Part I: Time…the Final Frontier

Traveling backwards or forwards in time is something that I ran into long ago. And please don’t try to interpret that as a way that I’m “dating” myself. Language changes with time, but I’m still pretty hip about slinging the lingo. Or I was, or will be. It’s a little difficult when dealing with these time tenses. Where was I? Oh yeah, it all started when I read about that place in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where a gentleman by the name of Rip Van Winkle, took a nip of some special liquor and napped for 20 years, and woke up and found that a lot had changed.

Needless to say, that started me thinking about time-traveling, which then led me to the second such idea I encountered. This was my introduction to the idea of being inexplicably transported back in time, to some former era. I had in my possession, a “Complete Novels of Mark Twain” book collection, which included A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This book took right off on the subject, where in the very first page, a new set of terms were presented for my edification, i.e., transmigration of souls, transposition of epochs–and bodies.

Please note, my attitude was not just being curious about what might be possible if one could arrange circumstances such that time-travel could become possible, but also a desire to take advantage of the situation, much as Hank did back at King Arthur’s court. I wasn’t above doing some dreaming about how much fun it would be, to be the local equivalent of Merlin, just because of an avid background interest in science and chemistry. So I set about acquiring as much information as I could get about the subject of time travel.

Soon after then, a copy of H.G. Well’s Time Machine was in my hands, and I began to learn a lot more about the risks that were incurred when someone was traveling via a temporal transference technique. One thing was becoming apparent, and this was that time travel wasn’t a very safe thing to do. But I really got the jitters as I slowly realized how much more universal the implications could be. This became an outright fear about the inherent danger of the whole time travel topic, as I read about what could happen in A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. Fear of what could happen to Time, and to History. It was all so mysterious, and now also, quite a bit scary. Such a small thing could change so much. Which started to make even more sense when I heard about this same sort of thinking, expressed as another new concept.

It was called a paradox. The so-called universal paradox. The idea being that if someone were to travel back in time and somehow kill their ancestors, that someone would eliminate the possibility of his or her own existence in the present, and thereby not be able to perform the jump in time to begin with. This killed my previous goals of being able to travel back in time for a while, but it wasn’t long before I had time to learn about other newer ideas that added some depth and scope to the basis for time itself. By learning about this, I immediately gained even more perspective.

Part II: From Paradox to Hyperspace

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” -Albert Einstein

It seemed that others before me had thought through some of this, and they also had a few notions that went beyond the scientific validity of great thinkers like Galileo and Newton. Specifically, by this time I had already learned a bit about what Albert Einstein thought about time, in his general and special Theories of Relativity. Apparently, it was indeed possible to travel into the future, if you left behind your original reference point, and traveled away from there at speeds approaching the speed of light, in which case, time would slow down for you in a relative way. But the time back home would continue to advance at the original pace, and the left-behind world would grow older at a much faster rate than you would. And so, if you then returned back to your point of origin, everything would be much, much older than you now were. Thanks to Einstein, I had a model to go by. Time travel? Yes, sort of, but only in the forward direction. Time travel to the past just didn’t have a workable method like that. Or so I had been informed.

And although the consensus was that physical time travel to the past wasn’t possible, I wanted to know much more about the reasons why. That’s when I started getting into real serious research. I wanted to know if anyone had answers to questions like what is time? Or, is time even real at all? Surely, there had to be information about how everything began, or how it would all end. I even wanted to know about eternity. I was intent on seeking details that were a little more comprehensive than those that had been offered so far.

So by adding all of the above together, I arrived at the time in my life where I was learning about causality. At a point where space-time geometry, and the laws of physics all added up to certain things, which were supported by theories, which could then be speculated upon. But without knowing if the universe was causal or acausal, the answers still weren’t forthcoming. Was time travel only a myth? Or was it just a matter of time before we found out?

Science Fiction had some answers in the form of distortions of normal time and space, such as the prototypical “warp” or bending and folding of space-time. We had hyperspace and warp drives, and we also had Dr. Who, along with various other stories that were intentionally lending credibility to what might be possible if we were to employ what might be termed as higher dimensions. But there was one concept that begged for further examination by everyone who professed interest in the subject. This was known as a wormhole.

It seemed that Einstein’s ideas had been leading us in the direction of further explorations of the topology of our Universe. In the analogy used in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, I learned about how a three dimensional cube could be built into a four dimensional hypercube, also known as a tesseract. But that was very difficult to visualize at the time. It was much better to visualize this from the viewpoint of the wormhole. Was it going to be possible to open a tunnel that connects distant regions of space-time as though they were next door? Physicists thought about this in the way that a worm eats from one side of a curved apple to the opposite side. A tunnel through time. A wormhole that could allow travel to a different time. Into the past, or whenever.

