Authors wishing to highlight noteworthy details of their cunningly crafted settings may encounter one vexing issue: for people raised in those milieus, there is nothing remarkable about them. The characters won’t comment on or explain things that puzzle us readers. Or at least they should not.
Introducing an outsider, especially one from an earlier point in history, provides useful perspective on the ways in which this new world differs from the past. It is not surprising, therefore, that SF authors have embraced a variety of ways to drop olden-time observers into futuristic worlds.
Here are five tried-and-true olden-time-observer insertion methods…
Probably the easiest approach is to have the character slumber the ages away. This classic method is well established, perhaps because it is such an obvious possibility. After all, who’s never slept in? The difference between oversleeping an hour or two or a century or ten is merely a matter of degree.
Lawrence Block’s 1999 Tanner on Ice is a somewhat paradoxical example, since Evan Tanner is notable for his inability to sleep thanks to a wartime injury. With eight extra hours a day to fill, Tanner became an international man of action for a certain agency. This thrilling life came to a very sudden halt on October 8th, 1972, when Tanner was duped, drugged, and put into suspended animation. The narrative begins again when Tanner is revived on March 14th, 1997, in a world that is quite different from the swinging Cold War he once knew. A world to which he will somehow have to adapt.
Relativity is a godsend to authors seeking convenient temporal displacement. Dispatch your traveler at near light speeds and when they return to Earth, they will discover their friends and family at home have lived through many more years than have the travelers themselves.
Consider the situation in which Boris Fedoroff (a supporting character in Poul Anderson’s 1970 Bussard ramjet classic Tau Zero) finds himself. For Fedoroff, the Delta Pavonis expedition took twelve years. On Earth, it would have lasted forty-three years. That time difference is short enough that the traveler’s native Russia is still (mostly) recognizable, but long enough that the society has evolved in ways to which the starfarer refuses to adapt.
Fedoroff turned to confront her. “We expected people would have died when we came home. We expected change. If anything, I was overjoyed at first that I could recognize parts of my city — moonlight on canals and river, domes and towers on Kazan Cathedral, Alexander and Bucephalus rearing over the bridge that carries Nevsky Prospect, the treasures in the Hermitage—” He looked back away and shook his head wearily. “But the life itself. That was too different.”
Happily, for Fedoroff, the expedition to Beta Virginis can use an experienced crew member like him. Not that this new expedition will go entirely to plan.
Authors not wishing to go to the bother of near-light-speed interstellar travel might cut out the middleman and resort to time travel. Ignore space, traverse time itself, and step from one era to another.1
Rebecca Ore’s 2007 Time’s Child is a book in which temporal displacement is driven by necessity. Having made a number of terrible decisions that have dangerously diminished the human gene pool, the 24th century Archive decides to go into the past and seize humans on the brink of death. Their seizure won’t affect history (they’re going to die anyway) and it’s just possible that 24th century medicine can keep them alive. Their genes can be used to increase genetic diversity.
It’s a mixed blessing for the retrieved. They won’t die, but they will have to adjust to a very alien world.
Then there’s amnesia. Long amnesia, like a long sleep. One wakes up in an aged body and a new world.2
This was used in Lisa A. Nichols’ 2019 Vessel. Catherine Wells used wormhole travel to visit and return from Trappist-1. No relativistic shenanigans required. Somewhere along the line, however, Catherine lost nine years of memory. From her perspective it is as though she jumped from her younger self into an aged version whose society, family, and friends have changed unrecognizably.
Very traumatic, but not as worrisome as the reason why Catherine’s memories went missing.…
A fifth and last (for now) method of introducing a traveler from the past: construct the traveler from old computer scans. It will be an AI that thinks it is a person. Have fun in the comments debating whether or not the AI is, in fact, a person.
Once, Bob Johansson was a successful software entrepreneur. He chose to have his head cryogenically preserved. Much, much later, his head is destructively scanned and a computer simulation is created… with his memories. He still feels alive…but it’s an existence in silicon, not flesh.
This new Bob finds himself in a theocratic state known as the Free American Independent Theocratic Hegemony. This setting is just as unfamiliar and unpleasant as it would have been to the old Bob. Just like the old Bob would have done, he feels a pressing need to escape. But how?
