Uchronia: Definition
Uchronia, also often called alternate history, is a sub-genre of science fiction that asks the "what if" of history. It consists of narratives that explore parallel realities in which certain key historical events unfolded differently, creating an entirely new fictional universe.
For example, "What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo?" In a uchronia, this premise would be the starting point for a new story. Used primarily in literature but also in other media such as films, video games and television series, uchronia invites reflection on the impact of events and choices on the course of history. It is a tool for exploring the potentialities of history and its infinite ramifications.
The Foundations of Uchronia and My Initiatory Journey
Do you remember the first time you had a crush? Well, what about falling head over heels for an author? That is what I call it when I discover a writer whose work I love so much that I feel compelled to read their entire body of work.
In recent years that has included Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne, but it all started with Kurt Vonnegut. I remember very clearly the experience of reading Slaughterhouse-Five in high school, and within a year I had read each of his 14 novels. Slaughterhouse-Five was not only a gateway into science fiction in general and Vonnegut in particular, but it was my first exposure to time travel in literature, and it primed me to become an unconditional steampunk traveler.
In Vonnegut's story, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is "unstuck in time." He travels neither to the distant past nor the distant future. Instead, 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 (as was Vonnegut himself), and he finds himself reliving that trauma again and again. Pilgrim makes these journeys inside his own body — he is not watching the events of his life unfold from the outside. Instead, he revisits scenes from his life, but is powerless to change them. When someone mentions time travel, this is generally not what comes to mind.
Usually, we think of a person stepping into a contraption like the one in H.G. Wells's classic The Time Machine, and traveling through time while their physical body remains unchanged. This might happen out of pure curiosity, but most often the goal is to avert a catastrophe.
Steampunk and the Mechanics of Time Travel
Throughout this article I will give examples without necessarily citing Steampunk works. So here are a few recommendations in the purest retro-futurist style.
"The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man" by Mark Hodder
This is first and foremost a detective novel set in a Victorian era of the best kind. Rogue geneticists, time travel, the assassination of Queen Victoria, a mad marquis (very Victorian indeed), a timeline that keeps unraveling, and above all — my personal favorite — a hearty dose of swashbuckling adventure. I swear this book made me want to draw a rapier and dance like a lunatic. That is what I would look like if I tried my hand at sword fighting. Oh, and there is also a young Oscar Wilde selling newspapers.
"The Nomad of Time" by Michael Moorcock
In these adventures, a young Edwardian soldier is hurled into various versions of 20th-century history. Moorcock was writing steampunk long before the term was invented, with airships and the Empire — favorite themes of many steampunk works — recurring in every richly described reality his hero encounters. Moorcock's politics are very much present, with perceptive descriptions of the Empire's shortcomings and its legacy of racial discrimination, as well as his frustration at most socialists' inability to rally around common policies and shared goals.
Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter (in English only)
This book is a sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, one of the most celebrated science-fiction novels of all time (published in 1895). In Jeter's sequel, we learn that the time traveler not only failed in his mission, but that the Morlocks have acquired his machine and learned to use it. They are now transporting an army of Morlocks through the sewers of 1892 London. From their underground lair, they threaten the England of good Queen Victoria...
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
A wild time-travel adventure, a delirious blend of steampunk, Victorian London, Egyptian sorcerers, rival gangs of beggars, the real poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, monstrous experiments lurking in the London sewers, a body-swapping werewolf, and a modern-day scholar of Victorian poetry who travels back in time with a group of tourists and gets stranded. Tim Powers packs so many disparate elements, grotesque villains and non-stop action into the plot that it can be a little hard to follow, but it is an incredibly fun ride.
You can discover more Steampunk Books on this blog.
A few years ago, I received as a birthday gift an incredible short story collection titled "The Time Traveler's Almanac." This 948-page volume, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (of the famous Steampunk Bible fame), contains the cream of the crop of time-travel fiction. In addition to stories by luminaries such as Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, some genuinely interesting essays explore compelling themes. The information in this article is largely adapted from "Time Travel: A Primer" by Stan Love.
Science Fiction or Reality
We all travel through time — it is just in one direction at a uniform rate of 3,600 seconds per hour. That does not sound quite as exciting as... imagining a quick dash to the Jurassic or popping over to 2300 for a cup of hydroponic coffee. All of that belongs to the realm of imagination, of science fiction. But hard science does offer some interesting insights into what we can expect from time travel based on what we already know.
Albert Einstein gives us two theories concerning time travel, a general theory and a special theory. General relativity deals with the interaction between extremely massive objects and smaller objects attempting to escape their gravitational pull. Assuming your ship could travel at just below the speed of light and you were trying to move away from a black hole or neutron star, time would behave 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 force experiences a stronger pull than the other side, and it is drawn away from the far side of the ship, causing the whole vessel to stretch lengthwise.