Part III: We Were Just In Time

“…mere trifles like negative energy… should not deter any mathematical physicist worthy of his salt.” -Arthur C. Clarke

In the late 80s, I learned that a physicist at Caltech, Kip Thorne, along with several colleagues, had suggested that you could use a wormhole to time-travel into the past. Here’s how you would do it: Move one end of the wormhole through space, returning it to its original position, with the opposite end fixed in place. By jumping into the moving end, which ages less, you would connect back to an earlier time on the fixed end. When you come out of the fixed end an instant later, you’d emerge into your own past. All very workable in theory, except for one small problem. Keeping a wormhole open for more than a fraction of a second is extraordinarily difficult. So difficult that the only way to keep them open (in theory), is with matter that has a negative density, e.g. something that weighs less than nothing at all.

Although this mind-bending and wormhole-bending trick sounds impossible, there appears to be a way to create a region of negative density in between two plates of electrically conducting material, which was originally theorized about as a force by physicist Hendrik Casimir, then eventually named the Casimir effect. Having been verified in the laboratory, it appears to be able to support a microscopic wormhole for an arbitrarily long period of time. Long enough that a wormhole could act in the above described manner.

At this point in history, the questions about where the universe comes from, how and why it began, and will it come to an end, and if so, how, are mostly topics that remain in the realm of theoretical physics. The ongoing research has yet to conclusively bring us answers, but certain topics such as the nature of time, gravity, the Big Bang, black holes, and the search for the grand unifying theory (T.O.E.), are being discussed and thought about by more people than ever before, thanks to those authors who are so adept at non-technical jargon, such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Michio Kaku, to name a few of my personal favorites.

However, we may be right around the corner to discovering a whole new world of possibility. There are many questions, but also some possible answers for ways that a Time Machine could be built, and make it all too easy to travel through time. We won’t know until we get there I suppose, unless it already happened and we just don’t know about it yet.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” -Carl Sagan

Depending on how you look at it, perhaps some or even most of these books are the best-written stories of all time, or in fact, the best-selling Sci-Fi, Fantasy, or Horror stories ever.  They are not in any particular order,  because certain of these stories really made a strong impression on me growing up (e.g. Frank Herbert’s books), and yet I’ve listed them without regard to their popularity.

Some of these are older classics that our parents may have read too, and some are pretty new (the latest Harry Potter for instance). Due to my own interests, several of these are on my personal “most recommended books of all time” list and I’ve certainly read most of these over and over.

Some of them don’t exactly fit into a given genre, but a few of them are either currently about to be released as movie versions, or are already top-selling book and movie franchises.

And if high-quality literature is something that you care about, then I’m sure you’ll agree that all of these are capable of taking you to another microcosmic universe, world, or parallel dimension, where romantic and strange things are happening.  A place where the long, hot, summer time months will go by more enjoyably, as you wander through these stories with a sense of wonder.

1. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling (FANTASY ADVENTURE)
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Series) by Douglas Adams (HUMOR, SCI-FI)
3. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (TIME TRAVEL)
4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (FANTASY ADVENTURE)
5. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (FANTASY ADVENTURE)
6. The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) by J.R.R. Tolkien (EPIC FANTASY ADVENTURE)
7. The Princess Bride by William Goldman (FANTASY ROMANCE)
8. Twilight (Series) by Stephenie Meyer (VAMPIRES, ROMANCE)
9. Ender’s Game (Series) by Orson Scott Card (SCI FI)
10. Interview with the Vampire (Series) by Anne Rice (VAMPIRES)
11. The Stand by Stephen King (HORROR, POST-APOCALYPTIC)
12. Dune (Trilogy + Series + Prequels) by Frank Herbert (SCI FI)
13. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (FANTASY)
14. Dracula by Bram Stoker (THEE VAMPIRE)
15. Dead Until Dark (Series) by Charlaine Harris (VAMPIRES)
16. Outlander (Series) by Diana Gabaldon (TIME TRAVEL, ROMANCE)
17. The Shining by Stephen King (FANTASY, HORROR)
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (FANTASY – MAGICAL REALISM, ROMANCE)
19. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (FANTASY, SUPERHEROES, COMIC BOOKS)
20. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (FANTASY ADVENTURE)

As a young reader, the discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs is literally what propelled me head first into a life-long love of science and fantasy fiction. Burroughs is the American author whose best-known character is Tarzan, though his first story, Under the Moons of Mars, was a work of science fiction published in a magazine in 1910.

