological aspect. The Drowned World eliminated chronology, experimenting with pure duration. The Drought eliminates duration, reducing chronology to a series of unrelated events. This structural symmetry is enhanced by the fact that the supposed ‘element’ of The Drought, fire, is in fact the absence of water, as the world is parched after the chemical wastes dumped into the oceans have generated a mono-molecular film that prevents evaporation. But this almost too-neat correlation hides a more serious shift, from dreamy symbolism to a ruthless exploration of apocalyptic violence. As in The Drowned World, the protagonist of The Drought, Ransom, lives in a world where the inner and the outer landscapes have merged. But the result is horrifying rather than sublime. Deprived of both memory and hope, he experiences temporality as a dry accumulation of disasters. Drained of duration, time disintegrates into a jumble of moments stranded on the wasteland of history. When Ransom stumbles across the desert of salt and fish-bones that used to be a lake, he feels that he is ‘advancing across an inner landscape where the elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without association’ (139). This sense of meaningless time falling apart is conveyed by disconnected images of aimless cruelty, random violence and bizarre mutilations. The Drought is undoubtedly the bleakest novel in the series, not so much because of its apocalyptic scenes of car-choked highways and

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people killing each other for a sip of water, but rather because, as opposed to the traditional apocalyptic plot, these scenes do not lead up to any millennial consummation. The geography of Ransom’s wanderings undermines the linearity of many secular apocalypses, in which the protagonists cross the hostile terrain to reach a City of Light. With a handful of accidental companions Ransom escapes the drying lake community and manages to reach the sea-coast, only to find it transformed into a salt-marsh whose bitter waters mock the millenarian promise of rebirth. Stranded there for a decade with an unloved ex-wife, Ransom inexplicably decides to go back to the lake. His companions are just as accidental and unconnected as before; their shared privations failing to create any sense of emotional bond. The lake is now a basin filled with fish-bones and presided over by the monstrous Caliban-like Quilter, a fat Miranda and their idiot children. Neither the lake nor the sea provides any real destination; and Ransom’s meandering across the mean landscape of the desiccated land is not even an inverted quest into a heart of darkness but merely a senseless nightmare. The Drought features a millenarian cult of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his fishermen disciples who become literal, not metaphorical, fishers of men. Religious fanatics burn the city, hoping that ‘God’s grace would come to them only through this final purging fire’ (37). But even this violence ultimately dissolves in the sterility of the novel’s landscape. On the salt beach ‘time [is] not absent but immobilized’ (113). And so both violence and compassion are equally meaningless because neither can generate change. The novel vividly demonstrates how human identity is constructed by a narrative, in which each action or happening acquires meaning from the temporal sequence in which it is embedded. Once this sequence is gone, identity becomes illegible and accidental, a broken reflection of ‘a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free from the demands of memory and nostalgia, free even from the pressures of thirst and hunger’ (165). If Kerans in The Drowned World wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse, Ransom is intermittently beguiled and revolted by it. Eventually abandoning both communities, he strikes out on his own, searching for ‘absolution in time’, as opposed to the disconnected ‘quantum of existence’ that his life has become (34; 36). His search for water figures the desire for time in the desert of eternity. In a strange and hallucinatory ending, having lost all human ties and connections, Ransom is suddenly blessed by the fall of rain; an oblique hope for the recovery of history and escape from ‘a zone without time, suspended in an endless interval’ (113). But this hope is only faintly and ironically indicated: Ballard’s apocalypse offers no easy solutions and no allegorical interpretations. The novel’s use of intertextuality again incarnates the spatiality of its chronotope but its literary allusions are piled up haphazardly, like the accidental objects littering the dry river-bed of Ransom’s wanderings. If in The Drowned World, the allusions were thematically unified by the fin-de-siècle trope of regression, in The Drought they

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seem to be random, selected for their momentary impact rather than for some overarching thematic significance. Shakespeare’s Tempest, Wagner and the Bible are no more than accidental objects in the textual wasteland. The millenarian space drained of both duration and chronology is ‘no longer a place for the sane’ (64).

Lepers in the City of Light The Crystal World returns to the dreamlike beauty of The Drowned World but with a twist that unifies all the four novels into a coherent whole. The last novel in the series looks back on the political, psychological and metaphysical concerns of the first three and restates them in a way that makes clear the connection between the apocalyptic desire and the apocalyptic chronotope; between ‘millennial seduction’ and millennial narrativity. Its premise is that a mysterious process causes ‘crystallization’ of all things, including human beings and animals, encasing them in sheaths of beautiful jewels. The crystallization is generated by ‘anti-time’ (by analogy with antimatter), which annihilates ordinary temporality, ‘subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time’ (85). Time itself dies into a millennium of eternal perfection. In this version of the apocalypse, history comes to an end without the ugly Tribulations. Rather, the entire planet becomes an analogue of the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation, the city whose walls are ‘of jasper; and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones’ (Revelation 21). In Ballard’s crystal millennium, even the profane Babylon that used to be called Miami is transformed into ‘a city of a thousand cathedral spires, a vision materialized from St John the Divine’ (168). But there is no human life in the city of jewels. Like Snow White in her glass coffin, the crystallized humans are neither dead nor alive. Suspended in timeless animation, they have become not angels but objects, beautiful and lifeless things. And yet, there are people who deliberately walk into the jewelled forests seeking to become part of the inorganic ‘New Jerusalem’ (138). They are suffering from leprosy, which becomes endemic at the same time as the process of crystallization begins. These lepers would rather be imprisoned in the sublimely beautiful coffins of crystals than in their rotting flesh. But leprosy is a disease that kills slowly, gradually and inexorably – just like old age; like life itself. We are all lepers. The juxtaposition of time and eternity in The Crystal World is figured as the juxtaposition of leprosy and crystallization. Sanders the protagonist who eventually retreats into the forest, writes: ‘I know that all motion leads inevitably

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to death, and that time is its servant’ (83). But without time, there is no decay but also no growth; and without death, there is no life. Thought itself only exists in time and thus can be regarded as a sort of sickness, contingent on the inevitable decay of its vehicle. As Cioran points out, ‘freedoms prosper only in a sick body politic’ (13). If time is leprosy, its cure is non-being. The Crystal World simultaneously critiques the psychic and ideological underpinnings of the millennium and reveals its powerful seduction. The bejewelled forests are an ultimate incarnation of the apocalyptic chronotope in which successive moments are embalmed in lifeless simultaneity. And yet this cemetery of time is beguilingly beautiful. As opposed to the stark wasteland of The Drought, the sparkling forests of The Crystal World are the true millennium: pure, eternal and deadly.

