Steampunk Uchronia: a journey through time

Summary
Steampunk, a journey through time

Uchronia: definition

Alternate history, also known as uchronia, is a subgenre of science fiction that explores the "what if" of history. It involves stories that explore parallel realities where certain key historical events happened differently, creating a new fictional universe.

For example, "What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo?" In an alternate history, this hypothesis would be the starting point for a new story. Used mainly in literature, but also in other forms of media such as films, video games or television series, alternate history allows for reflection on the impact of events and choices on the course of history. It is a tool for exploring the potential of history and its infinite ramifications.

 

The Basics of Uchronia and my initiatory journey

Remember the first time you had a crush? Well, how about an author crush? That's what I call it when I discover an author whose work I enjoy so much that I feel compelled to read their entire body of work.

In recent years, it’s been Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne, but it all started with Kurt Vonnegut. I vividly remember the experience of reading Slaughterhouse 5 in high school, and within a year I had read all 14 of his novels. Slaughterhouse 5 was not only a gateway to science fiction in general and Vonnegut in particular, but it was my first exposure to time travel in literature, and prepared me to be a hardcore steampunk traveler.

In Vonnegut's story, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is "unstuck in time." He travels neither to the distant past nor to the distant future. Rather, he is able to travel along his own timeline, from birth to death, and is doomed to do so forever. For the reader, the story takes him through different events in his life, but not in a linear fashion, and he always returns to the same experience.

He and his platoon were trapped in a slaughterhouse during the bombing of Dresden in World War II (like Vonnegut himself), and he finds himself reliving that trauma over and over again. Pilgrim takes these trips within his own body; he doesn't watch the events of his life unfold from the outside. Instead, he sees scenes from his life again, but he's powerless to change them. When someone mentions time travel, it's not what usually comes to mind.

Typically, we think of a person getting into a machine like the one in HG Wells' classic The Time Machine and traveling through time, their own body remaining unchanged. This may happen out of pure curiosity, but more often the purpose is to prevent catastrophe.

Steampunk and the Mechanics of Time Travel

Throughout the article I will give examples without necessarily citing Steampunk works. Here are some recommendations in the purest retro futuristic style.

Steampunk Time Travel Books

“Burton and Swinburne” by Mark Hodder

This is, first and foremost, a Victorian-era detective novel, as we like it. Crooked geneticists, time travel, the assassination of Queen Victoria, a mad (very Victorian) marquess, a timeline that gets more and more out of whack, and, my favorite part, a full-on adventure. I swear this book made me want to pull out a rapier and dance like a madwoman. That's what I'd look like if I tried my hand at sword fighting. Oh, there's also a young Oscar Wilde as a newspaper vendor.


"The Time Nomad", Michael Moorcock

In these adventures, a young Edwardian soldier is thrown into various versions of 20th-century history. Moorcock was writing steampunk before the term was even invented, with airships and the Empire (favorite themes of many steampunk works) recurring elements in each well-described reality he encounters. Moorcock's politics are very much in evidence, with insightful descriptions of the Empire's flaws and its legacy of racial discrimination, as well as his frustration at the inability of most socialists to come together and agree on common policies and goals.


Morlock Night, KW Jeter (English only)

This book is a sequel to H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," one of the most famous science fiction novels of all time (published in 1895). In Jeter's sequel, we learn that not only has the time traveler failed in his mission, but the Morlocks have acquired his machine and learned how to use it. And they are transporting an army of Morlocks into the sewers of 1892 London. From their underground lair, they threaten the England of good Queen Victoria...


The Ways of Anubis, Tim Powers

A wild time-travel adventure, a delirious mix of steampunk, Victorian London, Egyptian sorcerers, rival gangs of beggars, real poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron and the monstrous experiments lurking in the London sewers, a body-switching werewolf and a modern scholar of Victorian poetry who travels back in time with a group of tourists and gets stranded. Tim Powers adds so many disparate plot elements, grotesque villains and non-stop action that it's a little hard to keep track of, but it's an incredibly fun ride.

You can find other Steampunk Books to discover on this blog.

    A few years ago, I received as a birthday gift an incredible collection of short stories called "The Time Traveler's Almanac." This 948-page book was edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (of steampunk bible fame) and contains the best of the best in time travel fiction. In addition to stories by notables such as Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov, there are some very interesting essays that provide some truly compelling themes. The information in this article is largely adapted from Stan Love's "Time Travel in Theory and Practice."

    Science fiction or reality

    We all travel through time, it's just in one direction at a uniform speed of 3600 seconds per hour. It doesn't sound as fun as it is...imagining a quick jaunt to the Jurassic period or jumping to 2300 for a cup of hydroponic coffee. It's all fantasy, science fiction. But hard science offers some interesting insights into what we can expect from time travel with the knowledge we already have.

    Albert Einstein gave us two theories about time travel, a general theory and a special theory. General relativity concerns the interaction between extremely massive objects and smaller objects that are trying to escape their gravitational pull. Assuming your ship could travel at a speed just slightly slower than the speed of light and you were trying to get away from a black hole or neutron star, time behaves in very strange ways.

