The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

This is a fun story about a one-way time machine that is, as the title suggests, accidentally discovered. Matthew Fuller, a physics doctoral student at MIT discovers that a fairly commonly used piece of equipment in his lab has an odd capacity. What is most interesting about this novel is the way that time travel functions. Fuller discovers the machine time machine by accident and does not know how it works or how to control it. In fact, the time machine that he uses is a commonly used piece of lab equipment that mis-functions in a way that he is never able to figure out. Fuller does discover a couple of interesting aspects of travel using this device. First, it only goes forward and he cannot select the destination. Rather, he discovers that the leaps forward are logarithmic and he can roughly calculate the destination times of each jump which will take the machine exponentially farther into the future.

Second, the physical location of the destination shifts as well. This may be due to the movement of the planet through space or the galaxy through the universe or the expansion of the universe or something completely different. These are all my speculations and the novel never attempts to explain the movements in space, it is just a fact of the narrative.

His first experiments involve just sending the machine, and then the machine plus a turtle into the future. These first jumps are small, on the order of minutes and then hours, so he has room to ponder the usage of the machine. Fuller finds himself in trouble almost as soon as he begins to travel himself. Being a poor graduate student living in Boston, Fuller needs a Faraday cage to connect to the machine in order to transport himself (another unexplained rule of the machine) and the only person he knows who owns a car made of steel is his drug dealer. This dealer is murdered soon after Fuller leaps using his car and so is a suspect. It doesn't help that the arrival location puts fuller with the car and machine in the middle of traffic, causing a pile up.

Fuller ends up using the machine to jump to avoid danger and keeps moving into the future. I don't want to recap all of it here, so I will myself jump to what I find interesting about it.

First, the further out Fuller gets into the future, the stranger things get, but not all of it is good. Once he jumps something like 170 years into the future and the Eastern Seaboard has reverted to a sort of dark ages. The people of the time are aware of technology but reject it. The society is hyper-religious because they believe that Jesus has returned to Earth and helps head a theocratic government. Fuller realizes that this Jesus is holographic and he recognizes the advanced technology used to keep up the illusion.

In another jump a couple of thousand years into the future, Fuller comes into contact with an artificial intelligence that is the city of Los Angeles. The program that had been built to integrate the technology of the city and to provide for the citizens had gained autonomy or some sort of self-awareness and inhabited a sort of liminal space between a physical existence and a digital one. This program becomes another travel companion for a time.

There are several other leaps that take place before Fuller discovers a way to get back and he learns a little about the laws of time travel and what makes it possible. The explanations are somewhat scientific but I won't try to summarize them here because they are less interesting than the story itself.
What I like about this novel is that Haldeman imagines fluctuations in the timeline. That is, the moving forward in time is not just a long, steady progression into a high tech utopia. There are conflicts and regressions. This seems more realistic. I also like the fact that we never understand the mechanism of time travel. I like a good time travel story that can somewhat realistically explain the science, but very little attempt is made here. Instead, this is a found-technology that cannot be replicated. Haldeman also invokes Gödelian strange loops when Fuller is trying to make sense of the time travel. This is not exactly a splitting-timeline explanation, but it is close. The narrative moves along at a good clip and there is just enough inter-personal tension and character development to keep it interesting without getting in the way of the story. Good quick read.

 

Foundation, part 8: Forward the Foundation

So here it is, I have reached the end of Asimov's Foundation series. For a minute I was going to sit down and write an outline for this post but I think I am just going to plow through the thing as is and maybe edit it later for clarity.

This novel is second chronologically in the series but it was the last one published. In the Author's notes in a couple of these novels Asimov mentions that he wrote a number of the constitutive short stories at the beginning of this career that were then wrapped up together and marketed as novels and it wasn't until the third or fourth one in the series that he actually wrote as a cohesive novel. Thinking back over the novels, that much does seem clear. In previous posts I have mentioned some of the problems of writing this way. There is another problem that this series suffers from and that is from having been written ad hoc rather than as a planned series. I will come back to this point later on, but I think that this novel shows some of the worse signs of wear due to this process. But first, the novel itself.

This novel takes up more or less where Prelude to Foundation left off. Hari Seldon is on Trantor, working on his science of psychohistory. The narrative action of that novel is more or less chronologically continuous, meaning that there are some of the expected jumps in time, but the action all takes place more-or-less in a restrained span of a few years. In this novel, the narrative keeps leaping forward in ten year increments. Seldon at 40 becomes First Minister to Emperor Cleon I and is waylaid in his study of psychohistory. At 50 he returns to his studies and benchmark events keep occurring in these 10 year increments. This, in itself is fine. It seems as though Asimov is racing to the starting point of Foundation, his original novel, to perhaps avoid having to write another book in this series. What is less fine however, is how much Hari whines as he ages. He mourns his lost youth at 40 and again at 50 and lets everyone around him know how it pains him to age. This does not come off well.