The Ethics of Mutability Mikhail Bakhtin relates the messy, unpredictable, multiform chronotope of the novel to the open-endedness of history, in which ‘a place for the future must be found’ (2002, 37). In his impassionate defence of the poetics of contingency, Morson quotes Bakhtin to make his own point that narrative temporality is the main axis for the self-creation of subjects and societies; we narrate our selves in the full knowledge that ‘the past is fixed and the future is not’, and it is only along this arrow of time that freedom and authenticity can be found (284). Morson’s critique of what he calls the ‘synchronic’ world-view obliquely refers to the violence implicit in the idea that the immutable laws of history exist and we can know them, therefore knowing the future (302). But the apocalyptic plot makes this violence overt, collapsing the distinction between murder and salvation. In the apocalyptic timeshape ‘the place for the future’ must be not found but rather revealed by clearing away the detritus of accidental history. And this detritus consists of human bodies that by necessity function as soft clocks ticking away the irreplaceable moments of time. The only way to create a purely spatial chronotope is to freeze all organic processes and to stop all human and perhaps even non-human, actions. The ultimate narrative of the end of time is the end of narrative. Ballard’s novels both incarnate the death of narrative and question its ethical premises and consequences. In its combination of violence and beauty, of narrative slowdown and temporal distortion, the Quartet embodies the postmodern poetics of the sublime. But in its denial of utopian redemption, in its mockery of the millennium, the Quartet undermines the political appropriation of the sublime in the service of religion and ideology. By taking to the extreme the spatiality of the postmodern chronotope, Ballard’s novels show that if time is dead, it is because it has been murdered by the violent excesses of the would-be builders of New Jerusalem.

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Ballard’s anti-apocalyptic apocalypse opposes millennialism with a focus on corporeal experience and psychic endurance. His Four Horsemen are not the exceptional disasters of the Book of Revelation, War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. They are the foundations of life, the elements that comprise the entire living world: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. The deadly delusion of a divine emplotment of history can only be opposed by the everyday reality of survival in time.

Conclusion: Beyond Millennium

Please, sir, I want some more! Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Utopias of Space and Time Postmodernity is damned by its inability to imagine utopia. This, at least, is Jameson’s belief. In an early essay ‘Progress versus Utopia or, Can We Imagine the Future’ (1982) he argues that the only function of literary utopias today ‘is to bring home, in local and determinate ways and with a fullness of concrete details, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself: and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners’ (2007, 289). This closure has only intensified in the years between 1982 and today, since the collapse of Communism and the accelerated spread of globalization marks the end of the last large-scale implementation of a utopian ideology. This is why Francis Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History, despite its evident implausibility (momentous events have continued to happen since its publication) is so seductive. What seems to have ended is not history but rather history’s dream of becoming utopia. In the last chapter I argued that pursuit of the millennium is bound to result in protracted Tribulations. But this conclusion seems emotionally hard to accept, no matter how ideologically unpalatable the current millenniums on offer are. Is there nothing else besides the spooky Kingdom Come of the fundamentalists or the reanimated corpses of Nazism and Communism on the far right and the far left? Are we condemned to be stuck in the iron cage of globalization or blow it to smithereens in an unrestricted orgy of violence? Alternate histories with their celebration of contingency can show us what might have been but where is a roadmap to what will be? In this Conclusion I want to look at several SF texts that try to envision, with varying degrees of success and varying ideological implications, a radical

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breakthrough in history; an ontological Singularity; and a new temporality that is not only post-apocalyptic but also post-millennial. Coupled with their attempt to envision a new timeshape is their adumbration of a posthuman subject of history who does not merely ‘subvert’ or ‘collapse’ the dichotomies of liberal humanism as Haraway’s cyborg does but actively engages in self-remaking. It is a subject beyond the anomie of a-temporality, beyond the passivity of determinism and the violent intoxication of apocalypse. It is a subject that is perhaps impossible to represent. And yet in its very impossibility lie the seeds of its emergence. In his recent work Jameson refined his earlier paradoxical argument that writing utopias only succeeds in making us aware of the failure of the utopian imagination. In his essay ‘Varieties of the Utopian’ Jameson makes a distinction between a utopian blueprint and a utopian desire. Going back to Thomas More’s original Utopia, he finds ‘two distinct lines of descendency from More’s inaugural text: the one intent on the realization of the Utopian programme, the other an obscure yet omnipresent Utopian impulse finding its way to the surface in a variety of covert expressions and practices’ (2007, 3). While the ‘Utopian impulse’ is at work in a variety of social and reformist practices, the triumph of global capitalism has sapped our capacity to envision a new Utopia. Tom Moylan recasts this distinction by referring to Karl Mannheim’s opposition between utopia and ideology. For Mannheim, ‘Utopia is that unconquered power of the imagination which resists the closure of ideology’ (Moylan 18). Moylan, however, points out that utopia and ideology are not opposite but complementary; ideology utilizes utopia in service of its own ends, as we have seen in the millennial seductions of both the religious and the secular variety. Consequently, the utopian impulse must always exceed its incarnation in a specific ideology: ‘For a specific, homogeneous utopian vision would be a betrayal of radical utopian discourse and would only end up serving the instrumentalization of desire carried on by the present structures of power’ (Moylan 28). The utopian programme and the utopian impulse are radically at odds with each other. Utopia, as in Thomas More’s original text, is a place. It is an island, or a city as in Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), or a planet, as in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) or in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Martians (1999). It is easy to see in the utopian geography the secularized lineaments of New Jerusalem. Indeed, just as the space of the millennium negates or consumes the time of apocalypse, the space of utopia negates or consumes the time of history. In his essay ‘Of Islands and Trenches’ (1977) Jameson emphasizes the spatiality of the utopian chronotope: In Utopian discourse, on the contrary, it is narrative itself that tends to be effaced by and assimilated to sheer description, as anyone knows who has ever nodded over the more garrulous explanatory passages in the classical