***
Of course, these are just five of the many methods authors could and have used. No doubt I’ve overlooked many techniques in a blatant bid to reserve some material for future essays. Perhaps your favourites were among the ignored. If so, comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Time machines as described in SF somehow manage to sidestep a possible problem: exactly *where* will the travelers be deposited? Stars and the planets orbiting them move. A few centuries ago Earth was nowhere near where it is now (at least in relation to the galaxy and probably in relation to the rest of the universe…hmmm…infinite universe? How to specify location?). Perhaps conservation of energy (it takes a lot of energy to move something from Earth to deep space) keeps time travelers glued to the surface of their worlds. Perhaps it is simply that the authors prefer their travelers not to die in the vacuum of deep space.
[2]One does not need to be an amnesiac to experience the horror of being trapped in an explicably aged body. To quote the late Terry Pratchett’s “Moving Pictures”, “...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
Boris Fedoroff’s situation sounds remarkably like that of the protagonist in Lem’s “Return from the Stars”.
I feel like Vernor Vinge’s bobbles are distinct from your “oversleeping,” but I can’t quite put my finger on how. This may or may not also apply to Niven’s stasis fields.
As for the problems of time travel brought up in the first footnote, the obvious answer is that the complicated mathematics that make time travel work use a frame of reference in which the position of the time machine is a fixed point and the universe moves around it. Wave your hands vigorously and mention Einstein a few times, and there you go.
I always imagined time machines would reasonably travel along space-time geodesics, in which case they’d bob to and fro through the core of the planet and your main problem would be timing things so your exit point isn’t embedded in the middle of the Earth.
The Day Before Forever, by Keith Laumer. A man awakens in a world far in the future of the one he remembers. It turns out to be not quite that straightforward.
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman (interesting that both have “Forever” in the title). A soldier in a centuries-long interstellar war finds that the futures he encounters get progressively stranger.
Philip Jose Farmer Flesh
A E. Van Vogt Far Centauri.
Stephen Baxter’s Timelike Infinity and succeeding novels make use of time travel via wormhole.
Stephen Baxter’s stories from the “Old Earth” sequence make use of a (yet undiscovered) vastly exaggerated effect of General Relativity, where the rate of time passage depends strongly on your altitude. People at low elevations live much more slowly than people at high elevations. This is true in our reality, but the effect is incredibly minuscule; in Baxter’s stories, it’s very very very strong indeed, where people a few flights up can live several days between serving you lunch and serving you dinner. (Which they do. Slavery, you know.)
@1: Similar…but what happens to them is very, very different.
I think the generic ancestors of your first category are Lawrence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933) and, more notably, H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; revised in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes).
But of course both of those owe something, consciously or not, to a certain Mr. van Winkle…
The time traveler in Michael Bishop’s No Enemy But Time actually asks about the time and position issue (an especially big one, since he’s heading to the Pleistocene). He’s told it’s not relevant, since the time travel is by mental projection (which somehow doesn’t prevent the traveler from bringing back the daughter he fathers with a Homo habilis woman).
@8: I think the big difference between H. G. Wells’ Sleeper, Graham, and Rip van Winkle or various visitors to Fairie who found more time had passed while they were away than they had experienced, was that Graham woke in the future relative to the author and readers (like Buck Rogers, but unlike Steve Rogers, whose time spent frozen caught him up with the present). Was Wells’ the first such story?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle#Themes_and_literary_forerunners lists many earlier stories, but not with a future setting.
(Wells’ story includes a character saying “It’s Rip Van Winkle come real”, so I think the debt was conscious.)
IIRC, this process is actually weaponized in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, where “ice assassins” deal with politicians they dislike by kidnapping them and putting them in suspended animation for some decades, thus reducing their political effectiveness in a sort-of-ethical way.
Time’s Child sounds a bit like Varley’s “Air Raid” (novelized as Millennium).
@Steve Wright: And of course “The Door into Summer” also has weaponized cold sleep (Vinge’s “Marooned in Realtime” does a similar trick without the sleeping part).