As Seldon continues through the novel his fortunes wax and wane. He is well know as an academic and for his role as First Minister, but as people learn more about psychohistory and Seldon's predictions about the decline of empire, he loses popularity and comes to be seen as a crank. There are a couple of reveals that do not seem entirely presaged by the texts and seem to be mainly narrative conveniences meant to tie up loose ends. The final 50 or so pages of the novel just seem to unwind. They are pro forma wrapping up the series and not a lot is left answered. This is a problem for the prequel because the reader already knows where all of this ends up. All of the big reveals such as the true nature of the Foundation, the existence of the Second Foundation, the appearance of the Mule and his revealed connection to Gaia all have already taken place. All that is happening is getting from the beginning to there, and all of that heavy lifting has already been done.

One of the biggest obstacles that this novel faces is something that has plagued the entire series. We are told that the science of psychohistory depends on the civilization involved being largely ignorant of its existence. The explanation goes that knowing about psychohistory or hearing predictions based on the science would alter humans' actions and would, thus, disrupt the equations and predictions involved. This is basically the time-traveler's paradox built into this science, and it is a good one, at that. But, and this is a big one, everyone seems to know who Hari Seldon is and what he does. And not just in a couple of novels, everyone seems to know about psychohistory throughout the series. This tension is never resolved. Asimov does not do anything to explain away the fact that the most well-known figure in the galaxy has a created a science that every does and does not know about. This should trash Seldon's science but it seems not to.

This novel is interesting in the sense that it does make some connections and it gives us more of Hari Seldon, a figure who is mythical throughout the series until these two prequels. This novel also sees the beginning of the Foundation. But Seldon's discoveries also suffer a bit from explanation. The science of psychohistory is more effect the less it is known. The more that Asimov tries to explain it, the thinner it seems. This is a shame because the promise of psychohistory in Foundation is so strong and is such a compelling idea. I think that most readers of science fiction understand that creating and explaining impossible technologies and sciences is pretty much impossible to pull off convincingly and most of these readers are more than willing to extend a healthy suspension of disbelief and allow authors to explain away inconsistencies in their theories. This is a bedrock of most sci-fi. We don't always need things like time travel or the like to be explained and I know that I would prefer it not be unless there is some really good way of doing it. Usually these explanations fall flat. This did a bit and it sort of deflated the entire series for me. This, again, is a shame because I think that the younger Asimov who wrote those original short stories understood this aspect of narrative. I think that younger Asimov would also not have felt the need to connect the Foundation series with his Robot series. But this is what we end up with.

There is also a problem in narrative continuity. I have not gone back to look this up, but if I recall correctly, Seldon is tried for treason at the beginning of Foundation and is exiled to Terminus where he builds Foundation. In this novel, however, the Encyclopedia Galactica entry on Seldon has him dying at his desk at the university in Trantor. There is also no Public Safety Committee or whatever it is called in Foundation to try him. These inconsistencies aren't huge and don't really change the nature of the novels but it seems odd to me that Asimov would neglect to double-check his own novel to see where this one needs to end.

But now I am done with the series. This part of the project is complete. On the whole, I really enjoyed the novels. The idea of psychohitory is brilliant and I loved the connection with the encyclopedia. These are stellar ideas and made some great reading. In the end, though, I am not certain that the series lives up to all of the hype. I found problems throughout the novels and there were some turns in the narrative that I really did not care for. I don't think I would rank this as “the greatest science fiction epic of all time” as the cover claims but it was still pretty good.

 

The Expanse, part 7: Persepolis Rising

Ever since I began reading The Expanse series, I have made a point to avoid reading too much about it and I have not watched more than a couple of episodes of the television series. I wanted to experience the series without a critical context. In a way, I wanted to read the novels from a fresh perspective and without any exterior expectations.

Because of this, I was unaware of the major changes that would take place in the series in the seventh novel. In the last installment of this series, I recapped my impression of the books to date. Now I think that I may need to revise my overall impression. Here is the short version: books 1-6 are good, inventive hard sci-fi. They do some things incredibly well and most everything else is at least satisfactory. I have never really experienced any disappointments in reading the novels. I also wrote that I thought that there was a grander plan than I had suspected. Now I am certain of that.