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Utopias. Indeed, one of the basic constraints of the form would seem to be its incompatibility between action or events and that timeless maplike extension of the nonplace itself; in other words, if things can really happen in Utopia, if real disorder, change, transgression, novelty, in brief is history is possible at all, then we begin to doubt whether it can really be a Utopia after all . . .’ (1988b, 95) The utopian space, in other words, is the familiar spatial chronotope of determinism. But as opposed to time-travel narratives, utopia abolishes the temporal contortions of the chronoclasm by the simple expedient of abolishing time altogether. But this does not help to stabilize the utopian chronotope. It is even less stable than the time-travel chronotope which is fissured by the relentless pressure of its unresolvable paradoxes. Utopia is undone not by logical antinomies but by simple boredom. The anomie of the a-temporal subject undermines the perfect arrangement of the utopian City of Light, as ‘the displacement of time, the spatialization of the temporal’ (Jameson 1991, 156) takes its revenge on the best-laid utopian schemes. Without the divine authority that upholds New Jerusalem in eternity, utopian spaces are fast eroded by the narrative drift within the utopian text itself. Few utopias are mere programmatic blueprints of ideal societies and those that are, are largely unreadable. Most utopian texts are structured by the stripped-down plot of a visitor to the utopian city who has to be shown and lectured upon, the miracles of the perfectly organized society. But once temporality enters through the back door of even this minimal narrative development, it cannot be banished again. Any utopia contains the seeds of its own destruction. As E. M. Cioran cogently points out, when we seek escape from history, we identify the future ‘with an appearance of an altogether different time within time, we consider it as an inexhaustible and yet completed duration, a timeless history. A contradiction in terms, inherent in the hope of a new kingdom, of a victory of the unsolvable at the heart of becoming. Our dreams of a better world are based on a theoretical impossibility. Hardly surprising if, in order to justify them, we must resort to solid paradoxes!’ (89; emphasis in the original). Caught between the extended duration of the apocalypse that is kept stretched and inflated by the violent sublime and the oxymoronic ‘timeless history’ of determinism, utopia appears impossible and undesirable, a deceptive lure for tyranny and mass murder. And indeed, the political record of utopian ideologies of the last century is so dismal that one hardly needs to reiterate the objections to utopian programmes. However, there is still something in postmodern culture that resists the foreclosure of the end-of-history pragmatism, which, after all, is yet another apocalyptic discourse masquerading as common sense. Both Jameson and Moylan call this ‘something’ the utopian impulse or utopian desire: an irrepressible and protean modality of psychic investment that attaches itself to

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small everyday pleasures and yet is also capable of animating political reforms and oppositional movements. Utopian desire generates ‘Utopian figures [that] seep into the daily life of things and people and afford an incremental and often unconscious, bonus of pleasure unrelated to their functional value or official satisfaction’ (Jameson 2007, 5). This stubborn survival of the utopian impulse in the temporal and contingent existence of individuals and societies undermines the totality of utopian programmes and rebels against their ruthless closure of history, with all its attendant and inescapable violence. The war between the utopian programme and the utopian impulse is a war between homogeneity and heterogeneity, millennium and history, space and time. But the timeshape proper to the utopian impulse is hard, perhaps even impossible, to define. Determinism has its chronoclasms; contingency – its counterfactuals; apocalypse – its duration. Does the utopian impulse have anything? What happens when SF attempts to go beyond both history and millennium and to transcend the inbuilt limitations of narrativity that demand, at the very minimum, a chronotope with plot, setting and actants? What happens when narrative encounters not the limits of a confining ideology but of the human imagination itself?

Voices of Blood In 1983 Greg Bear wrote an award-winning short story ‘Blood Music’, which he expanded into a novel of the same title published in 1985. While based on the same idea of a biotechnological Singularity that brings about a radical transformation of humanity, the story and the novel differ significantly in their narrative form. The story is an apocalyptic warning; the novel is a utopian fantasy. The story emphasizes the horror of the biotech Tribulations; the novel recuperates them in the bliss of the biotech millennium. A disgruntled scientist Vergil Ulam cooks up a new species of organicchip-augmented bacteria, creating ‘an intelligent plague . . . a disease that thinks’ (Bear 1985, 101). He comes with his discovery to his friend Dr Edward Milligan who realizes that the ‘noocytes’, as Vergil calls them, pose a deadly danger to humanity. Vergil has injected himself with his intelligent bacteria and they are rebuilding him from the inside out, turning him into a sort of geeky superman, with vastly increased intellectual capacity and sexual potency. But more importantly, they are talking to him, humming through the ‘blood music’ of their interface, as his individual consciousness is being transfigured by their collective wisdom. After much soul-searching, Edward kills Vergil but it is too late: the noocytes have entered the water supply. In the last section of the story Edward and his wife Gail are taken over and merged into sheets of living tissue, as their minds are being pulled apart, duplicated and ‘spread through the transformed blood’ (Bear 1983, 32). Edward who is the first-person narrator

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of the story finally shifts to the first-person plural and this marks his full absorption into the brave new world of the intelligent plague: ‘Within the old time-frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force’ (1983, 32). This is what Jameson calls the ‘ethical depersonalization’ of the Utopian programme; the submergence of the individual in the collective, the subsuming of the ‘existential time’ of human life into ‘the end of time, the end of history’ (2007, 7). But for Edward, poised on the cusp of the transition from ‘I’ to ‘we’, the utopian ‘depersonalization’ is as much a moment of profound loss as it is of transcendental hope; together with ‘the old time-frame’ he feels his narrative agency dissolve in the stasis of the dimly glimpsed bacterial millennium. This millennium, the City of God built of living flesh, is figured through a striking image in Edward’s repeated dream: ‘I dreamed that New York City was raping a woman. By the end of the dream, she was giving birth to little embryonic cities, all wrapped up in translucent sacs, soaked with blood from the difficult labor’ (Bear 1983, 19–20). As opposed to the bejewelled and deadly forests of Ballard’s The Crystal World, Bear’s New Jerusalem is very much alive, even sexually potent, but monstrous and overwhelming. The hope for a posthuman transfiguration merges here with oblique images of political violence, recalling the blood-splattered streets of the revolutionary Paris in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. A revolution is simultaneously a consummation and a rape. But this ambivalence is considerably muted in the novel version, which underplays apocalyptic horror in favour of millennial exaltation. Edward is no longer the narrator; instead, different sections of the novel are focalized through different characters, creating a more panoramic, but also more distanced, representation of humanity’s transformation into a literal body politic, in which a dream of solidarity has been realized as a nightmare of fused flesh. The first section of the novel ends with a corporeal epiphany as Edward and his wife Gail meld into a single entity; a literalization of the sentimental cliché of ‘two becoming one’: ‘Edward and Gail grew together on the bed, substance passing through clothes, skin joining where they embraced and skin where they touched’ (1985, 109). After this perverse consummation, the intelligent plague strikes the rest of the world. People’s bodies dissolve and flow down the drains where they festoon the pipes with coral-like growths of flesh. Manhattan grows muscles and skin over the skeletons of its skyscrapers. The second part of the book follows the hallucinatory voyages of a couple of lonely survivors through this planet-wide body politic. If at the beginning Vergil’s body is the noocytes’ universe, now it is the few remaining humans who are the dying bacilli infesting the posthuman body of the world. The novel conflates the two cities of the apocalypse: Babylon, the dark city of the flesh; and New Jerusalem, the city of light where death has no dominion. The new body politic is simultaneously horrifying and transcendent. On the eve of the ‘Big Change’, one of the characters, Bernard, asks himself whether he is afraid of the ‘completely different – sublime or hellish’ (1985, 231). The answer

