Thanks in large part to the Hulu series (which has finished, though I have yet to see the final episode,) I picked up Stephen King's 11/22/63 and have been reading it. It might be unfashionable to admit (though I also feel like so-called low culture has become less taboo in recent years) but King's one of my favorite authors. (Actually, I think he's one of those authors whose popularity and prolificness make him a default target for snobs - in a few decades he'll be considered a great of American literature, if he isn't already.) The Dark Tower series was an enormous influence on me - the novel set in Otherworld that I've been working on (and procrastinating around) since I was 17 and is the backbone of the setting around which my Dispatches from Otherworld stories revolve began as a pretty bald-faced attempt to write my own unofficial Roland Deschain story.
King hasn't been quite as prominent since he semi-quasi-pseudo retired after the last Dark Tower book, but his story about time travel and Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-respected thing he's written in recent years.
I haven't finished the novel yet (in fact, I'm nearly synchronized with the penultimate episode of the show) but it's got me thinking about Time Travel.
If you ever read the first post on this blog about its namesake, you'll know that I've been a time-travel obsessive since I was little. No, I don't think that there have been any time travelers throughout history and I think that it might actually just be a physical impossibility. But as grounds for thought experiments, it's basically my mind's favorite park to stroll through on a spring afternoon.
King is not a science fiction writer. There's no attempt to explain any kind of technology that allows the protagonist of his novel to go back in time, which is fine by me. There's a place for sci-fi that goes into deep detail about how things are done (The Martian, for example, is such hard sci-fi that it almost comes off as not being sci-fi at all.) But I suppose because I am someone who believes in a rational universe that obeys all these physical laws without variation but also simultaneously find such a universe kind of boring, I gladly welcome King's supernatural mystery.
I classify King as a dark fantasy writer (the line between dark fantasy and horror is a faint one, but I think he's on the fantasy side of it,) but one of the things I love about his style is that it doesn't get caught up in clarifying things. There might be godlike beings that oppose or aid our heroes, but they're left so abstract that we feel like we can instead pay attention to the people.
King also devises a pretty unusual style of time travel for his story. Every time travel story has to make a decision about how it works. Most often you get the Back to the Future style, where the past can be changed, but the heroes must worry about paradoxes that result of their changes. Twelve Monkeys is one in which the past is unchanged - if you travel back into the past, you always did, and so even if you take an active role in the past, you aren't changing it because you were always there in the first place. These allow what I think of as "weak paradoxes," like a piece of information spawning itself (like the Song of Storms in Zelda: Ocarina of Time) but do not allow "strong paradoxes" like the grandfather paradox because the fact that you are there in the first place means that your grandfather clearly lived to conceive your parent.
But 11/22/63 makes things rigid yet malleable in a way that sets aside a lot of these questions in favor of far weirder ones.
In the story, there is a doorway in a diner that allows one to enter the exact same moment in 1958 (1960 on the TV show) every time you go down. You can spend as much time as you want in the past, with time progressing normally after that moment in 1958 for you, and once you feel like going back, you can walk back up through the doorway and come out and see the future adjusted by your actions. On the modern side of the doorway, no matter whether you spent two seconds or two decades in the past, only two minutes will have passed in the modern world.
Step in again, and you're back in 1958, and anything you did to the past the last time around is wiped clean.
So first off, this means that there is a "real" version of history. If you just hop in and out, barring some really shocking butterfly effect (though given enough time, maybe that would accumulate one,) it will reset things to that real version.
It also means duplication is possible. The main character, Jake, is introduced to the doorway by Al, the owner of the diner in which the door is found. The guy sells $1.50 "Fatburgers" that a lot of people steer clear of due to the low cost, fearing there must be something wrong with the meat.
But in fact, the meat is fine, and it's super-cheap because he buys it in 1958. And not only is he buying 1958 ground beef, but he's also buying the exact same beef over and over. He knows it's good because it's literally the same cow (or cows) that his customers are consuming over and over. That same (poor, butchered) cow is being eaten multiple times by all his customers. On his second (well, technically third, but the first was just to show him the doorway in the first place) time through, Jake finds himself buying a blue shirt. The salesman comments that it's clearly his favorite color, given the shirt he's currently wearing. In the narration, Jake mentions that in fact, the shirt he is wearing is actually the same shirt that he's currently wearing.