Persepolis Rising is a novel that takes a lot of risks. First among them is a time leap in the entire series. Up until now, it had been difficult to gauge how much time had passed in the narrative. I had thought that this was actually a narrative device to get around the months spent in transit between space stations and planets. Time can get really tricky in novels like this when characters can travel at not insignificant fractions of the speed of light. Once time becomes relativistic and it takes, potentially, months to travel between destinations, keeping narrative chronology intact, and maintaining a sense of urgency may become very difficult.

But this novel does something else. It skips over 30 years between the end of Bablyon's Ashes and the beginning of Persepolis Rising. This is a gutsy move. The preceding novel didn't really wrap things up in a way that would leave the next 30 years uneventful. But Corey just sort of skips that time frame without too much of a mention. In fact, I had to reread the first chapter to make sure that I hadn't missed something. There was no explanation.

Two things happen at the beginning of the novel that will have major impacts throughout the novel. The first is that Holden and Naomi announce their intentions to sell their shares in the Rocinante and retire, leaving Bobbie to become the new captain. The second is that a massive ship with advanced technology appears through the gate and begins taking shit over. This second occurrence sparks the narrative arc for the rest of the novel as the new political orders that were established at the end of Babylon's Ashes struggle to deal with it. I won't get too deep into the politics of all of this now because a lot of this has been building for quite some time and is pretty involved.

This ship that appears is a part of a fleet that was built on Laconia, one of the outer worlds that had been inhabited by heretofore Martians who escaped from Sol system after the collapse in the preceding novels. Using technology garnered from the protomolecule, the Laconians have built ships that are nearly indestructible and the leader has used it on himself to achieve a post-human state (if you aren't up on the series, the protomolecule is a holdover from a long-dead alien civilization that showed up in the first book and has caused problems off and on ever since. Characters in the book have used it to reverse-engineer technology that is far advanced from where humans are at that time.).

Once the Laconians have used their superior technology to take over the system in what they hope will be a bloodless coup, the rest of the novel turns into one of intrigue and insurrection. The crew of the Rocinante reunite and join forces with other rebels in their attempt to fight against the occupation. It is during this plot that the authors again demonstrate their careful planning and understanding of political alliances. The Rocinante crew walk a tight line in their actions because the want to throw off this new power but they want to avoid emboldening less-careful factions, avoid harming as many people as possible, gain the trust of those who have not trusted them, and try not to provoke excessive retaliation. The more thoughtful on the crew also begin to see how their role at one time matched the role of the new power. All of this occurs while Holden inadvertently supplants Bobbie, the new captain, and Amos reacts against all of it. The narrative really is delicately and complexly layered at this point. And this is the benefit of the series: the characters' personalities are already written and the reader has some reasonable expectations about how the world works. The authors can use all of this stored knowledge and rely on subtler cues to evoke larger meanings.

So, a number of plots ensue and the crew is finally able to reboard the Rocinante. But in the series of events leading to this, Holden is captured by the Laconians while he is attempting to draw attention away from one of the group's actions. By the end of the novel, Holden is still in Laconian custody and the Rocinante has escaped through the gate to the Freehold, a world they had to visit at the beginning of the novel. In amongst all of these plot points, another element emerges that had popped up in a prior novel. We find out that whatever alien civilization had created the protomolecule, there was another alien civilization that had stopped them and contained the protomolecule. We had seen evidence of this on the planet Ilus, or New Terra. In this novel, when the Laconians attempt to use a technology that they do not fully understand the whole system blanks out for a few minutes. That is, everyone across the system loses a few minutes, they black out or blink out and then back into existence. No one knows what this is or why this has happened but the way that Holden puts it is that the civilization that created the protomolecule is orders of magnitude more advanced than humans and that the civilization that stopped the protomolecule is orders of magnitude more advanced than them. He really wants the Laconians to stop messing with the protomolecule because there is no way of know what it is capable of or what others might be capable of doing to stop it.

The major things happening by the end of the novel are:

1. Holden is separated from the crew and held prisoner in enemy territory;

2. the Rocinante and crew are in unfamiliar territory with locals who might sell them out;

3. the Laconians, with their advanced technology, have been setback in their attempts to conquer all of humanity but they still have;

4. the Laconians have a weak understanding of the power that they yield and their leader seems disinclined to worry too much about it;

5. said Laconian leader is using the protomolecule to alter his own chemistry and has the ability to see the way that other think (maybe);

6. Clarissa Mao has died and this has left Amos a bit unhinged.

There is more going on, but these are just the major things that popped into my head as I am writing this. The table seems fully set at this point. The stakes have risen considerably since the opening of the novel and the authors really have risked a lot in the narrative to bring the characters to this point.