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is that the hellish is the sublime. Within the undifferentiated body of the noosphere created by the noocytes, human beings have shed the constraints of mortality, becoming pure information, virtual copies of themselves that can be copied, merged, reduced to a DNA strand, edited and re-recorded. The millennium, born in the apocalyptic violence of the deadly plague (one of the Four Horsemen of the Revelation), delivers not merely a better social order but a transfiguration of humanity marked by a ‘radical, even alien, difference’ (Jameson 2007, 5). And yet when it comes to depicting life in this biotech millennium, the book fails miserably. Blood Music is highly imaginative when it depicts the noocyte Tribulations, deploying the same techniques of elaborate landscape description, temporal stretch and action slowdown that we have seen in Ballard. But as opposed to Ballard’s characters who remain stuck in the twilight of the Tribulations, Bear’s characters enter the millennium – and discover that it is more akin to yawning over the family album on a sleepy afternoon than it is to a spiritual transfiguration. In the last section of the novel, set in the ‘thought universe’, the rejuvenated Bernard is lounging on a very ordinary lakeside with his lost fiancée, engaging in teenage chatter and getting ‘another chance’ to mend a broken relationship (1985, 262). This bathetic ending, so jarring after the sublimity of the world destruction, marks the ideological failure of the utopian programme. In a world where history has come to an end, repetition is the only activity; pastiche is the only art; and replay is the only modality of subjectivity. The last sentences of the novel, set in special typeface, are: Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten. It was in the blood, the flesh. And now it is forever. (1985, 262) This fortune-cookie message of hope exposes the puerility of a realized utopian programme. We have come back full circle to the postmodern simulacra and their bored and superficial consumers. On the other side of the apocalypse lies the Disneyland. And yet, just before this bathetic closure, the novel allows us a glimpse of that ‘totally Other’, which lures the utopian imagination beyond the limitations of time, space and history: ‘The Earth, for the space of a long, trembling sigh, held together in the maelstrom. When its time came, the cities, towns and villages – the homes and huts and tents – were as empty as shed cocoons. The Noosphere shook loose its wings. Where the wings touched, the stars themselves danced, celebrated, became burning flakes of snow’ (1985, 260). Poised on the boundary between apocalypse and millennium, the novel strives to articulate a different experience of time, beyond religion, ideology, worldview, beyond language itself. Naturally, it fails. But this, perhaps, is the only success the utopian desire is capable of.

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The Harvest of Souls Robert Charles Wilson’s The Harvest (1993) is a kinder, gentler apocalypse. The alien Travellers, having come down from the stars, offer each human being on the planet a choice: to live forever and to forfeit their humanity by becoming a virtual entity in the Greater World, or to remain as they are, fragile and mortal. One in ten thousands rejects the offer and the novel follows the hopeless trek of a group of ‘old’ humans, led by a small-town physician Matt Wheeler, across the Pacific Northwest, while also tracing the ascension of the rest of humanity. The ‘ascension’ is the right word because Wilson’s novel is permeated with mystical and eschatological imagery, despite its rejection of organized religion. It is cognitive, rather than Christian, SF but it borrows much of its vocabulary from the mystical tradition in Christianity. The Travellers are highly-developed aliens, not gods, let alone the God of the Bible. The transfiguration of humanity is achieved by nano-machines (neocytes, echoing Bear’s noocytes; another intelligent plague) rather than by divine fiat. The Harvest is a secular utopia that appropriates the language and plot of the Revelation in an attempt to articulate a millennial vision that avoids the violent sublime of the Biblical apocalypse and yet preserves some of its transcendent wonder. The new Home that the transformed humanity is building for itself out in the space is a paradisiacal copy of the Earth, cleansed of the devastating effects of human exploitation and natural wear and tear. It is a place where nothing dies, nothing decays: ‘Elysium . . . Jerusalem. The illud tempus’ (Wilson 83). The transition to this orbital New Jerusalem is achieved softly and painlessly, without the baroque corporeality of Blood Music or Ballard’s choreography of ruination. Everybody is offered a chance of immortality, even murderers, child abusers and warlords. But not everybody accepts; and herein lies the catch. Apparently even a non-denominational, all-inclusive apocalypse cannot do without its share of the damned. While the rest of humanity is caught up in its protracted and painless Rapture, transforming themselves into new and wonderful shapes before casting off the flesh altogether, the motley band of old-style humans falls prey to dissention, jealousy and eventually violence. These human throwbacks are not so much evil as pitiful. With a considerable psychological subtlety Wilson portrays them as lacking in something, as flawed, incomplete and damaged. The worst of them are morally and psychologically empty vessels, such as Colonel Tyler, the villain of the novel who is prepared to shoot the President of the US for his collaboration with the alien ‘invasion’. Evil is the absence of good; but those hollowed out by this absence cannot join the new human polis, the epistemos or place of thought, as the millennium is called. Instead, they long for non-being. ‘And some people want to die,’ says the President who has remade himself into a young boy, a prophet of the new

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world. ‘They might not admit it, they might even fear it, but in the deepest part of themselves they long for it.’ (359). Eventually, the shrinking band of the willing Left Behind undergoes its own winnowing. But as opposed to Christian SF, the ticket to Heaven is not acknowledging Christ but repudiating him. One of the survivors, Miriam Flett, a dour evangelical, eventually accepts the proffered salvation when she realizes how ‘provincial’ her Bible is compared to the majesty of the infinite Universe (356). Openness to the Universe, rather than submission to God, is the prerequisite of eternal life. The only ones who truly die are those like Tyler who have never lived in the first place. This is true about everybody but the novel’s main character Matt Wheeler and he is the one who complicates this New Age utopia. He is a dedicated and kind man, passionately attached to his home town of Buchanan, Oregon. And this love of a small, dying American town is strong enough to prevent him from joining the City of Light. In the same conversation with Miriam, the boy President explains Matt’s decision: ‘Yeats wrote a line,’ William said, ‘which always stuck in my memory. Man is in love, he said, and loves what vanishes. I don’t think it’s true – not the way the poet meant it. Not of most people. But it may have been true of Yeats. And I think it’s true of certain few others. Some few people are in love with what dies, Miriam, and they love it so much they can’t bear to leave it behind’. (360) When trying to explain to his transfigured daughter why he has rejected the aliens’ offer, Matt tells her about the history of Buchanan, singling out a moment in 1919 when during a labour dispute, his grandfather saved the strikers’ flag from the soldiers trying to take it down. ‘It was the first time I really understood this town had a history . . . that people had histories’ (173; emphasis in the original). What Matt is in love with is history itself; not what vanishes but the process of vanishing and renewal. Matt is in love with time for which the Greater World, the shining Home in the sky, the epistemos, has no place. But perhaps just as significant as his attachment to history is the episode Matt chooses to illustrate what it means to him: the revolutionary romance of the strike; the labour against the capital; the moment when a socialist millennium seemed to be within reach. In 1993 when the dream of a realized utopia is finally buried under the rubble of the Soviet bloc, it is hard not to see the gentle apocalypse of The Harvest as a wish-fulfilment, a millennial substitute for what history so spectacularly failed to deliver. But as humanity is saying farewell to history, one man is still holding on to the tattered flag of the utopian impulse which rejects what is in favour of what will be. The novels itself seems unsure what to do with Matt; perhaps he will join the Home, after all, but meanwhile he, with his new girlfriend, is doggedly trudging through the depopulated

