The Time Machine Hypothesis by Damien Broderick

Author:Damien Broderick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030161781
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

1970 The Year of the Quiet Sun Wilson Tucker

When he was 17, Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker (1914–2006) published his first fanzine—one of the amateur magazines that helped knit together the geographically dispersed readers of science fiction until the explosive arrival of cheap computers and the Internet, when blogs replaced almost all the by-then-classic self-produced paper’zines mailed locally at first then often internationally. Bob Tucker, one of the first and soon majorly influential sf fans, went on to write crime and sf novels while working as a film projectionist. It is intriguing that this pioneering fanzine was titled The Time Traveller, and that nod to a sub-genre launched by H.G. Wells less than two decades before Tucker’s birth recurred as a theme in the notable novel under discussion—nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards—and several other sf works such as The Lincoln Hunters (1958).

These time travelers do not build their craft at home or in a commercial or academic laboratory. The first TDV, or Time Displacement Vehicle, is constructed and tested under the government auspices of the US Bureau of Standards in a heavily protected concrete structure, and powered by a dedicated nuclear reactor outputting 500,000 kW hours. The equipment is rated for 20 years of continuous service, and all equipment will be replaced every 25 years or sooner. Because the mass of the TDV and its single passenger makes heavy demands on the system, travelers are obliged to go into the future wearing only briefs. Suitable garments, food and water, camera, recorders and other provisions will be set out for their use on arrival at a prespecified future date, and they are permitted only 50 h outside the bunker before returning.

Many sf stories assume that experienced hours spent in the future will be matched by an equal time lost on return, but in this novel the traveler will be back in his home time (all three are male in this 1978 test sequence, going to 1980) after exactly 61 seconds. The initial test killed nine technicians and the traveler, because the homing TDV tried to materialize on the same spot and at the same moment it had left, with predictable explosive consequences. (One might think this sort of error could not possibly happen, but then one recalls the $125 million climate orbiter that smashed into Mars in 1999 because the engineering staff had confused Imperial and metric units.) Since that tragic and humiliating error, the system has been fully recalibrated, and monkeys are sent to the future and back without harm. After shorter leaps into the future, the plan is to explore the shape of things to come in 2000.

The temporal investigators are inducted by a lovely and competent Bureau specialist, Kathryn or Katrina van Hise, and comprise Air Force Major William Moresby, a seasoned warrior and evangelical zealot in his mid forties, a Navy Commander of thirty, Arthur Saltus, who is instantly smitten by Katrina, and the demographer and futurist Brian Chaney who is no less taken by

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