Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

This structure constitutes the so-called time loop, a causal structure characteristic of an enormous number of science-fiction compositions. The composition I described is a “minimal” loop, yet there is one still “smaller,” created by Robert Heinlein in the story “All You Zombies” (1959). [9] The dates given in this essay are either for first publication, whether in serial or book form, or for serial/book publication. — R. D. Mullen. Its plot is as follows: a certain young girl becomes pregnant by a man who then promptly disappears. She bears a child, or, more correctly, gives birth to it by Caesarean section. During the operation, the doctors ascertain that she is a hermaphrodite and it is essential (for reasons not explained by the author) to change her sex. She leaves the clinic as a young man who, because he was until quite recently a woman, has given birth to a child. She seeks her seducer for a long time, until it comes to light that she herself is he. We have the following circular situation: one and the same individual was in time T1 both a girl and her partner, since the girl, transformed into a man by surgical intervention, was transferred by the narrator to time T1 from a future time, T2. The narrator, a time traveler, “removed” the young man from time T2 and transferred him to time T1 so that the latter seduced “himself.”

Nine months after time T1 the child was born. The narrator stole this child and took it back in time twenty years, to moment T0, so he could leave it under the trees of a foundling home. So the circle is completely closed: the same individual comprises “father,” “mother,” and “child.” In other words, a person impregnated himself and gave birth to himself. The baby born as a result of this is left behind in time, bringing about in twenty years the growth of a girl who has in time T1 sex with a young man from time T2. The young man is she herself, transformed into a man by a surgical operation. The fact that a sexual hermaphrodite should not be able to bear a child is a relatively small hindrance, since the puzzling situation of a person’s giving birth to himself is considerably “more impossible.” What we are dealing with here is an act of creatio ex nihilo. All structures of the time-loop variety are internally contradictory in a causal sense. The contradictoriness is not, however, always as apparent as in Heinlein’s story.

Frederic Brown writes about a man who travels into the past in order to punish his grandfather for tormenting his grandmother. In the course of an altercation he kills his grandfather before his father has been engendered. Thus the time traveler cannot then come into the world. Who, therefore, in fact killed the grandfather, if the murderer has not come into the world at all? Herein lies the contradiction. Sometimes an absentminded scientist, having left something in the past, which he has visited, returns for the lost object and encounters his own self, since he has not returned exactly to the moment after his departure for the present, but to the time point at which he was before. When such returns are repeated, the individual is subject to multiple reproduction in the form of doubles. Since such possibilities appear to be pointless, in one of my stories about Ion Tichy (the “7th Journey”), I maximized “duplication” of the central character. Ion Tichy’s spaceship finds itself in gravitational whirlpools that bend time into a circle, so that the spaceship is filled with a great number of different Ions.

The loop motif can be used, for instance, in the following ways. Someone proceeds into the past, deposits ducats in a Venetian bank at compound interest, and centuries later in New York demands from a consortium of banks payment of the entire capital, a gigantic sum. Why does he need so much money all of a sudden? So that he can hire the best physicists to construct for him a thus far nonexistent time vehicle, and by means of this vehicle go back in time to Venice, where he will deposit ducats at compound interest… (Mack Reynolds, “Compounded Interest” [1956]). Another example: in the future someone comes to an artist (in one story to a painter, in another to a writer) and gives him either a book dealing with painting in the future or a novel written in the future. The artist then begins to imitate this material as much as possible, and becomes famous, the paradox being that he is borrowing from his own self (since he himself was the author of that book or those pictures, “twenty years later”).

We learn, further, from various works of this sort how the Mesozoic reptiles became extinct thanks to hunters who organized a “safari into the past” (Frederic Brown), or how, in order to move in time in one direction, an equal mass must be displaced in the opposite direction, or how expeditions in time can reshape historical events. The latter theme has been used time and again, as in one American tale in which the Confederate States are victorious over the North (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee [1952, 1953]). The hero, a military historian, sets out for the past in order to investigate how the Southerners gained victory near Gettysburg. His arrival in a time machine throws General Lee’s troop formations into disarray, which results in victory for the North. The hero is no longer able to return to the future, because his arrival also disturbed the causal chain upon which the subsequent construction of his time machine depended. Thus, the person who was supposed to have financed the construction of the machine will not do this, the machine will not exist, and the historian will be stuck in the year 1863 without the means to travel back into the original time. Of course here also there is an inherent paradox — just how did he reach the past? As a rule, the fun consists in the way the paradox is shifted from one segment of the action to another. The time loop as the backbone of a work’s causal structure is thus different from the far looser motif of journeys in time per se; but, of course, it is merely a logical, although extreme, consequence of the general acceptance of the possibility of “chronomotion.” There are actually two possible authorial attitudes, which are mutually exclusive: either one deliberately demonstrates causal paradoxes resulting from “chronomotion” with the greatest possible consistency, or else one cleverly avoids them. In the first instance, the careful development of logical consequences leads to situations as absurd as the one cited (an individual that is his very own father, that procreates himself), and usually has a comic effect (though this does not follow automatically).

Even though a circular causal structure may signalize a frivolous type of content, this does not mean that it is necessarily reduced to the construction of comic antinomies for the sake of pure entertainment. The causal circle may be employed not as the goal of the story, but as a means of visualizing certain theses, e.g., from the philosophy of history. Antoni Slonimski’s story “Time Torpedo” [10] Slonimski, born in 1895, was a Polish poet and essayist. belongs here. It is a belletristic assertion of the “ ergo ness” or ergo dicity of history: monkeying with events that have had sad consequences does not bring about any improvement of history; instead of one group of disasters and wars, there simply comes about another, in no way better.

A diametrically opposed hypothesis is incorporated into Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952). In an excellently written short episode, a participant in a “safari for tyrannosaurs” tramples a butterfly and a couple of flowers, and by that microscopic act causes such perturbances of causal chains involving millions of years, that upon his return the English language has a different orthography, and a different candidate — not liberal, but, rather, a kind of dictator — has won in the presidential election. It is only a pity that Bradbury feels obliged to set in motion complicated and unconvincing explanations to account for the fact that hunting for reptiles, which indeed fall from shots, disturbs nothing in the causal chains, whereas the trampling of a tiny flower does. (When a tyrannosaur drops to the ground, the quantity of ruined flowers must be greater than when the safari participant descends from a safety zone to the ground.) “A Sound of Thunder” exemplifies an “antiergodic” hypothesis of history, as opposed to Slonimski’s story. In a way, however, the two are reconcilable: history can as a whole be “ergodic” if not very responsive to local disturbances, and at the same time such exceptional hypersensitive points in the causal chains can exist, the vehement disturbance of which produces more intensive results. In personal affairs such a “hyperallergic point” would be, for example, a situation in which a car attempts to pass a truck at the same time that a second car is approaching from the opposite direction.