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Northwest towards some other human community, some other evanescent promise of a better future. By utilizing the familiar imagery of the Second Coming, Wilson attempts to convey the sense of the transcendent. But his depiction of posthumanity, while not as bathetic as Bear’s, is equally problematic. The traditional tools of characterization – description, focalization and inner monologue – are simply insufficient to convey the sense of radical alienness that the posthumans are supposed to project. And the end of the novel runs into the same millennial aporia as does Blood Music. After suitably apocalyptic convulsions, with terrible storms and tsunamis, the Earth is healed. Some of the transfigured posthumans remain to watch over the lush, safe, protected garden that our planet has become and its inhabitants. One of the remaining human holdovers describes the new world order: ‘Eden,’ Kindle said. ‘Kind of a garden. Live there, you’re taken care of. God looks after you for your natural span. God makes the sun shine. God makes the grass grow.’ ‘They’re not God,’ Matt said. ‘Might as well be.’ (432) History is bent into the familiar Ouroboros shape, coming back to its mythical beginning in the Garden of Eden. And with the death of Tyler, there is not even anybody to qualify for the role of the serpent except, perhaps, the human longing for what vanishes. The Harvest is an attempt to wrest the ownership of the millennium from the religious right. But perhaps just as much, it is a requiem for the historical hope, symbolized by the image of a 1919 worker proudly holding on to his flag. Wilson’s novel represents the millennium as a consolation prize for the lost utopia.

The Dawkins Paradise Greg Egan’s Distress (1995) is explicitly and programmatically an anti-Christian apocalypse/utopia – and perhaps for that very reason its hectoring tone is strongly reminiscent of The Left Behind. Set in the near future, it portrays a world awash in miracles of genetic engineering, while gripped by social, political and existential malaise. Eventually this malaise coalesces into the Distress of the title, a mysterious ‘AIDS of the mind’ that causes its victims an unbearable psychic anguish (Egan 40). It turns out that Distress is not caused by a virus, a noocyte or even a neocyte. It is a metaphysical plague, an immune reaction of the collective psyche to the about-to-be-revealed TOE or Theory of Everything, the ultimate synthesis of relativity and quantum mechanics. Once this theory is apprehended by even a

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single human being, the quantum entanglement will guarantee that the relationship between matter and mind will radically change. Mystery, uncertainty and the abyss of the unknown will disappear forever and the universe will be revealed in all its pristine clarity and comprehensibility, obediently transforming into an epistemos, the place of thought, in which the Cartesian duality is abolished forever. By the simple expedient of coming up with a new scientific theory, humanity will instantly erect a cosmic New Jerusalem. Surely, this is as much a matter of faith as the Second Coming! Nevertheless, Egan makes quite an effort to differentiate his own brand of millennialism from the religious kind. All mysticism is dismissed as ‘idiot mythology’ (404). Opposed to it is what he calls the ideology of technoliberation, a mixture of sociobiology, anarchism and biotechnology that promises to deliver humanity from the clutches of irrational fears and self-destructive desires. One of the followers of this scientific religion explains that metaphysical and historical angst is a mere disease of the immature mind: For a year or so . . . I really believed it: Here I am, staring into the abyss with Nietzsche. Here I am, on the brink of insanity, entropy, meaninglessness, the Enlightenment’s unspeakable godless rational damnation. One wrong step, and I’ll go spiraling down . . . But I didn’t go spiraling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that We’re animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand . . . (278) Far more so than Bear’s and Wilson’s but similarly to LaHaye’s, Egan’s is an ideological millennium. It embodies the danger of ideology sliding into religion, of the utopian impulse mutating first into a utopian programme and then into a utopian mandate. Paradoxically, in violently abjuring the religious apocalypse, Egan produces its exact mirror image. And this is evident in the way in which the book dismisses its own social programme in favour of a wholesale ontological transformation not just of humanity but of the entire cosmos. Technoliberation inspires a full-fledged island utopia of Stateless, introduced in the middle of the book. The protagonist and first-person narrator Andrew Worth is given a traditional utopian tour, which is supposed to demonstrate the workings of a society that combines libertarianism and sociobiology, simultaneously advocating ‘diversity’ and ‘acknowledging biological forces’ (118; emphasis in the original). Stateless is neither more nor less convincing than other similar communities, from Thomas More’s Utopia to Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975). The problem with this utopian programme, however, is that it is not enough; that a mere social transformation does not suffice to prevent that ‘spiraling into the abyss’ that haunts the novel all the more so because it is so insistently denounced. And so an ontological transformation follows; the Revelation of

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TOE arrives with the full panoply of the secular Tribulations, resurrecting the sadomasochistic dynamics of violence, purification and the final Rapture. As the victims of Distress howl in anguish and the protagonist, for good measure, suffers a bout of antibiotic-resistant cholera, the ‘Aleph Moment’ arrives and marks the advent of the millennium. The universe is transfigured into a cosmic City of Light: a perfectly transparent, perfectly understandable cosmos lit with the light of reason as inexorable as the glory of God that lights New Jerusalem. ‘And there shall be no night there’ (Revelation 22). In the post-Aleph world the night of ignorance is over, and with it the fever dreams of the imagination. ‘No wheels within wheels, no dazzling cosmic technoporn, no infernal diagrams. No visions. Just understanding’ (445). And of course, the techno-Rapture requires its own Left Behind: nine million people commit suicide, unable to bear the prospect of a Richard Dawkins paradise. The most curious feature of Egan’s millennium is its treatment of the body. In both Blood Music and The Harvest, transformation and eventual abandonment of the flesh attempt to represent what Jameson calls ‘Utopian corporeality’: the dream of a radical transformation of the body that ‘haunts’ even such commodifications of the utopian impulse as plastic surgery and cosmetics industry (2007, 6). This ‘Utopian corporeality’ in the two novels is conveyed through the hackneyed imagery of the organic hell and the incorporeal heaven. Nevertheless, the very second-handedness and insufficiency of these images figures the ineffability of the utopian desire; there is something poignant about Egan’s cities of the flesh and something wistful about Wilson’s new humans, gracefully shedding their skins like butterflies emerging from cocoons. But in Egan, the corporeal transformation is sternly prescriptive, recalling the repressive Puritanism of both evangelical Christianity and early Communism. Having had his share of unhappy relationships in the pre-Aleph world, Andrew Worth finds haven from desire in a relationship with an ‘asex’, a person who has surgically eliminated all primary and secondary sexual characteristics and gotten rid of the sex centres in the brain. This self-castrated techno-angel, named Akili, explains the reason for this ultimate ascesis in terms that would be perfectly familiar to St Augustine who, in Confessions, describes sexual desire as ‘this disease of the flesh’ (129). For Akili, sex is an ‘addictive, euphoric, exhilarating’ and ‘meaningless’ drug (405). In the Kingdom of TOE the disease of the flesh is cured. For good measure, even the desire for non-sexual intimacy is eliminated as voluntary autism, consisting of the surgical removal of the brain area that is responsible for the need to understand other people and be understood by them, becomes widespread. Free of sex, conflict and desire, the inhabitants of the techno-millennium are living out the biblical prescription for the Kingdom of Heaven where there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Gentile. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Distress is its total foreclosure not just of human history, as in Blood Music and The Harvest, but of cosmic history as

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well. In both Bear and Wilson there is an opening at the end through which the future, incomprehensible, indescribable and unforeseeable, can re-enter. The Ouroboros may still uncoil; humanity’s descendants may rediscover time. But after voiding the universe of mystery, Distress ends with a programmatic statement, a shrill declaration that the ‘future is unbounded’ (342; emphasis in the original). And it is as unpersuasive as the tired slogans of the collapsed utopian regimes, from the rubble of which Distress is trying to build its millennium.

