麻豆传媒

Book

OVER the past couple of years, a meme has emerged according to which we inhabit 鈥渢he worst timeline鈥�. Buried in this social media snark is the fear that time is actually running out for us on this planet, whether we鈥檙e drowning under rising seas, fleeing fiery no-go zones or succumbing to the exotic pandemics we鈥檙e told are learning to surf the advance of climate change.

Literary science fiction鈥檚 rediscovery of time travel started with William Gibson鈥檚 in 2014: a devastated future just beginning to get a tenuous grip on civilised life discovers a mysterious server that can branch new timelines off the main trunk. 鈥淐ontinua enthusiasts鈥� use these timelines for games or sport, while a cop intervenes to rescue the branched timelines from the worst mistakes of the main one.

Over the past year, The Peripheral was joined by Annalee Newitz鈥檚 The Future of Another Timeline and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Now Gibson has written a sequel to The Peripheral titled simply Agency. All offer ways for us to bootstrap ourselves out of a bad reality.

These new time-travel books make short work of the genre鈥檚 earlier preoccupation with paradoxes. They rely on more-or-less rigorous science to build more interesting narrative structures, and spin intriguing ways by which we might twist time to our service.

In This Is How You Lose the Time War, these twists are literal: time is a braid whose strands can be carefully and subtly rewoven to bring about profound change far down the line. But the only people capable of comprehending these labyrinthine relationships are warriors from a future so deep that they 鈥� and their priorities 鈥� are barely human.

Newitz, by contrast, zips between 90s California and the 1893 World鈥檚 Fair in Chicago with shouty, urgent, 鈥測oung adult鈥� characters, though this accessibility doesn鈥檛 make the book any less resonant. With a clever twist, Newitz kills off the classic time-travel paradox about one鈥檚 inability to kill one鈥檚 own grandfather: people can kill anyone they like, but as a consequence they become stranded in their new timeline, solitary, haunted guardians of the memories their edits erased.

The time structure that Gibson brings to Agency is the most thoughtful of these books, involving a clever, computational riff on Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. We learn that one of the time branches thrown up by a malevolent continua enthusiast took place in 2017, and that this timeline is heading for nuclear war unless the police of 2130 can weave it back into the main trunk.

Why go to so much trouble to save people who are far removed from the here and now? The police will gain nothing tangible by intervening in the affairs of other timelines: their own world鈥檚 past is unchangeable so none of its misfortunes can be reversed. What they have, instead, is the ability to enlarge their idea of who they are responsible for. Rainey, one of the characters from 2130 working to save the 2017 timeline from Armageddon, at one point needs to take a sick day because of timeline empathy sickness.

Gibson鈥檚 novel comes the closest to showing us how we might think about the future we ourselves are editing, even now. The clue鈥檚 in the title: Agency.