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Or would it? Clearly, it was God’s divine purpose (assuming the God of the Bible exists) to have the crucifixion take place in order that Jesus serve as a divine atonement for Adam’s sin. Would the subversion of this plan be allowed to take place?
It’s a nice dilemma, and it is within the province of legitimate science fiction. Yet who has ever considered writing such a story, even though it would give us a chance to deal with what many consider the central event of history? The story would be an extremely difficult one to write, and I wouldn’t feel up to it myself, but I think it is primarily self-censorship that keeps it from being written.
For that matter, what if we went back in time and found that the biblical Jesus never existed?
The mere existence of time-travel makes all these speculations irresistible, so is it possible that very religious people might object to time-travel themes, and call them blasphemous, simply because of the possibilities they give rise to?
The correspondent says in his letter, “Dr. Asimov, I know that you are an atheist-” and there may be the implication that because of this I am insensitive to the feelings of religionists, or perhaps even anxious to make them seem ridiculous.
As a matter of fact, I have frequently, in my writings, made it clear that I have never encountered any convincing evidence of the existence of the biblical God, and that I am incapable of accepting that existence on faith alone. That makes me an atheist, but, although this may surprise some Americans, the Constitution safeguards my right to be one and to proclaim myself one.
Nevertheless, although I am an atheist, I am not a proselytizing one; I am not a missionary; I do not treat atheism as a kind of true faith that I must force on everyone. After all, I have published more than almost anyone, about 20,000,000 words so far, and I have frequently discussed controversial problems.
You are free to go through my writings and search for any sign that I ridicule religion as such. I have opposed those people who attack legitimate scientific findings (evolution, as an example) in the name of religion, and who do so without evidence, or (worse yet) with distorted and false evidence. I don’t consider them true religionists, however, and I am careful to point out that they disgrace religion, and are a greater danger to honest religion than to science.
And suppose I weren’t an atheist. My parents were Jewish and I might have been brought up an Orthodox Jew, or become one of my own volition. Might it then be argued that I would naturally favor any story burlesquing Christianity?
Or suppose I were a Methodist; would I therefore look for stories that burlesqued Judaism, or
Catholicism-or atheism?
If I were in the mood to run this magazine in such a way as to offend “any substantial religious group” I wouldn’t have to be an atheist. I could do it if I were anything at all, provided only that I were a bigot, or an idiot, or both.
In actual fact, I am neither and again, I offer my collected writings as evidence. As for Shawna, she doesn’t have a similar body of written works to cite but, if I may serve as character witness, I can tell you right now she is certainly not a bigot, and a hundred times certainly not an idiot.
Needless to say, I am sorry that our correspondent was upset by “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis.” If we lived in an ideal world, we would never publish any story that upset anyone. In this case, though, we had to choose. On the one hand, we had a remarkable story that considered, quite fearlessly, an important idea, and we felt that most readers would recognize this point-if not at once then upon mature consideration. On the other hand, we had a story that might offend some of our readers.
We made the choice. We put quality and importance ahead of the chance of some offence. We hope that our angry correspondent will consider the matter again and see that the story is far more than a burlesque. He might even give Bishop points for skill and courage.
Time-Travel
I have often said, in speaking and in writing, that the qualified science fiction writer avoids the scientifically impossible. Yet I can’t bring myself to make that rule an absolute one, because there are some plot devices that offer such dramatic possibilities that we are forced to overlook the utter implausibilities that are involved. The most glaring example of this is time-travel.
There are infinite tortuosities one can bring to plot development if only you allow your characters to move along the time axis, and I, for one, can’t resist them, so that I have written a number of time-travel stories, including one novel, The End of Eternity.
You can get away with a kind of diluted time-travel story, if you have your character move in the direction we all move-from present to future-and suspend the usual consciousness that accompanies the move by having him (please understand that, for conciseness I am using “him” as a shorthand symbol for “him or her”) sleep away a long period of time, as Rip van Winkle did, or, better, having him frozen for an indefinite period at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Better still, you might make use of relativistic notions and have your character move into the future by having his subjective time slowed through motion at speeds close to that of light, or motion through an enormously intense gravitational field.
These are plausible devices that do not do damage to the structure of the Universe, but they are one-way motions, with no return possible. I did it in Pebble in the Sky although I made use of an unknown (and unspecified) natural law involving nuclear fission, which was then quite new. This was a weakness in the plot, but I got past it in the first couple of pages and never brought it up again so I hoped no one would notice it. (Alas, many did.)
The same device can be used to make repeated jumps, always into the future, or to bring someone from the past into the present.
Once you have a device that sends someone into the future, however, it is asking too much of writer-nature not to use some device-such as a blow on the head-to send a person into the past. (Mark Twain does it in “ A Co
But all one-shot changes in either direction are only devices to start the story, which then usually proceeds in a completely timebound fashion. That’s not the true, or pure, time-travel story. In true time- travel, the characters can move, at will, back and forth in time. Nor is it fair if this is done through supernatural intervention as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It must be done by an artificial device under the control of a human being.
The first true time-travel story was H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895. Wells, who was probably the best science fiction writer of all time [If others, since, seem to have reached greater heights, it is only because they stand on Well’s shoulders.], carefully explained the rationale behind it. It requires four dimensions to locate an object: it is somewhere on the north-south axis, somewhere on the east-west axis, somewhere on the up-down axis, and somewhere on the past-future axis. It exists not only in a certain point of three-dimensional space but at a certain instant of time. A merely three-dimensional object is as much a mathematical abstraction as is a two-dimensional plane, or a one-dimensional line, or a zero-dimensional point. Suppose you considered the Great Wall of China as existing for zero time and therefore consisting of three dimensions only. It would then not exist at all and you could walk through its supposed position at any time.
Since duration is a dimension like height, width, and thickness, and since we can travel at will north and south, east and west, and (if only by jumping) up and down, why shouldn’t we also travel yesterward and tomorrowward as soon as we work out a device for the purpose?
That was 1895, remember, and Wells’s analysis at that time had some shadow of justification. But then, in 1905, came Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and it became clear that time is a dimension but it is not like the three spatial dimensions, and it can’t be treated as though it were.
And yet Wells’s argument was so wi
The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the well-known “paradoxes” it entails. The classic example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” In that case, you see, the murderer was never born, so who killed the little boy?
But you don’t need anything so drastic. What if you go back and change any of the many small items that made it possible for your father and mother to meet, or to fall in love after they met, or to marry after they fall in love. Suppose you merely interfered with the crucial moment of sex and had it happen the next evening, or perhaps just five minutes later than it did, so that another sperm fertilized the ovum rather than the one that should have. That, too, would mean the person committing the act would never come into existence, so who would commit the act?
In fact, to go into the past and do a nything would change a great deal of what followed perhaps everything that followed. So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes that follow, so wholesale is the a
However, any discussion of this gets so philosophical that I lose patience and would rather consider something simpler.
Suppose you get into a time machine and travel twenty-four hours into the future. The assumption is that you are traveling only in the time dimension, and that the three spatial dimensions are unchanged. However, as is perfectly obvious, Earth is moving through the three dimensions in a very complex way.
The point on the surface on which the time-machine is located is moving about the Earth’s axis. The Earth is moving about the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, and also about the center of gravity of the Earth-Sun system; is accompanying the Sun in its motion about the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy in its undefined motion relative to the center of gravity of the Local Group and to the center of gravity of the universe as a whole if there is one.