Time without Qualities In all three novels, the interaction of the utopian programme and the utopian impulse results in the narrative defeat of the latter. Any attempt to inscribe the radical open-endedness of the utopian desire in a structured narrative form seems to lead, inevitably, to the reification of the desire in the confining cage of the spatial, deterministic chronotope. At best, the utopian impulse simply dissipates; at worst, it is co-opted in the service of apocalyptic violence or millenarian tyranny. And the more complete and all-encompassing the utopian programme is, the more decisive is the defeat of the utopian impulse. If the oblique hints of a radical transformation at the end of Blood Music leave some room for imagining a different narrative trajectory beyond the novel’s repressive recycling of sentimental clichés, Distress forecloses not just social but even cosmological options. It offers the reader the paltry consolation that while ‘there are no more “deep” surprises – there’s nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence . . . there’ll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain’ (Egan 342). But this new epistemology is merely extending the scope of the crystal prison-house of ‘clarity’ throughout the entire universe. When in the last section of the novel the dying Andrew Worth lectures utopian children on their bright future, he can tell them nothing new because there is nothing new to tell. The last sentence of the novel is: ‘They already knew that, of course’ (324), summing up in the dismissive ‘that’ the entire social, cognitive and spiritual quest of humanity. And yet, even as the utopia triumphantly swallows up history, there is still a chink in the millennial space, through which time can come back. But it comes back not as a new timeshape, articulated through a set of images, a theoretical elaboration, or a configuration of narrative techniques. Rather, time and history return as an incoherence at the heart of every chronotope; as a breakdown of narrativity; as a hint of the radically Other that cannot be defined, described, or represented. If, as Ricoeur argued, time is humanly apprehended only through narrative, perhaps the breakdown of narrative is a glimpse of time as it really is, in all its irreducible non-humanity.

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This breakdown of narrativity, the aporia of temporal representation, occurs in different ways in SF texts. In ‘Blood Music’ the story, the narrative voice keeps narrating when Edward is no more; when his mind has been assimilated into the noosphere. And even as he speaks of ‘we’, the ‘I’ keeps coming back, and ‘they’ as well: ‘I leave them – us – with only one question. How many times has this happened, elsewhere?’ (Bear 1983, 32; emphasis in the original). The pronoun confusion testifies not only to the breakdown of subjectivity but to the disintegration of the temporal progression which underpins our sense of individual identity. The question itself relates to time and yet undermines the linear apocalyptic/millenarian plot of the story by rewriting it as a cyclical occurrence, the Nietzschean ‘eternal return’ of what, by definition, can only happen once: the End Times. In Blood Music the novel, on the other hand, the narrative breakdown occurs on the level of the plot, as the millennial transformation of the Earth itself into a cosmic bird sharply contrasts with the individual survival within the noosphere. The incongruity of the two concluding images of the novel creates a narrative fissure within the utopian chronotope. In The Harvest the very blatancy of the religious and mystical allusions eventually collapses the millennial space. What seemed to have been a transfiguration of humanity, a radical novum, turns out to be an almost parodic recycling of Biblical clichés, which are insistently introduced on the extradiegetic level by the third-person omniscient narrator. Intertextuality, which is often used to shore up SF chronotopes by enabling the reader to draw upon the genre’s stock of images and ideas, here becomes the weight that crashes the diegetic structure of the fictional world. Even in Distress, there is a hint of radical incoherence marring its scientific New Jerusalem. Worth realizes that he himself is the Keystone of the New World Order, since he is the one to first apprehend the TOE. But he is no God; in fact, the only way for him to be the Keystone is to erase himself completely, to perceive the universe as a self-creation ex nihili, in which his own self acts as the locus of cosmic nothingness. ‘All I had to do to tear myself out of the centre of the universe – all I had to do to prevent the unravelling – was give up one last illusion’ (Egan 338). But by giving up the illusion of his own substantiality, Worth leaves the universe with no centre at all, just as his narrative, suddenly bereft of its narrator, is suspended in a void. The chronotope of Distress is the Worm Ouroboros without the worm. Such radical antinomies of SF chronotopes are different from the engineered paradoxes of time-travel or the incongruities of the diegetic and extradiegetic levels in alternate histories. They indicate points at which the radical alterity of the utopian impulse penetrates the closed system not just of a utopian programme but of any narrative representation whatsoever. They are neither deliberate nor accidental; they are a necessary consequence of the very project to emplot time. And so they mark both the failure of this emplotment and its ultimate success.

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These fissures in timeshapes are the loci where the posthuman subject truly enters the worlds of SF. I have already argued that the baroque body modifications of the theoretical cyborgs, lifted from the pages of Golden-Age SF, are insufficient to convey the sense of unlimited possibilities that both biological evolution and bio-engineering, in all their historical unpredictability, open to humanity. The Eloi and the Morlocks are more posthuman than the Borg and the Forged because their mute animal opaqueness is more alien than a whole host of cyber-prostheses. In ‘Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System’ Scott Bukatman analyses how ‘the contemporary drama of the subject, which I call terminal flesh, is played out upon the surface of the body’ (111; emphasis in the original). But if the subjectivity within this ‘terminal flesh’ remains the same old, narrative, humanist subject, we have hardly moved beyond liposuction and breast augmentation. But if it is not, how can it possibly be narrated using the tools derived from the human historical experience? The breakdown of language and narrativity practised by mainstream postmodern fiction, paradoxically, does not go far enough because it remains parasitic on old mimetic conventions. But while SF expands these conventions and invents its own, it cannot go beyond what is known at this stage of our historical development. It is impossible to represent the unrepresentable. Stanislaw Lem struggled with his dilemma his entire life. The Ocean of Solaris (1961), the unfathomable aliens of Fiasco (1986), the cyber-insects of The Invincible (1964) are images of the totally Other; of the absolute alterity, which can only be conveyed by failure, foreclosure, denial. The Ocean remains mute; the aliens do not respond to threats or entreaties; the Invincible is defeated. One might say that all these enigmatic images represent the total openendedness of the future, the allure of the utopian desire that always leads away from what is toward what will or may be. But Lem in an autobiographical essay suggests a genesis for his imagination which is both more humble and more illuminating. Describing his youth in Nazi-occupied Poland, he talks about his dissatisfaction with the conventional historical narrative techniques as epitomized in the novel of Saul Bellow that purported to describe that period: These days (under the Nazi occupation) have pulverized and exploded all narrative conventions that had previously been used in literature. The unfathomable futility of human life under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by literary techniques in which individuals or small groups of person for the core of the narrative . . . I do not know, of course, whether this sort of narrative inadequacy was the reason that I started to write science fiction but I suppose . . . that I began writing science fiction because it deals with human beings as species (or rather, with all possible species of intelligent beings, one of which happens to be human species). (1985, 12)