This phenomenon goes by the delightful name of "spaghettification" or "the noodle effect." The side closest to the gravitational force will also experience time slightly differently (due to gravitational time dilation) than the far side, and both of these phenomena differ from what the outside observer experiences.
When I studied special relativity, I was in a delightful course nicknamed "Physics for Poets" (the more lyrical counterpart of "Sports for Jocks"). My professor was a lovable old man, tenured for decades, who had written and illustrated his own textbook — which meant stick figures and rudimentary rockets.
He explained the classic twin paradox of special relativity using stick figures named Moe and Joe (and later their sister Roe, though we only need the first two for this theory). This thought experiment has been part of physics discussions since the early 1900s and will remain a thought experiment until we are capable of traveling at the speed of light.
Right, so there are twins named Moe and Joe. Moe gets into a rocket and Joe stays on Earth. As Moe's rocket approaches the speed of light, Joe checks in with a telescope. From Joe's external observation point, Moe appears to be moving in slow motion.
Moe's clock will tick more slowly than Joe's, and the wavelengths of the light source on her rocket will shift toward the red end of the spectrum (because they are stretched by the noodle effect). When Moe returns to Earth, she will have lived only a fraction of Joe's Earth-time, making Joe the older one. There is a great deal of math and experiments with very small objects to back up this theory, and you are welcome to explore them further if you really love facts and figures, but the stick figures and the kind old professor were enough for me.
In theory, then, it is entirely possible to move rapidly into the future, but so far we are far from achieving the speed required to test this with a human being. To do so, a person would need to reach a speed of approximately 300,000 km per second, and to date we have not discovered an energy source capable of generating that amount of power. And frankly, if we did, I doubt we would use it to send someone into the future. Because we are already heading there constantly.
Going Back
With hindsight, I am sure there has been a moment 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 simply encourage them with the assurance that things will get better.
As adults, we know that high school drama fades quickly after graduation, and that university life gets the same treatment a few years into the working world. But within our limited perception of time, we will always see what lies ahead as the most vivid, intense and important thing happening and about to happen. In Stan Love's essays mentioned above, he tells his readers that he learned most of what he knows about time travel from Kip Thorne. If you want all the details, check out Thorne's book, Black Holes and Time Warps.
There are in fact several theoretical methods for creating a time machine, but there has been no way to test them. And there likely will not be any way to test them for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. But waiting is no fun, and a good imagination handily outpaces concrete facts — so let us move on to the theories. I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician, but all of this makes for wonderfully strange food for thought.
One theory involves an infinitely long cylinder. We are not talking about the width of the known universe here, but actual infinity. Apparently, physics allows that if this cylinder existed and rotated at near-light speed, vehicles passing through it could follow specific trajectories and return to where they started, but at an earlier point in time. And the best part? We might not even have to build this infinite cylinder ourselves. Our current understanding of physics allows us to imagine the existence of a natural structure with these very properties. It is called a "linear black hole," also known as a cosmic string.
Do not confuse it with a wormhole, which would be a tunnel created by connecting two black holes. Generally speaking, this theoretical mode of travel (also called an Einstein-Rosen bridge) is most often associated with faster-than-light travel across great 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 cannot tamper with one without affecting the other. So an astronaut traveling through a wormhole that essentially warps space would also experience a time shift. If one could manipulate the vortex, you could theoretically travel back (or forward) in time. The catch? You can never go back further than the moment the wormhole was established, because you need an exit point to emerge from. One can imagine that people living far enough in the future might take a trip back to meet their ancestors...
Right, so we have a few theories involving black holes, which exist. But there is still the whole problem of "spaghettification." Black holes are made of incredibly destructive forces that tear things apart atom by atom — so even if a wormhole existed and we could point it wherever we wanted, how would we survive the journey? Black holes are extremely unstable, and any tunnel created by joining two of them would be liable to collapse at any moment.
We would need to use something emptier than the vacuum of space to counteract the effects of the gravity well. Does that sound impossible? Not at all. Thanks to what is known as the Casimir effect, it is actually possible to create negative pressure. There is a lengthy explanation involving photons behaving strangely between materials that are poor conductors, but take my word for it. If you build two spheres, one inside the other, from these poorly conducting materials, and trap photons between the two layers, the photons outside the spheres will produce this negative pressure.
Right, this has only been measured mathematically — but it has been measured. As I said, hard science really cannot take us much further. The implications and intellectual appeal of time travel ultimately have very little to do with physics. Now that we have disposed of all that tedious science and "reality," it is time to get to the fun aspects of time travel. Before we can explore the repercussions of time travel, however, we need to examine our understanding of time itself. Namely, is there a single timeline, or are there infinite possibilities? (This of course assumes that time is linear, but that is a much bigger discussion for another... time.)
