Up The Line

AN INTRODUCTION by Kim Stanley Robinson

Up the Line is a time travel novel from the 1960s, and now it is also time travel back to the 1960s, for it is very much a book of its time. John Clute once claimed that he could date any unknown science fiction novel to within a year or two of its writing date, by means of stylistic and content analysis; this particular novel would be no difficult test for anyone. The psychedelic drugs, the free love, the racial integration, the early New Age spiritualism, even the spectacularly colorful clothing, all speak the late Sixties with no possibility of error. The “New Orleans of 2059” depicted in this novel is very obviously the 1967 of New York, of California, and of the traveling circus that is the science fiction community. It’s interesting and funny, painful and nostalgic, thus to revisit the feeling of innocent unbridled fresh freedom that was one component of those years.

This is not to say that Silverberg has not done his usual fine job of extrapolation in establishing an sf setting, creating a fully fleshed-out and believable future. Indeed it is very impressive to see his almost offhand inclusion of elements that even now are timely and cutting edge, including extremely powerful computers — not personal computers, the famous blind spot of sf — but widely available computers, doing many of the things we use computers to do now. This alone is an impressive feat of “prediction,” given the primitive state of computers, and of science fiction’s thinking about computers, in the late Sixties. Then also there is the inclusion of “helix booths,” where people’s genomes can be read and their genes chopped and spliced to order; this could be included in a science fiction novel today and have a thoroughly contemporary feel. The fact that these elements are throwaways and not really what the novel is about, that they are merely part of establishing the “futurity” of the novel’s setting, make them all the more impressive. It is as if Silverberg at that time was so filled by both science fiction and the world that he could speak prophetically even when concerned with something else; as here, where he is concerned with the past, and history, and his own life.

But here again, in his treatment of history, his attitude has a thoroughly modern, or rather postmodern, feel to it. It is now a commonplace of contemporary thought that a significant difference between modernism and postmodernism lies in their attitudes toward the past. For modernism — that period in which modernization was incomplete, and parts of the world existed in radically different periods of historical development, there for all to see — the past was a real thing, a repository of truth, and for many modernist artists, the location of a deep nostalgia. In postmodernism, on the other hand, the whole world has become modernized (globalized), and the past has therefore become merely a storehouse of glossy images, to be raided and appreciated for their surfaces, appropriated as one of many interchangeable and essentially meaningless styles.

Up the Line straddles the border of this change, and indeed discusses it in its plot and situation: one crowd treasuring the past and trying to keep it solid and whole, the other zipping around like hummingbirds, looking for the biggest thrills they can find. Thus the introduction of time travel tourism to the older science fiction situation of a “Time Patrol,” policing the past in order to keep things consistent and the way they had always been. Science fiction in the 1950s was filled with stories of these various Time Patrols and their fights to keep history — or, as the sub-genre developed, various concurrent histories — consistent and the same. This is the delightfully confusing and complicated world of the time-paradox story, a growth industry during the 1950s, perhaps precisely because the sense of what history consisted of was beginning to fall apart. Writers such as Poul Anderson in his “Time Patrol” series, Asimov in The End of Eternity, Fritz Leiber’s “Change War” series, and many others, played with all the paradoxes and plot conundrums offered by the logical contradictions inherent in the idea of time travel, in much the same manner as chess players or crossword puzzle makers play with the possibilities offered by their games. On that relatively simple crossword puzzle level, Silverberg’s novel is as complicated and ingenious as any of them. But with the addition of tourism to the mix, the book also offers an image of, and discusses, the emergence of the postmodern view of the past as sheer spectacle and entertainment, with nothing substantial to teach us. The Time Patrol therefore becomes a very un-hip police force, the tourist guides the coming new thing, conforming to the Patrol’s consistency laws only insofar as they are convenient, with the attitude that “anything goes as long as you don’t get caught.” A very Sixties kind of mind-set, perhaps.