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Historical time and private time, future and past, human and alien are linked in this mini-narrative of a life shadowed by mass murder. The unrepresentability of time is not just a postmodern philosophical quandary; not just a discovery of Derrida and Deleuze and Foucault. It is also a tangible result of the historical experience of postmodernity, shadowed by the cataclysms of tyrannical utopias and man-made apocalypses. And entering through this breach of narrative, SF bravely confronts the alien future, the incomprehensible past and the elusive present, and tries to give utterance to their silence and shape to their shapelessness. If it fails, it is in a good cause.

Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

In the English translation chronotope is rendered as ‘spacetime’; however, in the Russian original Bakhtin renders it as ‘timespace’, emphasizing the narrative priority of temporality (Bakhtin 1975, 234). Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first cell-phone, acknowledged the inspiration of Star Trek; so did Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. See ‘Star Trek Tech’ in Edit International. http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=4810edf3a83f8. Accessed on 12/11/09. The Russian Formalists’ terminology for the same thing was fabula and sjujet.

Chapter 1 1

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3

4 5

In the 2001 TV mini-series The Infinite Worlds of H. G. Wells (Hallmark, Robert Young, dir.), Wells travels into the past and the future, writing down his adventures in the form of his ‘scientific romances’, which therefore are not fiction but fact! However, the naïve Victorian protagonist of the series has nothing in common with the author of The Time Machine. Charles Lyell (1797–1875) published Principles of Geology in 1830–1833. His argument that the surface of the Earth was formed by slow forces acting over long periods of time profoundly influenced Darwin. Robert Chambers (1801–1872) anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, promoting the idea of ‘evolution by law’. Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888) was a naturalist and a Christian believer who suggested in his Omphalos (1857) that God created the universe exactly as described in the Bible but with all the traces of the ‘virtual’ past; a science-fictional concept that was praised by both Stephen Jay Gould and Jorge Luis Borges for its imaginative force, if not for its veracity. http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org./ Accessed on 10/09/09. The two most famous cinematic adaptations are the 1960 film (Dir. George Pal) and the 2002 one (Dir. Simon Wells), both tacking on a soppy love story, both making the Eloi into an oppressed human minority and the Morlocks into evil monsters (in the last version, unaccountably ruled by Jeremy Irons as a sort of cannibalistic aesthete). Needless to say, none engages with any sort of evolutionary

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problematic and both solve the incipient chronoclasm by a liberal application of special effects.

Chapter 2 1

2

For purposes of clarity I am using the simplest narratological terminology derived mainly from Genette and Rimmon-Kenan. There are other theoretical models that describe essentially the same narrative levels and structures using different terms. Contrary to common belief, the second law of thermodynamics does not in itself provide temporal directionality. This law, stating that a closed system develops toward a state of higher entropy, can be reformulated in a way that suggests that both the past and the future states of this system possessed higher entropy than the present. The only way for the second law to generate the arrow of time is to postulate that the post-Big Bang universe happened to be in a peculiarly unlikely state of low entropy, thus introducing a historical, narrative sequence into the workings of the laws of nature, almost all of which are symmetrical with regard to time.

Chapter 3 1

2 3

4 5

According to a recent CBS poll (2005), 51% of Americans reject evolution altogether and only 15% accept the standard Darwinian account of life’s development. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965223_ page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody. Accessed on 16/07/09. http://csunx4.bsc.edu/bmyers/WJ1.htm. Accessed on 02/11/09. There are several versions of the Anthropic Principle, some stronger and some weaker. For an excellent overview of the controversy see Susskind in Works Cited. The cosmological constant refers to the energy density of vacuum. See, for example, Ronald Lewin who calls the invasion ‘the catastrophe called Barbarossa’ (the code name for the invasion) (Lewin 120).

Chapter 4 1

2

3

Singularity is a concept proposed by SF writer Vernon Vinge to describe an explosive development of AIs (Artificial Intelligences) with a greater-thanhuman intellectual capacity, which is supposed to take place in the near future. This notion draws upon a well-developed SF topos of machine rebellion. It can also be applied to any kind of unforeseeable technological revolution. http://www.leftbehind.com/01_products/browse.asp?section=Books. Accessed on 30/02/09. http://www.raptureready.com/faq/faq149.html. Accessed on 24/03/09.

164 4 5

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http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html. Accessed on 21/11/09. Both have been suggested as possibilities by the evangelical blogosphere, the point being that until he is revealed as the Beast, the Antichrist will seem to be merely an extraordinary human being. http://www.ballardian.com/grave-new-world-introduction-part-2. Accessed on 21/01/09. http://www.ballardian.com/violence-without-end. Accessed on 25/11/2008.

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Index

agency 2, 17, 19, 23–6, 30–1, 38, 50, 25, 56, 66–7, 73, 75, 77, 83, 85–91, 96–102, 105–7, 110–11, 113–15, 123, 151 alternate history 17, 18, 25, 29, 85, 87, 97, 100, 102–3, 105, 107–10, 112, 115 Amis, Martin 23, 73, 77–9 apocalypse 17–20, 22, 25–6, 29–30, 44–7, 51–2, 119–21, 123–46, 148–56, 161 Aquinas, Thomas Saint 77–8, 91 Asimov, Isaac 64–8 Augustine, Saint 4, 6, 8, 17, 30, 73, 76, 87, 89, 121–2, 157 Auschwitz 67, 78–81, 103–4, 108, 110, 140 Bakhtin, Mikhail 6–7, 83, 122, 126, 145, 162n Ballard, J. G. 15, 74, 124, 134, 137–46, 151–3, 164n Crystal World 137, 144–5, 151 Drought 137, 142–3, 145 Drowned World 137, 140–4 Wind from Nowhere 137–40 Barthes, Roland 12–13, 110, 113–14 Baudrillard, Jean 20, 122 Baxter, Stephen 49–50 Bear, Greg 150–3, 155–6, 158–9 Benjamin, Walter viii–x Borges, Jorge Luis 8, 13, 17, 53, 162n Butler, Octavia 23, 65–6, 68 character 6, 22, 24, 32, 49, 54, 61, 85–6, 95, 98, 101, 109, 129, 154