He went on to write a series of stories in the science fiction genre, about a version of Mars known as Barsoom. The Barsoom tales are the ultimate Extra-Terran Swashbuckling Romance Adventure novels of all time, and include A Princess of Mars (1917), The Gods of Mars (1918), The Warlord of Mars (1919), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1928), A Fighting Man of Mars (1931), Swords of Mars (1936), Synthetic Men of Mars (1940), Llana of Gathol (1948), and John Carter of Mars (1964).

Burroughs introduces these novels as though they were a factual account passed on to him personally. He portrays John Carter as an ageless figure known to his family for years, who gave him certain manuscripts during a mysterious visit, with instructions not to publish them for 21 years.

Burroughs describes Barsoom as a kind of Martian American Wild West, and John Carter as a kind of adventuring frontiersman. When John first arrives on Barsoom, he mistakes the landscape for the Arizona he has left behind. His story gives details of a savage, frontier world where the civilized Red Martians are kept invigorated as a race by repelling the constant attacks of the Green Martians, a possible equivalent of wild west ideals. The opening scene, narrated in the first person, sets the stage for what’s to come:

Excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 1 – On the Arizona Hills (from A Princess of Mars)

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.

And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave.

The American copyright of the five earliest novels has expired in the United States. So these days, you can read the rest of that story and most of the other Barsoom stories listed above, at:  Literature.org

After nearly a century of popularity, and many spin-off works of fiction, a brand new adaptation of the Barsoom book series is coming from Disney in 2010. Directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and WALL-E),  starring Taylor Kitsch, (who is best known to movie-goers as Gambit in the Wolverine movie that just came out), as John Carter, and Lynn Collins, (who also co-stars with Kitsch in Wolverine, as Silverfox), as Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, this big-budget film promises to rekindle yet another round of interest in Burroughs’ Barsoom novels. I’m sincerely hoping that the movie that took so long to make, will be worth the wait.

Back in the Renaissance, the Italians used a term, “terriblisma,” to describe the strange mixture of fear and excitement they felt when they were observing catastrophes that were on the scale of all so-called act of God disasters. Apparently, our modern culture has a more contemporary version of this emotionally complex sense of fascination with all things Dystopic.

Science fiction uses the popular subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction, to portray scenarios of doom which imply what kind of struggles humanity might face in the smoking aftermath of nuclear hellfire or hurtling asteroids, or what might be encountered admidst the ruins of civilization after epidemics, mass starvation, or alien invasion.

From among the very first science fiction novels, have come the classic dystopian themes and stories that disturbed us with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic visions. Very early examples of such stories include The Last Man (Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, 1805), After London (Richard Jeffries, 1885), Caesar’s Column (Ignatius Donnelly, 1890), The Machine Stops (E.M. Forster, 1909), The Night Land (William Hope Hodgeson, 1912), Rossum’s Universal Robots (Karel Čapek, 1921), and some lesser known works by fairly well known authors, such as The Last Man (Mary Shelley, 1826), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London, 1912), and Anthem (Ayn Rand, 1938).

Much of these works were influential to some degree, whether they were an influence to later authors or set the stage for the wider subject matter of the science fiction genre in general. Certain stories from this era are considered to be true classics of the genre, and some of the best of these were The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895), War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1898), The Shape of Things to Come (H.G. Wells, 1933), Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon, 1930), When Worlds Collide (Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, 1933), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949).

In the same vein, science fiction that considers what possible effects there would be if global cataclysm occurred, were a main theme in much of the second half of the twentieth century. These include best-sellers and award winners like Lucifer’s Hammer (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle), On The Beach (Nevil Shute), Earth Abides (George R. Stewart), A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.), The Postman (David Brin), Eternity Road (Jack McDevitt), The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson), I Am Legend (Richard Matheson), and Planet Of The Apes (Pierre Boulle). The continuing popularity of this type of literature has supported new versions and retelling of many of these stories, which have been made into films and TV shows.

We all have fears that something really bad is going to happen if we don’t do something about it, so we seem to use science fiction to see a window into the devastated future, then hope to enjoy the prospects of being smart enough as a life form, to survive these implied threats. The thing that gets me about post-Apocalyptic/dystopian future novels is that they all seem rather depressing and hopeless, at least on the surface. But if we dig deep down and delve around in our fears, we come to understand that in a world beset by some of the most frightening problems that we’ve ever had to deal with, from economic turmoil and the loss of privacy, to the extremes of climate change and ecocatastrophe, and the awful implications of things like terrorism, war, or the loss of free will due to thought control, we really have a need for our phoenix to rise from the ashes and to bring back hope to a world on the brink of darkness. Here’s hoping that, Omega themes in our culture notwithstanding, we will come away from all of this, and evolve to a dreamed of destiny as a form of intelligent life that eschews Dystopia.