Fred Brown uses the amnesia motif in two of his horror short stories “Hall of Mirrors” and “Nightmare in Gray”
Heinlein’s For Us, the Living has our protagonist being time-shifted as a result of driving his car off a cliff. I don’t recall that the mechanism was explained. (surprising, as everything else is explained at great length) What did amuse me was the instant acceptance by everyone that he was a time traveler- no one ever questions it.
Its not an uncommon theme. Asmiov’s Pebble In the Sky was an early example. Larry Niven wrote a couple stories, starting with A World Out of Time, dealing with a character displaced in time.
Frankly its a major premise of Doctor Who—a contemporary viewpoint character who in many episodes travels forward into the future, and in others of course travels backward or sideways.
The most inventive time travel story I’ve read recently is definitely Ian Watson’s “The Very Slow Time Machine,” in which a man enters the time machine as a young man and goes back in time, except he ages in real time so he comes out an old man at the end (which is the story’s beginning). Time moves backward in the time machine while everything else moves forward. The time traveler is able to communicate with people on the outside using signs, but the exchanges happen in reverse order if I remember it right.
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez has characters skipping forward both by FTL travel (fast for the travellers, but lasts for years for the rest of the world) and suspended animation. The books starts with a part written from a point of a view of a man living on a colony world, who every fifteen years meets a captain of a ship coming to his colony.
“Semley’s Necklace” by Ursula K. LeGuin — the seed of her novel Rocannon’s World. I always loved how she blended fairy tales about one night in Elfland with Einsteinian relativity.
Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End had a variant where the viewpoint character had severe Alzheimer’s disease for years, and was cured. It’s not that he doesn’t remember the gap, it’s that he was isolated from society and wasn’t capable of understanding the changes at the time.
Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time and the short story Try and Change the Past tells us how hard it is for time travelers to change things.
Le Guin’s “Winter’s King” is a pretty good sample of this kind of thing.
Technically, this displacement-in-time is part of the origin story of Francis Sandow, the hero of Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead. It doesn’t really play much of a role in the plot, except that it allows him to comment on the future from a 20th century p.o.v.
Leigh Brackett wrote a pretty good science fantasy about a shiftless Earthman who’s plunged into Mars’ legendary past (Sea-Kings of Mars, a.k.a. The Sword of Rhiannon).
One of Asimov’s few genuinely moving stories is “The Ugly Little Boy” about a Neanderthal kid who’s displaced in time by an academic experiment. Once the experiment is over, there’s a question of what to do with its byproduct: a human child utterly unprepared to return to his own time.
Then of course there’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.
Footnote 1 issues are the core of Tomorrow is Too Far by James White. Just about any issue is mentioned someplace in genre although too much of older SF has been relegated to long shelves of decaying paperbacks in used book stores in low rent districts.
Lazarous Long could be said to have dozed off stage – that is off planet – if not slumbered the ages away. Other characters have been defined more by memory edits than lived experience.
Two more examples of the freezer version – the TV series Adam Adamant Lives! (1966), in which the hero is frozen in the 19th century and thawed in the swinging sixties, and the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), which takes the hero from the swinging sixties to the nineties.
One you may not have come across is Summer in 3000 by Peter Martin (1946) in which the hero is whisked forward through time from the 1940s to 3000 AD and discovers it’s a socialist utopia with free love etc. There’s a plot in there involving evil American capitalism so it isn’t all sex…
This article got me wondering if there are any alternatives other than time-travel/hibernation. Harder than you think! I guess WestWorld? (Which I haven’t even seen). They do get to go out into the real world eventually, right? But that example only establishes how unnecessarily elaborate the backstory would have to be – assuming your priority from the start was to provide an unorthodox perspective on a particular culture/time.
In Peter Hamilton’s “Night’s Dawn” trilogy, it turns out that all the humans who ever died are still lingering around, and start coming back to possess people in an era of interstellar war and politics. The “older and wiser” alien races are terribly helpful, telling the humans that they went through it too, and it’ll work itself out. Meanwhile, people whose last memories are of dying are now back in a vastly different society, and trying to figure out how they feel about having the chance to live again, at someone else’s expense.
Is Rip van Winkle science fiction? And if it is not, the story inspired by it, the adventures of Anthony “Buck” Rogers, clearly is.