Christian science fiction (SF) 15, 18, 25, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130–5, 153–4 chronoclasm 17, 21–4, 27–8, 49, 52, 56, 59, 60–1, 64, 68, 73, 76, 132, 149, 163n chronotope 6–9, 13–18, 20, 22, 25–6, 28–34, 37, 40, 42, 45, 47, 50, 52, 56, 58, 61, 65–8, 70, 72–4, 83, 85–7, 90, 97, 99, 101–2, 107, 115, 122–3, 132–5, 137–8, 140–1, 143–5, 148–50, 158–9, 162n Communism 2, 8, 21, 37, 39, 84, 147, 157 contingency 3, 17, 19–22, 24–6, 29–30, 33–6, 38, 41–3, 45–7, 49–50, 52, 60, 62–4, 68–73, 75, 77, 81–8, 90–1, 93–5, 97, 99–101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111–13, 115, 117, 119, 122, 135–9, 145, 147, 150 counterfactuals 25, 88, 97, 103, 150 cyberpunk 9, 12, 16 cyborg 25, 113–15, 117, 148 Darwin, Charles 20, 33–7, 39–40, 42–3, 45, 83, 92, 95, 162n, 163n Derrida, Jacques 1, 21, 120, 161 determinism 17–26, 29–30, 32–9, 46–7, 49–50, 52, 58–74, 81, 83–7, 89, 91, 95–6, 98, 101, 112–13, 117, 120, 123, 148–9 Dick, Philip K. 9, 23, 76, 78, 109, 112, 115 Counter-Clock World 73, 76–7 Man in the High Castle, The 18, 25, 108–9, 111

176

Index

duration 3–4, 22, 25–6, 51–2, 123, 126–9, 131, 138, 141–2, 144, 149–50 Einstein, Albert 27, 30, 33, 69–70 ethics 21, 25, 40, 41, 43, 74, 118, 145 evolution 20–1, 23, 30, 33–7, 39, 42–5, 52, 83, 91, 92, 95–6, 114, 160, 162n fictional world 13–14 focalizer 54, 66, 85–6, 100, 112 Foucault, Michel 2, 62, 161 free will 30, 67, 86–91, 94–5, 106 fundamentalism 3, 20–1, 34, 83, 88, 123 Gould, Stephen Jay 20, 21, 36, 83–4, 91, 94, 96–8, 162n Harris, Robert 109–10, 112, 115 Hawking, Stephen 4, 71 Hegel, G. W. F. 61, 63, 95, 96 Heinlein, Robert 23, 53, 55 “. . . . All You Zombies . . .” 18, 53–5, 57, 64 Heisenberg, Werner 70–1 history vii, ix, 1–4, 6–8, 10, 14–21, 32–3, 36–9, 41–3, 45, 48–9, 51, 56, 61–2, 70, 75, 77–8, 80–8, 95–117 Hitler, Adolf ix, 86, 99, 103, 105–8, 112 Holocaust, the 2, 25, 65–8, 77, 103–7, 109–13, 129 Huxley, Thomas Henry 11, 33, 39, 42–3, 47–8, 95 intertextuality 56, 68, 127–8, 141, 143 Jameson, Fredric 1, 2, 8–10, 15–16, 20, 28, 53, 57–8, 62, 64, 115, 148–52, 157 Kant, Immanuel 68, 94–5, 119 Kermode, Frank 19, 122, 127, 129 Left Behind 18, 28, 124–32, 134, 154, 155, 157 Lem, Stanislaw 12, 13, 32, 53, 96, 160 Lyotard, Jean Francois 2, 22, 29–30, 46–7, 55, 57, 63–4, 104

McHale, Brian 9, 11–12 Marx, Karl 61, 63, 95, 96 millennium 18, 21, 28, 47, 52, 120–3, 125, 127, 131–5, 137, 139–42, 144–5, 147–8, 150–8 modernism 1, 2, 11–12, 23, 32, 56, 115 myth 19–23, 42, 55–7, 63, 81, 113, 116, 123, 139 narrator 8, 24, 28–9, 32–3, 36, 38, 47–8, 53–4, 78–80, 85–6, 80, 94, 98–102, 107, 109, 111–12, 150–1, 156, 159 extradiegetic 24, 54–6, 85–6, 98, 100–2, 109, 140, 159 homodiegetic 24 Nazism 21, 25, 64, 79, 81, 103–7, 109, 120, 147 novum 13, 28, 56, 159 plot 6, 14, 18, 22–5, 50–1, 63, 66, 75–6, 78, 98–100, 107–8, 110, 112–13, 115–16, 120–4, 127–30, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141–3, 148–50, 153, 159 posthuman 12, 25, 113–14, 117, 123, 148, 151, 160 postmodernism 1–3, 8–13, 19–20, 56, 62, 109, 113, 117 quantum theory vii, ix, 3–4, 20, 50, 70–2, 78, 92, 143–4, 185 Rapture, the 20, 45, 125–7, 130–1, 134, 136–7, 153, 157 relativity 20, 27, 69–72, 155 Revelation, the 18, 48, 118, 121–2, 125, 127, 133–4, 136, 138, 144, 146, 152–3, 156–7 Roth, Philip 112–13, 115 science fiction (SF) x, 2, 4, 6, 8–18, 20–1, 23–6, 28–30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 47–8, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 64–5, 73, 85, 94, 97, 100, 103, 109, 114, 115, 121, 124, 132–4, 148

Index Silverberg, Robert 24, 82, 100, 101 Roma Eterna 100–2, 107 space viii, 1–4, 6–8, 16–20, 22–3, 25, 27–30, 48–9, 52, 53, 55, 58, 65–7, 69–70, 74, 91, 97–8, 122–3, 126–8, 131–41, 144, 147–50, 152–3, 158–9 Stalin, Iosif ix, 37 subjectivity 25, 53, 57–8, 62, 65, 85, 87, 99–100, 102, 106, 115–16, 152, 159–60 timeshape ix, x, 8–9, 15–21, 23, 31, 37, 42, 46–7, 49, 61, 69, 83–5, 87, 91, 96, 120, 123, 135–6, 146, 148, 150, 158

177

time travel 17–19, 23, 26–9, 31–4, 37, 42, 47–9, 53, 55–60, 64–6, 70, 74, 76, 132, 149, 159 utopia 10, 15, 18, 21, 26, 28, 34, 37, 39, 41–2, 52, 114–17, 123, 131, 134–5, 137, 147–9, 153–6, 158 Wells, Herbert George 10–11, 18, 20, 26–8, 30–4, 37–42, 44, 46–51, 70, 74, 133, 141, 162n Time Machine, The 11, 18, 26–30, 32–4, 36–8, 40, 43–52, 59, 70, 90, 133, 162n White, Hayden 2, 14, 63, 97, 132, 144