Downtiming the Night Side

THE NIGHT SIDE

“I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?”

Robert A. Heinlein, particularly in his short fiction, had an annoying habit of raising questions that he never thought worth solving, I think mostly because he was going for an emotional reaction to which such things would have brought needless complexity. For that level of complexity, he needed a novel, and he didn’t turn to answering those questions from the shorts when he wrote his long work, but rather other concepts.

I have a different reaction to such things.

In “They,” Heinlein writes of the classic paranoid who is institutionalized because he comes to believe that the whole world is being put on for his benefit alone. I hope I’m not destroying a classic for any of my readers by noting that, of course, Heinlein closes with the director of the asylum worrying about the subject escaping, and uttering those wonderful lines, “New York City and Harvard University are now dismantled. Divert him with those sectors. Move!”

That line justifies the story on its own, but it’s really just a lightweight gimmick tale, a shaggy dog story, but from the first time I read it I found myself less interested in the “shock” ending (whose sense, although not its great lines, I already expected) than I was fascinated by the concept of an entire race devoting its sole energies to fooling and containing one individual. What, I wondered, would cause a race to devote its entire activity to such an end? Phil Dick addressed this same concept to a degree in his novel Time Out of Joint, but his solution, while ingenious, wasn’t of the scope I imagined the first time I read “They.” Maybe someday I’ll write it. I have a number of very rational solutions, but I’ve never thought the rationales up to the premise. We’ll see.

“All You Zombies” had a much more direct effect on me along the same lines. Heinlein always had a fascination with time paradoxes, and “All You Zombies” is a more modern, “grown-up” variation on his early Forties novelette “By His Bootstraps,” in which the hero isn’t also the heroine, as in “Zombies,” but does wind up being not only the hero but also the arch-villain (and much of the supporting cast). The problem was, he still had to throw those extras to the wind in both stories, although in “Zombies” he acknowledges the problem.

I grew fascinated with answering the question about who all those zombies were and where they all came from and how they came about, and determined to have that answer stand up to a ruthless logic. It was basically my second book concept (after A Jungle of Stars), and I started to work on the problem way back in 1976. The heart of the problem was, of course, causality.

Backward time travel stories are really fantasies, not science fiction at all, because they all are forced to either ignore laws of physics or collapse. (Forward time travel, of course, has no such problems except the fact that you can’t go home again). Evan Hunter, wearing his Richard Marsden hat, tried to tackle it head on accepting the laws of physics and causality in a Fifties Winston “juvenile” novel called Danger: Dinosaurs. A much unappreciated and little known book today that should be back in print, it was the first work I know of in which, as each major character dies, the entire premise of the book changes constantly. A little of which was in the Back to the Future movies, but they owed more to It’s a Wonderful Life than to real science fiction for their causality problems, with perhaps a touch of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, in which the “present” is the last point of reality and from that point the future is conditional. That to me also brings up more questions than it solves, since my hard-headed logical bent refuses to accept the idea that the “present” in any real temporal sense isn’t the farthest out in the expanding master time wave.

In effect, I didn’t want any solution that wound up with the old cliche that meddling in the past so changed the future that nothing you just read actually happened. The “present” is that far future; we are in the past in a temporal sense, and what they do is from the basis of reality, not possibility. That “present” has to be fixed; it has to have existed, or none of the actions would have been necessary. No conditional future. But the real future, the second beyond the present, is always conditional because it hasn’t yet happened. The concept, then, had to be from the point of view of influencing the future course of a fixed “present.”

And already you’re seeing why so few decent, complex time travel paradox books are done. “Oops! But if we accept this, then we also have to buy that! But if that has to be accepted, then…” And you forget it and go off and write something saner. And you always thought that writing science fiction was fun, huh?

In other words, to answer Heinlein’s question, I discovered I had to invent a whole new line of physics and work it out while accepting the real world as it is, and I had to do it completely before I could do a single bit of plotting. I also had to accept Heinlein’s logic, that what we know today is the result of what’s already happened, but without throwing paradox to the winds.

So, most of all, I had to take on causality. Accepting the unlikely premise that backward travel might be possible, at the very least we’re faced with the sure phenomenon of natural resistance. If you go back, you will find yourself in a situation where you are (A) unlikely to effect events in any way, and (B) in which time, as a force of nature, would be fighting you every step of the way. Defining this process, while accepting a level of “present,” as stated, resulted, I think, in a logical answer to Heinlein’s unanswered question.

By late 1978, I had it sufficiently worked out so that I understood it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until about 1981 that I had it well enough along that I could make other people understand it. Once I had that, though, I could proceed to work out the book—and then I hit the second “gotcha” inherent in the construction of all good time travel paradox stories.

It quickly become obvious that such a book, if it was to be true to itself and the readers, had to be not only constructed but written quite differently than just about any other sort of book. Just as a complex murder mystery has to be at least partly written backwards—if you don’t write the ending first you’ll never solve the crime yourself—the structure of a time travel paradox story must be, by definition, Shakespearian— a five-act play in which the climax comes not at the end but in the third act, beyond which the logic of what precedes it dictates the final two acts. Cause and effect in a time paradox book are reversed—effect comes in Acts I and II; definining climax comes right in the middle, while cause comes in the last two acts to explain the first two acts. I call this the Wonderland Method: sentence first, verdict after.

This, then, means scrupulous outlining with little room to maneuver. It’s constricting and can drive a creative mind completely around the bend, particularly when you see a wonderful idea that you’d love to use but which would mean throwing out the 50,000 words you already wrote. This kind of time travel book requires more discipline than most writers have, and more than any writers want to have.

The book you are now reading took many false starts and was worked on over a long period of time, between the other projects, requiring in the end better than two years to write after its mechanics were worked out. I realize when I finished it that it could not have been written by me any sooner; without the personal computer and a decent word processor, it would have been nearly impossible for me to have seen it through. That alone gives me both admiration for the earlier paradox writers using only typewriters and some feeling of why so many of the questions were left unanswered by those who came here before.

Well, here’s my answer to the question, and my way of making time travel science fiction, rather than a branch of fantasy. If done right, these stories can be a lot of fun to read while making your head spin. I think Downtiming the Nightside is both fun and fast and yet thoughtful. It, and this explanation, though, may tell you why in forty-plus subsequent books, I haven’t written another time travel book.

Now, then… Never mind that they dismantled New York City. The real question is, why did they build it in the first place? Hmmmm…

Jack L. Chalker

May 8, 1992