Up The Line

I know why they haven’t done that to me yet. It’s because that other Jud, God bless him, is standing trial for timecrime down the line, and they can’t retroactively pluck him until they’ve found him guilty. They have to complete the trial. If he’s found guilty, I guess they’ll take some action of that sort. But court procedures are slow. Jud will stall. Sam’s told him I’m here and have to be protected. It might be months, years, who knows? He’s on his now-time basis, I’m on mine, and we move forward into our futures together, day by day, and so far I’m still here.

Lonely. Heartsick.

Dreaming of my forever lost Pulcheria.

Maybe they’ll never take action against me.

Or maybe they’ll end me tomorrow.

Who knows? There are moments when I don’t even care. There’s one comforting thing, at least. It’ll be the most painless of deaths. Not even a flicker of pain. I’ll simply go wherever the flame of the candle goes when it’s snuffed. It could happen at any time, and meanwhile I live from hour to hour, playing god, listening to Bach, indulging in floaters, dictating my memoirs, and waiting for the end. Why, it could even come right in the middle of a sentence, and I’d

AN INTRODUCTION

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Up the Line is a time travel novel from the 1960s, and now it is also time travel back to the 1960s, for it is very much a book of its time. John Clute once claimed that he could date any unknown science fiction novel to within a year or two of its writing date, by means of stylistic and content analysis; this particular novel would be no difficult test for anyone. The psychedelic drugs, the free love, the racial integration, the early New Age spiritualism, even the spectacularly colorful clothing, all speak the late Sixties with no possibility of error. The “New Orleans of 2059” depicted in this novel is very obviously the 1967 of New York, of California, and of the traveling circus that is the science fiction community. It’s interesting and fu

This is not to say that Silverberg has not done his usual fine job of extrapolation in establishing an sf setting, creating a fully fleshed-out and believable future. Indeed it is very impressive to see his almost offhand inclusion of elements that even now are timely and cutting edge, including extremely powerful computers — not personal computers, the famous blind spot of sf — but widely available computers, doing many of the things we use computers to do now. This alone is an impressive feat of “prediction,” given the primitive state of computers, and of science fiction’s thinking about computers, in the late Sixties. Then also there is the inclusion of “helix booths,” where people’s genomes can be read and their genes chopped and spliced to order; this could be included in a science fiction novel today and have a thoroughly contemporary feel. The fact that these elements are throwaways and not really what the novel is about, that they are merely part of establishing the “futurity” of the novel’s setting, make them all the more impressive. It is as if Silverberg at that time was so filled by both science fiction and the world that he could speak prophetically even when concerned with something else; as here, where he is concerned with the past, and history, and his own life.

But here again, in his treatment of history, his attitude has a thoroughly modern, or rather postmodern, feel to it. It is now a commonplace of contemporary thought that a significant difference between modernism and postmodernism lies in their attitudes toward the past. For modernism — that period in which modernization was incomplete, and parts of the world existed in radically different periods of historical development, there for all to see — the past was a real thing, a repository of truth, and for many modernist artists, the location of a deep nostalgia. In postmodernism, on the other hand, the whole world has become modernized (globalized), and the past has therefore become merely a storehouse of glossy images, to be raided and appreciated for their surfaces, appropriated as one of many interchangeable and essentially meaningless styles.

Up the Line straddles the border of this change, and indeed discusses it in its plot and situation: one crowd treasuring the past and trying to keep it solid and whole, the other zipping around like hummingbirds, looking for the biggest thrills they can find. Thus the introduction of time travel tourism to the older science fiction situation of a “Time Patrol,” policing the past in order to keep things consistent and the way they had always been. Science fiction in the 1950s was filled with stories of these various Time Patrols and their fights to keep history — or, as the sub-genre developed, various concurrent histories — consistent and the same. This is the delightfully confusing and complicated world of the time-paradox story, a growth industry during the 1950s, perhaps precisely because the sense of what history consisted of was begi

But Silverberg’s novel makes it clear that he himself does not agree with this postmodern attitude, that the past is there only to dazzle ignorant tourists and have some fun. The plot of the novel forms a strong critique of this view, as our protagonist, following his desires with little regard for history and what it could teach him, industriously replicates all his problems (including himself), until he is woven into a tangle more complicated than anything outside time-paradox fiction could easily be. By doing this the book makes it clear that the time-paradox genre can be used both to discuss attitudes toward history, and to express those moments in our life when we are most tied in knots by our desires and regrets.

What’s this? Time paradox puzzler as autobiographical fiction?

Yes. Definitely. That’s the kind of writer Silverberg was and is: extremely prolific but relatively reticent in personal matters, he has always been inclined to speak through the masks of his fictions, and to use the seemingly distant tropes of science fiction to tell his story, or rather to express his existential situation. And never more so than during the period in which this novel was written.

Silverberg began young, like quite a few other science fiction stars, falling in love with sf as a young teenager; by the age of nineteen he was up and ru