But Silverberg’s novel makes it clear that he himself does not agree with this postmodern attitude, that the past is there only to dazzle ignorant tourists and have some fun. The plot of the novel forms a strong critique of this view, as our protagonist, following his desires with little regard for history and what it could teach him, industriously replicates all his problems (including himself), until he is woven into a tangle more complicated than anything outside time-paradox fiction could easily be. By doing this the book makes it clear that the time-paradox genre can be used both to discuss attitudes toward history, and to express those moments in our life when we are most tied in knots by our desires and regrets.

What’s this? Time paradox puzzler as autobiographical fiction?

Yes. Definitely. That’s the kind of writer Silverberg was and is: extremely prolific but relatively reticent in personal matters, he has always been inclined to speak through the masks of his fictions, and to use the seemingly distant tropes of science fiction to tell his story, or rather to express his existential situation. And never more so than during the period in which this novel was written.

Silverberg began young, like quite a few other science fiction stars, falling in love with sf as a young teenager; by the age of nineteen he was up and running as a fully functioning professional writer, cranking out millions of words of science fiction for the many magazines and few small sf publishing houses of the 1950s. In these years he learned his craft and made a living, but he also gained a reputation for the heartless manufacture of generic filler material, a reputation that bothered him more than anyone else. The truth is that getting published at a very early age is a mixed blessing, because no matter how much one wants to become a writer, there remains the problem of having something to say, and this is a problem that cannot be solved by reading more books, but only by living more years. Thus it is that the very few writers who have written interesting fiction in their teens or early twenties, do so usually after a premature entry to adult life that often does great harm to them (cf. Raymond Radiguet).

So, although Silverberg sold a great deal of science fiction and made a living by writing, he was not satisfied. And then the science fiction magazine market collapsed and disappeared. This might have presented an insuperable problem to a less resourceful person, and indeed the history of science fiction is strongly marked by this event. If you track the important writers of science fiction by mini-generations marked by the decades, a process that works much better than it should to periodize the history of the genre, then what is significant about the generation of the 1950s is that almost every one of their careers was deformed or shattered in one way or another. I won’t recite the list of famous names, because each has a different story that needs explication, but the cumulative effect of all of them together suggests that something powerful was going on. And there is no great mystery to it. The pay was abysmal, so that it was hard to make a living at it; and the culture did not value science fiction as literature, rather the reverse, so that it was hard to maintain, in the face of such universal disdain and dismissal, the emotional stance that one was writing crucially important and very fine avant-garde literature. That happened to be true, as the long run proved, but who could be sure when the great bulk of the world seemed to regard it as trash?

So most of the great Fifties sf writers went silent, for periods short or long. They found other work, or became very poor. Many left the field and only came back years later, if at all. Even the prodigious Asimov left, for non-fiction and teaching. Only Philip K. Dick of all that generation powered on through this period, but he published a great deal of nonsense at high speed, and collapsed eventually under the strain; and all along he exhibited what his biographer calls “hypergraphia,” a useful disease for a writer, perhaps, but part of a suite of disorders ranging from drug use to paranoia to something like epilepsy, and a fatal stroke at age fifty-one.

So this was a very, very difficult time. Later generations of science fiction writers, appearing in a world full of enthusiastic readers, money, academic interest and general acclaim, can have no idea. In essence the generation of the 1950s broke down a ghetto wall with their foreheads, creating the open field that followed — even the world view that followed — for the younger generation to party in. It is not a debt that can be repaid, but it can be acknowledged.

Silverberg, however, being a strong-willed and practical man, confronted by this situation, was not going to break his pate or cry in his beer. He took a route more like Asimov’s than Dick’s, and turned to non-fiction. He wrote mostly for younger readers, and most of his books concerned history or prehistory. He became a figure quite like Metaxas in Up the Line; an ever-more skillful guide to the past, showing young clients the fascinations of history both natural and human, working like Metaxas from the refuge of a palatial mansion. In these years he published books on underwater archeology, archeological hoaxes, lost cities and vanished civilizations, living fossils, El Dorado, the Great Wall of China, and other, mostly historical, subjects. Perhaps there was a book on Byzantium in there as well. In any case, he made himself a second career as a guide to the past, and in the process he also discovered that scholarship was a craft like any other, open to anyone willing to learn the methods and do the work; it was not something confined to the esoteric worlds of the academy. To his repertory of writing skills he added those of a practicing scholar.