Shirts and the meat of a cow who dies before all this duplication occurs are amusing in a head-spinning sort of way, but when it comes to people, really big questions start to come up. People (not just JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald) live or die based on the actions that Jake takes while in the past. If he's truly wiping the board clean with each reset, what does that mean for the consciousness of those people?
We would generally imagine that our fellow human beings have an internal conscious experience - call it a soul if you want. So while the experience of the time traveler (and it would seem those who are near the doorway, like diner owner Al and... maybe... the "Yellow Card Man" in 1958, a drunk who is by the doorway and is the only one who seems aware of Jake's interloper status) accounts for all the changes made in history (if we assume that's all the Yellow Card Man is, then perhaps he's nuts because all those changes are happening simultaneously in his experience) everyone else in the world seems only aware of the version of history they're currently living.
But if we consider them the same person they were in previous iterations, that raises the following question: When do they experience the change? Obviously they don't remember it, but is there a kind of blink, and one goes from being crippled and brain-damaged to healthy and living a better life? Does one go from whatever the consciousness experiences in death (if anything) to suddenly alive or vice versa?
Or perhaps our consciousness experiences time in a more sophisticated way than the brains that actually process our thoughts can. This is a whole other can of worms, but I've often been fascinated by the idea that we might actually perceive things that we nevertheless can't actually think about because our brains aren't the things perceiving them. But that's for another day.
The idea of multiple timelines has always kind of implied that there's a sort of perpendicular dimension of time. We generally think of the universe in terms of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. But multiple timelines could kind of give width as well as the familiar length to the flow of time.
Yet in a way this is horrific in its own way. I actually thought about this when watching, of all things, the second Austin Powers movie. In it, Dr. Evil travels back to the 60s in a plan to... something about defeating Powers while he's cryogenically frozen (I haven't watched this movie in like 16 years.) His henchman cheer him on as he jumps through his time machine portal, but I remember thinking that there were only two things that they could expect to happen. Either Dr. Evil comes out the thing looking disappointed, or he just never arrives.
Because if he changed the past, then he never would have been incentivized to do this in the first place. He must fail, or more horrifically, he must cease to exist entirely. If he moves on to a timeline in which he is successful, then all those henchmen are left behind in a timeline Dr. Evil will never return to.
Or most horrifically of all, those people, and that entire universe, cease to exist.
Unless people have transdimensional consciousnesses, these acts of time travel are inherently kind of solipsistic. From your perspective, if you are saving a loved one from some horrible injury or disease (something I have sadly been forced to consider in recent weeks,) going and warning them or rescuing them armed with your foreknowledge looks from your perspective like you've saved that person and all is now well.
But there are serious possibilities that you're actually abandoning that person and merely happily replacing them with another person who is very similar.
Jumping timelines like this is a little like something I wrote about in a college philosophy class in an essay titled "Riker's Complaint." In Star Trek: The Next Generation, we discover that due to a transporter accident, there was a perfect duplicate made of Will Riker on another planet. Setting aside the horror that is the Star Trek transporter (which should really be called the Cloner/Murderer,) the duplicate (who goes by his middle name to become Tom Riker to make things less confusing) was left behind because his cremates were perfectly satisfied with the Riker they had.
If time travel creates all these duplicates (and the Fatburger seems to imply that, at least if you take them back with you, it does) then you run into the scary possibility that you're actually leaving behind a universe of Tom Rikers every time you take another crack at changing the past.
The solipsism comes in if you basically don't mind that. If you're the only conscious being, then the existence of the duplicates doesn't really worry you. A solipsist believes that the universe exists for their benefit (mind you, solipsism is impossible to disprove, and I don't think that solipsism inherently makes you a bad person, as long as you recognize that even if you are the only conscious being, it feels bad to be an asshole to people,) so in a sense, a timeline that they can never return to and never perceive again is philosophically indistinguishable from one that merely doesn't exist, or one that has been changed into the one they currently inhabit.
Narratively, King seems to imply that the timeline does change, and that however alien and incomprehensible the experience might be, the people in that changing timeline are the same people. But the Fatburger does introduce some doubt into that. There's multiples of that meat. Are we to believe that there's not a universe to correspond to each hunk of it?
(EDIT)
Having now finished the book, the explanation of what the Yellow/Orange/Black/Green Card Man (Men) are (vague though it is) actually makes some of these thoughts text, rather than subtext. Still, always good for a bit of writing to provoke some new thoughts.
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