    Inside the ship, time slows down, at least as it appears to an outside observer. If you get too close, the tidal forces of the black hole will tear you apart. The side of the ship facing the gravitational pull is pulled more strongly than the other side, and is pulled away from the other side of the ship, causing the whole thing to elongate.

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    This phenomenon has the delightful name of "spaghettification" or "noodle effect." The side closest to the gravitational force will also experience time slightly differently (due to gravitational time dilation) than the side farther away, and both of these phenomena are different from what the outside observer experiences.

    When I learned special relativity, I was in a delightful class nicknamed "Physics for Poets" (the more lyrical counterpart to "Sports for Athletes"). My professor was a lovely old man, long tenured, who had written and illustrated his own textbook, which meant stick figures and crude rockets.

    He explained the classic twin paradox of special relativity using action figures named Moe and Joe (and later their sister Roe, but we only need the first two for this theory). This thought experiment has been a part of physics discussions since the early 1900s and will remain a thought experiment until we are able to travel at the speed of light.

    steampunk girl 2022

    Alright, there are twins named Moe and Joe. Moe rides in a rocket and Joe stays on Earth. As Moe's rocket approaches the speed of light, Joe checks it out with a telescope. From Joe's vantage point outside, Moe appears to be moving in slow motion.

    Moe's clock will tick slower than Joe's, and the wavelengths of her rocket's light source will shift toward the red end of the spectrum (because they're stretched by the noodle effect). When Moe returns to Earth, she will have lived only a fraction of Joe's Earth time, and Joe will be older. There's a lot of math and experiments with very small objects to back up this theory, and you're welcome to explore it further on your own if you really like facts and figures, but the action figures and the kind old professor were enough for me.

    So in theory, it is entirely possible to travel quickly into the future, but so far we are far from reaching the speed required to experience it with a human being. To do this, a person would need to reach a speed of about 300,000 km/second, and so far we have not discovered an energy source capable of generating such an amount of energy. And frankly, if we did discover one, I doubt we would use it to project someone into the future. Because we are already moving into the future all the time.

    Back in time

    back to the future steampunk

    Looking back, I'm sure there was a time in your life when you wished your older, wiser self could go back in time and warn your younger self to avoid a mistake or just encourage them that things will get better eventually.

    As adults, we know that the drama of high school fades quickly after graduation, and that college life gets the same treatment a few years after entering the workforce. But in our limited concept of time, we will always see what is right in front of us as the most vivid, powerful, and important thing that is and will be happening. In the Stan Love essays mentioned above, he tells his readers that he learned most of what he knows about time travel from Kip Thorne. If you want the full details, check out Thorne's book, Black Holes and Time Warps .


    There are actually several theoretical methods for creating a time machine, but there has been no way to test them. And there probably won't be any way to test them for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But waiting is no fun, and a good imagination is a good substitute for hard facts, so let's get to the theories. I'm not a physicist or a mathematician, but this is all strange and wonderful food for thought.

    One theory involves an infinitely long cylinder. We're not talking about the width of the known universe here, but infinity. Apparently, physics allows that if this cylinder existed and rotated at a speed close to that of light, vehicles passing through it would be able to take specific trajectories to return to the place they left, but at an earlier time. And the best part? We might not even have to build this infinite cylinder ourselves. Our current understanding of physics allows us to envisage the existence of a natural structure with these properties. It is a "linear black hole", also known as a "black hole" also known as a cosmic string.



    It should not be confused with a wormhole, which would be a tunnel created by the connection of two black holes. In general, this theoretical mode of travel (also called an Einstein-Rosen bridge) is most often associated with traveling at a speed greater than that of light over large distances, and it is also linked to time travel.

    In general relativity, Einstein shows that space and time are two aspects of the same thing. You can't mess with one without affecting the other. So an astronaut traveling through a wormhole that essentially warps space will also experience a time warp. If you could manipulate the wormhole you could theoretically go back (or forward) in time. The problem? You can never go back further in time than the moment the wormhole was established, because there has to be an ending to get out. One could imagine that people living far enough into the future could make a jaunt to meet their ancestors...

    Okay, so we have a few theories that involve black holes, which do exist. But then there's the whole "spaghettication" problem. Black holes are made of incredibly destructive forces that pull things apart atom by atom, so even if a wormhole existed and we could make it point wherever we wanted, how would we survive the journey? Black holes are extremely unstable, and any tunnel created by joining two of them together would be likely to collapse at any moment.

    We should use an object that is emptier than a vacuum to counteract the effects of the gravity well. Sounds impossible? No, it's not. Thanks to something called the Casimir effect, it's actually possible to create negative pressure. There's a long explanation that has to do with the fact that photons do weird things between materials that are poor conductors, but take my word for it. If you build two spheres, one inside the other, out of these poorly conducting materials, and trap the photons between the two layers, the photons outside the spheres will cause this negative pressure.

