Abstract
The time machine in the twenty-first century is often an individual exploration, psyche-powered, as in a number of fine and increasingly hefty recent novels, not all of which we have room to discuss here. In this corner of the narrative Multiverse are versions of the Replay trope (a term borrowed from the late Ken Grimwood’s reiterating fantasy novel Replay, from 1998) where the time travel is sometimes presented without a manufactured machine or major project to do the heavy lifting. They include Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) and its quasi-sequel, tangled, mixed-up time in The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray (2016), scriptwriter Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays (2017), and this 400-pager by Claire North, a pseudonym of Catherine Webb (b.1986), from 2014. It deservedly won the John W. Campbell award for best sf novel of the year.
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Notes
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Is it fantasy? I remain only half persuaded, but Grimwood’s delicious novel is examined in David Pringle’s useful Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels (1988), which declares that “Despite a superficial similarity to such recent hit movies as Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married, no one has produced a time fantasy quite like this one before” (261). It won the 1988 World Fantasy Award.
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Paul Di Filippo catches this with vivid accuracy: “Its short chapters, its punchy, demotic, self-denigrating prose, its tragicomic ambiance resulting in genuine catharsis and epiphany, and its general fascination with the ways humans can screw up—all these are pure Vonnegut.” (Locus Online, https://locusmag.com/2017/02/paul-di-filippo-reviews-elan-mastai/).
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“As democratic means the rule of the people, so kakocratic means the rule of the bad.” Congressional Record: https://books.google.com/books?id=oA3oFKigTnEC
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B.F. Skinner was a major force in the transitional post-behaviorist psychology in the 1950s, espousing “operant conditioning” based on reward rather than classic pain- or deprivation-driven conditioning. It was effectively demolished following Noam Chomsky’s savage review in Language, 35, No. 1 (1959), 26–58, of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior.
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It might be argued that we should add A God in Ruins (2015), Kate Atkinson’s “companion piece” to her splendid novel Life After Life (2013) and even the many sequels to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, but the former two are mystical in tenor and the latter a kind of indefinitely extended romance enabled by a Druidic portal mystery.
Fiction Works Discussed, Plus Suggested Reading
Kate Atkinson Life After Life 2013
Elan Mastai All Our Wrong Todays 2017
Audrey Niffenegger The Time Traveler’s Wife 2003
John Wray The Lost Time Accidents 2016
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Broderick, D. (2019). Looping Time. In: The Time Machine Hypothesis. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16178-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16178-1_12
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