Arguably the earliest manifestation of “awakening in the future” trope may be the legend of “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.” Taking place in the year AD 250, it concerns seven Christian soldiers, who sealed themselves in a cave to avoid Roman persecution. There, they fell into a miraculous sleep, to awaken 200 years later to find that Christianity had triumphed throughout the empire.
This legend has been found retold in numerous manuscripts dating from the 6th – 9th centuries, as well as collected in various medieval compilations.
There was a YA book in the late 70s along these lines, The Forever Formula by Frank Bonham. A contemporary (or maybe near-future) teen catches the local mad scientist doing something, the scientist freezes him, and he’s found and awakened 180 years later in a world in which said mad scientist turns out to have come up with a formula that extends life indefinitely, though with some side effects, so that now much of the population is made up of barely functional extremely old people who hold all the wealth and power while contributing nothing to society — and they think that the teen knows something that could be used to stop the side effects so they really can live forever.
It sounds like a riff on Boomers now, but given the publication date, I suspect the author was a Boomer who was playing the “don’t trust anyone over 30” card.
The “where do you come out” problem can be addressed if the machine is linked to an external reference point, such as a particular bit of granite embedded within a large mass of granite. Wherever that mountain goes, you’ll go.
The amnesia trope was used in the ST:TNG episode “Future Imperfect”, in which Riker wakes to discover that he seems to have lost sixteen years. I found it implausible from the outset. If I woke up and found that everything around me was sixteen years older but my body felt exactly the same, I wouldn’t believe that I’d lived through that time.
John Varley’s “Millenium”
The Centurion’s Empire, by Sean McMullen, concerns a Roman agent, using Etruscan cold sleep technology to skip forward decades or centuries at a time, fighting a secret war against other time-travelers. It is a great premise. Every time the main character wakes up from a big sleep, it is a challenge just to find out what has changed.
Whether “The Time Machine” is the first of that kind is not perfectly clear to me, but evidently it stays at the same spatial point in England while travelling, and initially observing, just over 800,000 years of future time, just as a start.
GRRM’s Wild Cards series has a character who becomes known as The Sleeper. You can probably guess what category he falls into. Born in 1935, he’s exposed to an alien bioagent in 1947. It causes him to have a very drawn out sleep/wake cycle, being continuously awake for days or even weeks at a time and then likewise to sleep for long periods, with the added wrinkle of developing a new form each time, making him effectively imaging.
@24: I think Westworld constructed robots fall under the same banner as AI constructs from old recordings. Both Vernor Vinge’s Pham Nuwen from A Fire Upon The Deep and Larry Niven’s Jerome Corbell from A World Out Of Time have to come to terms with not being who they thought they were, but “based on” someone now gone. Also Silverberg’s “Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another”
I immediately thought of The Death of Sleep by Anne McCaffrey
Interesting list – the Bobiverse books are definitely my favorite among those.
No one’s mentioned Heinlein’s _Time for the Stars_ yet? It’s certainly relativistic time travel, albeit with the ability to phone home mid-trip…
‘The Sound of Thunder’ by Ray Bradbury (the one with the butterfly effect). The protagonist ends up back in his own time, now altered; transforming him into an outsider in his own world. It also introduces the paradox that if you altered the past, how would you know, since that will affect your present?
William Mandela in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is a good example of providing a kinda plausible vehicle for time travel: flying through “collapsars” to send troops to far-off worlds at near lightspeed to fight alien baddies. I guess the handwavium used to fuel this method also prevents those soldiers from being torn into subatomic particles or otherwise protects them from tidal forces.
Of course, it’s both literal and metaphorical time travel, as the soldiers return to Earth after their tour of duty to find decades have passed, and Mandella, who couldn’t really adjust, re-ups for another three tours, the kind of displacement many returning veterans from Vietnam (where Haldeman served) and other war zones encounter.
Correction to the above: I misremembered how many tours Mandella served: I think it was two, spanning four (relative) years, per Wikipedia’s summary.
James Blish’s short story “A Work of Art” has a variant on option 5: a notable composer is simulated in the future, not as an AI, but as a (temporary) secondary personality within the body of a human volunteer.