    Okay, so it's only been measured mathematically, but it's been measured nonetheless. As I said, hard science can only really take us so far. The implications and intellectual appeal of time travel ultimately have very little to do with physics. Now that we've gotten all that boring science and "reality" out of the way, it's time to get to the fun stuff of time travel. Before we can explore the implications of time travel, however, we need to look at our understanding of time itself. Namely, is there a single timeline, or infinite possibilities? (This of course assumes that time is linear, but that's a much bigger discussion for another... time.)

    There can only be one timeline

    Steampunk Time Travel Clock

    Let's say there is only one timeline. A classic example of this danger is the grandfather paradox. A time traveler goes back in time and accidentally kills his own ancestor, ending the family line. He can't return to his present, because he would no longer exist. The only way for him to ensure that the family line continues is to impregnate his grandmother, thus becoming his own grandfather.

    Personally, I find this thought experiment a bit ridiculous, since we know how DNA and the transfer of genetic material works. If the time traveler did indeed kill his grandfather, then impregnating his grandmother would not result in an exact copy of himself two generations later. Conversely, if killing his grandfather prevented him from being born, he would cease to exist the moment his grandfather's heart stopped beating and he would not have time to court his grandmother (yuck). If he did not immediately cease to exist, I suppose the grandfather could have put some of his little swimmers in ice, but that would really be the only way around it.

    Here's the problem with linear time, though. In a universe with a single timeline, every decision that is made, has been made, will be made, is already certain. This may sound a bit far-fetched, but think of it this way. Your present is someone else's past (let's call her Amber), and someone else's future (who will be called Zoe). To Amber, the time you are reading this is the future, which seems uncertain and full of possibilities. But, from Zoe's perspective, the events of the past are set in stone, immutable and measurable. The "truth" of those events may be obscured, but the events themselves happened the way they did. And Zoe's present is someone else's past, and so on.

    In this case, the act of time travel moves up or down along that single line, and the actions that take place there have happened, are happening, and have happened before. Some writers and filmmakers manage to do this. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for example, Harry and Hermione end up going back in time a few hours to save Harry's godfather. During the first time through those three hours, a few mysterious things happen. Rocks fly through Hagrid's window, alerting the teenage wizards to the Minister's approach. Later, a distant howl distracts the werewolf that attacks them, leading him into the forest and saving the children. When Harry and Hermione revisit these events, Hermione realizes that she must have been the one who threw the rocks and made the howl. She acts because she knows she has already acted.

    To infinity, and beyond!

    The other side of this cosmic coin is the idea that there is a timeline for every choice made by every person who has ever lived, because reality divides along these untraveled roads. There is a world where you had strawberry jam on your toast this morning, and another where you had grape jelly. If that sounds daunting, keep this in mind: People are not special.

    If we follow this idea to its logical extension, then there must be a new branch of existence for the decisions made by the human race, then there must be one for every dog, fish, amoeba, and atom that makes up the known (and unknown) universe. Let's introduce our time traveler into this scenario. He's either time traveler, or he's not. He arrives at the right time, or he doesn't. He eats a cheese sandwich, or he doesn't. Choking on the cheese sandwich, he steps on a man's foot, or he doesn't. That man is his grandfather, or he isn't. The man who may be his grandfather is angry, or he isn't. They draw their guns at dawn, or they don't. The time traveler kills his grandfather, or he doesn't. Not to mention what everyone decides to wear that day, whether they put on aftershave, kissed their kids, or put their pants on left or right first. For the sake of the story, people don't generally use this notion to the extent I've just demonstrated, because it gets confusing and weird and gets bogged down in details about pants.

    Some people only focus on life-changing events or big decisions, like choosing a university or missing the train that would have taken you to the love of your life. They figure the pants issue will resolve itself and be of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, and they're probably right. It didn't matter what I was wearing or what I had for breakfast.

    Back to our time traveler. We can't just leave everything behind in the multiverse, because some choices have a big impact. In the traveler's case, the fact that he traveled back in time is very important. Presumably, tearing the fabric of space and time would be enough to create a new branch of the timeline. Then, the murder of Grandfather (let's call him Mr. Smith) would certainly be a major event, and time would split again.

    Okay, so in this branch of time where the time traveler went into the past, Mr. Smith died. But this is still linear time, and the split between time travel and no time travel happened after the events of Mr. Smith's time, so the time traveler isn't in danger of disappearing. Instead, there would be a whole new branch of time that would spring into place to reflect Mr. Smith's absence.

    So the time traveler won't disappear from existence. In fact, even if he went back to the time when the most advanced creature on the planet was a reptile and killed them all, he would still exist in the multiverse. So the biggest problem is choosing the right timeline to land in once the journey is over. Back to the present Don't mistake these ruminations for a lack of love or respect for time travel stories. I enjoy them precisely because they make me think about things like this.

    The idea of ​​visiting another timeline where choices were all different is an exciting line of thought, and exploring these temporal twists and turns in stories is a unique way to navigate an examination of the human condition. In some ways, traveling to the distant future is a way of cheating death. Traveling to the past gives us the opportunity to see our roots and learn more about what brought us here in the first place. We live in the present so vividly that looking for a way to bring the past or future into focus is not only understandable, but commendable.

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    Thanks for reading, and see you soon for another exciting topic, through the prism of Steampunk.