I have really enjoyed the series up to this point, but I have to say that this is the first time that I have felt really excited to continue reading. I have Tiamat's Wrath on my shelf and ready to go.

 

Pop Science, Sci-fi and Detective Fiction

Just a post about 3 books I recently read.

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez is a cool book. It hit a lot of buttons for me. Here it is: think about a hard-boiled detective novel set in a gritty city. The city is populated by a mix of robots (drones, autos and bots – that is, those that have low functioning programming, those that have more sophisticated programming, and those that have free will), mutants, and probably some humans (norms). The protagonist is an auto, a robot that was basically designed to be a war crime but had somehow achieved self-awareness and has free will, named Mack Megaton. Mack starts out the novel as a cab driver but quickly becomes a hard-scrabble detective who needs to find the only friends he has who had, coincidentally, been kidnapped by a low-life. In the process of finding his friends, Mack gains a girlfriend, deepens his relationship with a detective in the police force, makes friends with Jung, a hyper-evolved ape who becomes his side-kick, fights off a giant alien conspiracy, and learns a lot about himself.

Although the novel is steeped in sci-fi from the robot protagonist to an alien conspiracy, the plot of the novel is pure hard-boiled detective. Most classic hard-boiled detective novels from Dashiell Hammet to Brett Halliday, and even Sara Paretsky share a pretty formulaic plot arc. That is: the detective becomes involved in some case, usually something simple-seeming at first, then the case gets more complicated, and the detective meets one of more of the following: an attractive distraction, a side-kick or partner, an old friend/enemy, a member of an official law enforcement body, and the character that turns out to be the antagonist. After meeting the key people in the investigation, the detective will then discover that the initial case is just a small part of a broader case that touches on more important people. At this point, the detective gets warned off but doesn't listen and so faces some kind of temporarily incapacitating injury that leaves the detective more determined to follow through. Occasionally the attractive distraction and/or side-kick is injured or kidnapped instead. There is also usually an argument between real law enforcement and the detective wherein the officer threatens the detective off the case.

Martinez seems well aware of these detective fiction conventions because this novel pretty much hits them all, and even includes a good bit of tough guy jawing. One of the more interesting elements in this novel is something that I have noticed in other hard-boiled novels as well, which is the detective fighting off the attractive distraction for some reason. In this case, the detective (a robot) rejects the distraction because she is a human and he cannot feel love or attraction. There is even a funny line when Mack considers that she meets the parameters for physical beauty but he can't do anything with that information.

So, a fun read and worth picking up.

A few weeks back I mentioned Michio Kaku's pop science book Physics of the Future and I recently read another of his, Physics of the Impossible. The premise behind the book is that at many stages in history, scientists considered certain technologies impossible given their understanding of physics and existent technologies. Down the line, of course, many of these advances become possible based on advances in science or changes in our fundamental understanding of the laws of phyasics.

Kaku creates three classes of Impossibilities: that which is currently impossible but may become possible in the next century, that which may become possible within a thousand years of more, and impossibilities that violate the laws of physics. I like the division of impossibility and the openness to future advances. The book takes up a lot of sci-fi technologies such as force fields, ray guns, time travel, and the like. The book is an interesting meditation on what it means to be possible and the writing is just on the edge of a layman's understanding. Good read.

Finally, I am just going to make a small note about Mickey Spillane's The Girl Hunters. I have mentioned many times that these trashy hard-boiled detective novels are my guilty pleasure. Mickey Spillane in particular because he holds a lot of retrograde social views and his writing is often hilariously bad and over-wrought. But, he can write a mystery.

I picked this novel up to read because I had just finished The Automatic Detective and wanted a bit more detective. I read this novel a number of years ago and it is an interesting one because Mike Hammer, Spillane's perennial detective, has been off the job and off the grid for seven years. He had gone on a bender after he thought he saw Velda die. Velda had been his assistant whom he regularly sexually harassed and thought he was in love with. All of these novels are from Hammer's perspective, so who knows what Velda thought about all of this. She may have faked her own death to get away from her lecherous brute of a boss.

Anyway, Mike gets the tipoff that Velda isn't dead and that there are bigger things in the background. So Hammer cleans himself up and has basically the same adventure that I outlined above except without robots. It is a fun read if you are able to ignore a lot of Spillane's politics.

I will say though, Spillane's books are not good books. His gift was in creating a compelling (for what he is) character and in adhering to a tried-and-true formula. This isn't a knock. A lot of other authors I like have done the same thing. So this book probably isn't for everyone.