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He Who Maps It Owns It Part I: The Structure of Space-Time Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda syndicated TV series episode “Deep Midnight’s Voice” A truly bizarre mixture of books has landed upon my desk this time, and we’ll have to reach far indeed to see the connections among them all. Add to that a bunch of unusual events in my life (the release this month of the first Sime~Gen volume in Meisha Merlin’s Sime~Gen program, Sime~Gen: The Unity Trilogy, simultaneous invitations to be interviewed on internet radio, for a weekly newspaper, and for the sequel TREKKIES 2, the Star Trek documentary (http://trekkies2.com/), plus a reader of this column has started rereadable-l, a discussion email list for the column — subscribe at www.simegen.com/archives/ ), and my life seems as diverse as this stack of novels. But this morning I saw an episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda that brought all these novels and events into a single unified pattern. I’ll try to show you what I saw. The Andromeda episode “Deep Midnight’s Voice” — the episode where they have to retrieve a crashed exploration ship’s database because it was mapping the slipstream. The epigraph for this episode reads: “The Universe is perfect. You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it,” and is attributed to Odo Chan, CY 9101. Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda is a nominee for the Saturn Award for series television. This episode is typical of the series, dense and rich in implications on both the scientific frontier and in the realm of spiritual development. As a series, it also discusses many esoteric aspects of the use and abuse of power. This episode weaves all three together into a very complex statement. One of the series premises is that you can’t map the slipstream. An A.I. (an artificial intelligence like the one that “is” the starship Andromeda Ascendant) can guess the way through the slipstream with an accuracy of about 50%. A human being can guess to about 99% accuracy. Access to the astrogational routing information when traveling the slipstream requires psychic ability. There are people who simply can’t do it, and others who are adept without practice. What is the slipstream? Well, if I describe it from the show’s explanation, it’ll just sound like wild fantasy — something they made up to create a TV show. But it’s not made up. It’s an extrapolation of today’s frontier of science. The “slipstream” is a fantasy concept based on “strings” and involves gravity. Which brings us to a tiny little book from Penguin Books that every magician in training really must read, especially if you do not have any advanced science, physics, math or astrophysics training. But even if you are a working astrophysicist, you still have to read this book because it has become extremely popular, and thus is what laymen are using to get these concepts into their heads. How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies is a thumbnail sketch of the current ideas of how the universe is structured — it is a “map” of the cosmos, or perhaps just a definition of what a cosmos might be. This book discusses wormholes, strings, space drives and time displacement. In fact, it explains lucidly the relationship between gravity and time. And it explains why you can never know if two events taking place far apart across galaxies happen simultaneously. This concept puts a crimp in our storytelling ability. Imagine how hard it would be to clinch a murder investigation if courts of law understood that it could never be determined that the suspect was actually here while at the same time the murder was happening there. Yet that is a fact of physics as we know it today (which is probably an incomplete model of reality). The fact that you can not determine simultaneity is derived from gravity. Gravity is not yet well understood, but we do know that it warps the fabric of space-time and prevents “simultaneous” from being a meaningful word at cosmic distances. Captain Dylan Hunt’s time-travel into his future via a black hole is a straightforward application of the theory of gravity. (Except for the rescue part.) Andromeda is not just a silly fantasy Roddenberry made up. It’s very real. Find out how real by reading the book, How to Build a Time Machine. And then consider all the alternate universe and other time-travel stories you’ve read and loved. Very often I try to understand time-travel and alternate universes in terms of a) science as we know it, and b) the ideas of Free Will, a Created Universe, spiritual growth, and of Higher Powers who take a personal interest in us as individuals with a Personality that survives death. I have to admit, I haven’t got it together yet. I did have some insights once, but they flashed away from me as I came out of meditation and I’ve never regained them. But from that one instance, I know there is a solution that incorporates all of these considerations. Still, thinking about these things can make your head ache! Sometimes you have to take a break, step back, and appreciate the Divine’s sense of humor. When you need that perspective, read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. It’s a time-travel romp in an alternate universe where they take fiction seriously! The styling is humorous, but oddly enough you can read it with a straight face as well, and it works just fine. This novel is set in a alternate 1985 in an England where time travel and cloning are routine. There are criminals who go back in time and tamper with classic literary manuscripts and/or their authors. And there are detectives like our hero, Thursday Next, a woman who is a real super-fan of Jane Eyre, who has not only leapt into the novel itself (as a child) and met the characters, but has been rescued by a character who leaps out of the novel to save her. She spends some time (holodeck style) inside the novel tinkering with plot-changes that the bad guys want to make. Now, in the Thursday Next series of detective novels, there is no attempt to explain the mechanism behind time-travel. Since the point of the novel is its humorous treatment of the subject, this seems all right to me. It wasn’t a “can’t put it down” read — but it is a page-turner, and a book you will pick up again. So I would say, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda is a “must study” while How to Build a Time Machine is a must-read at least once, and when you’ve had enough hard work, take The Eyre Affair to the beach or poolside. Now we come to a science fiction novel that is, in a way, “about” time travel — Shadow Run by A. C. Ellis. This is an Awe-struck E-book, and as I’ve said before, this is one e-book company that produces a consistently high quality product. This novel, however, bears all the earmarks of being set up for a sequel. The ending leaves many strings hanging out from which more stories have to evolve. Shadow Run is about a woman who has been a starship Captain and led her ship into a disaster. In the end she’s decorated for bravery and sent to a non-piloting job on Earth and the Moon. As the story starts, she is given a new assignment, a chance to pilot a ship again, and she seizes it. Immediately, there’s an attack on her life, and impossibly, the attacker disappears the moment she wounds him. Unwilling and unable to let that incident go, she digs and digs at it. Eventually, she finds out the truth about what happened when she lost her ship and her command. And it involves a whole long list of time-paradoxes I won’t try to go into here, except to say there is one scene where three versions of herself are present at the same time. Most novels that involve paradoxes get too confusing to read. I read this novel in several “sittings” and didn’t get confused. That is superior writing! If you’re looking for a definitive ending, this novel might disappoint you — wait until there are a number in this series and get them all. The time-travel “gimmick” involves a pendant found in ruins around an alien star, and there is no explanation of who these aliens are. The time travel process itself involves controlling time/location by mental commands. At one point she becomes inspired and executes a series of actions — no explanation of where that inspiration came from. I for one want those explanations and would love to read several books in this series all at once. This novel has enough tight writing to indicate that what seems to be a “gimmick” of time-travel may actually be well thought out world-building that the hero will eventually come to understand. Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. To send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. Next Article |
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