There Can Only Be One Timeline
Let us say there is only one timeline. A classic illustration of the danger this creates is the grandfather paradox. A time traveler goes back in time and accidentally kills their own ancestor, thereby ending the family line. They cannot return to their present because they would no longer exist. The only way to ensure the family line continues is to impregnate their grandmother, thus becoming their own grandfather.
Personally, I find this thought experiment somewhat ridiculous, because we understand how DNA and the transfer of genetic material work. If the time traveler did indeed kill their grandfather, impregnating their grandmother would not result in an exact copy of themselves two generations later. Conversely, if killing their grandfather prevented them from being born, they would cease to exist the moment their grandfather's heart stopped and would not have time to court their grandmother (yikes). If they did not immediately cease to exist, I suppose the grandfather could have put some of his swimmers on ice, but that would be the only way around the problem.
Here, however, is the problem with linear time. In a universe with a single timeline, every decision that is made, has been made, will be made, is already certain. That may sound a bit much, but think about it this way. Your present is someone else's past (let us call her Amber), and someone else's future (let us call her Zoe). For Amber, the moment you are reading this article is the future — uncertain and full of possibilities. But from Zoe's perspective, past events are set in stone, immutable and measurable. The "truth" of those events may be obscured, but the events themselves happened the way they happened. And Zoe's present is someone else's past, and so on.
In that case, the act of time travel moves up or down along this single line, and the actions that take place along it have happened, are happening, and have already happened. Some authors and filmmakers manage to pull this off. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, Harry and Hermione end up traveling back in time by a few hours to save Harry's godfather. On the first pass 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 howl from the distance distracts the werewolf attacking them, drawing it into the forest and saving the children. When Harry and Hermione go back over those events, Hermione realizes that it was probably she who threw the rocks and let out 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, as reality branches off along these roads not taken. There is a world where you had strawberry jam on your toast this morning, and another where you had grape jelly. If that seems overwhelming, keep this in mind: people are not special.
If we follow this idea to its logical conclusion, then there must be a new branch of existence for the decisions made by the human race — but then there must also be one for every dog, fish, amoeba and atom that makes up the known (and unknown) universe. Let us introduce our time traveler into this scenario. He either travels in time, or he does not. He arrives at the right moment, or he does not. He eats a cheese sandwich, or he does not. By choking on the cheese sandwich, he steps on a man's foot, or he does not. That man is his grandfather, or he is not. The man who may be his grandfather is angry, or he is not. They draw their pistols at dawn, or they do not. The time traveler kills his grandfather, or he does not. Not to mention what each person decides to wear that day, whether they put on aftershave, kissed their children, or put on their trousers left leg or right leg first. For storytelling purposes, people generally do not take this notion to the extent I have just demonstrated, because it becomes confusing and strange and gets bogged down in details about trousers.
Some people focus only on life-changing events or major decisions, such as which university to attend or missing the train where you would have met the love of your life. They tell themselves that the trouser question will sort itself out and will barely matter in the grand scheme of things — and they are probably right. What I wore or what I had for breakfast mattered very little.
Back to our time traveler. We cannot throw everything into the multiverse, because some choices carry great weight. In the traveler's case, the fact that he traveled in time is very significant. One can assume that tearing the fabric of space and time would be enough to create a new branch of the timeline. Then the murder of Grandfather (let us call him Mr. Smith) would certainly be a major event, and time would branch again.
All right, so in this branch of time where the traveler went back to the past, Mr. Smith is dead. But it is still linear time, and the split between traveling in time and not traveling in time occurred after the events of Mr. Smith's era — so the time traveler is not at risk of disappearing. Instead, a brand new branch of time would set itself in motion to reflect Mr. Smith's absence.
So the time traveler will not disappear from existence. In fact, even if he went back to the era when the most advanced creature on the planet was a reptile and wiped them all out, he would still exist within the multiverse. The bigger problem, then, is choosing the right timeline to land in once the journey is over. Back to the Present: Do not mistake these musings for a lack of love or respect for time-travel narratives. I appreciate them precisely because they make me think about things like this.
The idea of visiting an alternate timeline where all the choices were different is a fascinating line of thought, and exploring those temporal meanderings in stories is a unique way to navigate an examination of the human condition. In a way, traveling to a distant future is a means of cheating death. Traveling to the past gives us the chance to see our roots and learn more about what brought us here in the first place. We live the present so vividly that seeking a way to bring the past or the future into focus is not only understandable — it is admirable.