Meanwhile, science fiction had been changing yet again. The generation of the Sixties was arriving, and along with it all the radical social developments of that turbulent decade. Many of the new stars in science fiction were about Silverberg’s age or just a bit younger, and they were energetically using all the time-worn tropes of science fiction to “express themselves” as it was then said, in what was a characteristic Sixties act, but also a crucial aspect of art. Silverberg, no longer compelled by financial necessity to crank out fiction as fast as possible, returned to his first love, his hometown, at his own pace and on his own program. The tenor of the times influenced him, inspired him, and, as he put it, he “joined the revolution.” This was no immediate conversion, but the natural process of growth of an ambitious writer, who, after all, despite all that had already happened, was still only thirty years old, an age when many writers are just beginning; and really, at about the age when people have lived enough to have new things to say. Inevitably these life experiences include bad things as well as good, and some of the bad things have powerful lessons in them. So, despite his great energy, and his smooth negotiation of the professional troubles of his time, Silverberg was not immune to things like illnesses, or his house burning down (no doubt influencing the wistful descriptions of Metaxas’s lovely home in Up the Line), or troubles in relationships to people and places.

In any case, his mid-Sixties novel Thorns marked the rise to a new level in his work, wherein he too began to use the tropes and devices of science fiction to express what his life felt like to him during those crazy years. Up the Line comes from a few years later, written in 1968, in the middle of the craziness. Thus the particular intensity of the book, which could have been a light crossword puzzle kind of thing, but is not. Thus Metaxas, with his palatial home tucked away in a private place and time, and his highly-honed ability to present the past to his clients. He stands for a Silverberg from just a year or two before; but significantly, our protagonist Jud Elliott can only aspire to Metaxas’s happy state, and Jud’s attempts to achieve a similar situation go spectacularly awry. Things going wrong: this novel is a comedy, and it is funny, but it is one of those black comedies where things go wrong and then the more the protagonist tries to fix them the more wrong they become, until the ending is at one and the same time an O. Henry-style punchline and a deep existential truth, neat as a pin and just as sharp.

There is, in other words, a kind of grimness to all this hilarity, that has to do with Silverberg’s loss of his house, and the general tenor of the times. This painful comedy extends even to the “bawdy” material of Jud’s hunt for sex or love, which after all occupies so much of the text. That this hunt gets mixed up with Jud’s genealogical interests is one way of suggesting that he needs some kind of meaning to attend the matter; and indeed, he makes the classic discovery that “sex with love is better than sex without love.” All well and good — but the point is significantly vitiated by the fact that he knows his Pulcheria no better than the rest of the women he has bedded, and his love for her has been sparked, as he himself admits, by her pulchritude. As good a start as any to a relationship, no doubt, but more is required for such a thing to last. Jud never has the chance to learn the elementary lesson that good-looking people are not universally good; indeed it costs many of us painful years of experience to learn that. Whether this also pertains to Silverberg’s life at that time, is not the job of an introduction to say: but those were very wild years, years of “free love” and “sexual revolution,” and Silverberg married young, divorced, and only years later ended up with his true partner: so it may not be venturing too much beyond the public facts to suggest that when the guru in the text says to the protagonist, “You aren’t real. Believe me. Believe me. You’re your own ghost. Pack up and clear out!” there is a particular edge and force to the observation, only accentuated by the startling chill of the final line.

So — enjoy this technically adroit and heartfelt comedy, of course! But watch out you don’t find yourself confronting another version of yourself, in a dark hallway in Byzantium, arguing which one of you is real, and how you can get out of the mess you have gotten yourself into.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

December 4, 2001