Sunday Sample - The Pub!

What might life be like if you came from a world where the public house drinkery did not exist? If you'd had no exposure to pub mores around the dartboard, the jukebox or even the male toilets? If you'd never been exposed to the chill threat of having to make your exit past the killing ground of the pub car park?

Such a situation faces the main character from the comic scifi time travelling novel "Time After Time". He is from the future, a future where women hold sway and alcohol and violence are both unknown to the males of that society. Unknown, but reputed...

Here is a section of the novel where the assassin travelling back from the future encounters his first pub in the present.

She grabbed his hand and wrenched him forward. The involuntary jolt made him bite his tongue. She stayed behind the end lean-to and extended her head to take a peek out. F-10 tentatively brought two fingers to his wounded glossa.

"That's it, I think they've got bored and left us alone now. Thank heavens for poor attention spans."

"Um?" he said distractedly and with his fingers still in his mouth. She stared at him, trying to evaluate whether she was about to hop from a skillet into a wok. Well that's what aspirational TV cookery programmes could do to a person's terms of reference. She straightened her coat as best she could with one hand and marched them out of the refuse area holding his wrist with her other.

When his tongue had lost some of its tenderness, he inquired as to where they were heading. It was more a vague conversational gambit to test out his wounded organ, rather than providing information for the machinations of his brain to advance a plan for killing her. Everything all in good time. And now was not a good time. Head bowed, he trailed behind her as if he were her dog being walked.

"The pub of course!"

The pub? Was he at last going to experience one of these legendary mystical temples to the cult of man in the flesh? Well, in the bricks and mortar? He swallowed hard. He knew they were places of consecrated holy violence. Seeing what he had already experienced, he could scarce begin to imagine what that might encompass. Apparently the 'car park' was the holy sanctum where the highest rites of orgiastic violence kicked off after the other ceremonials had concluded.

"... Thanks by the way."

"Um, what for?"

"For being in the wrong place at the wrong time!" He looked nonplussed at her as she flashed him a wry smile. "My name's Hayley by the way."

Bingo! It truly was her. What were the chances? Whatever they were, Jolly had calculated them to a remarkable accuracy, so respect was due to him for that. He was so happy he could pass out. Which given the current disposition of various parts of his anatomy, he might have been on the threshold of anyway. But no, he was this close to securing the success of his mission. He had to gather himself. No longer the hangdog expression on his face, he gambolled up to fall in step with Hayley by her side. She responded by gripping him closer, so that their shoulders were touching. A bitter little grin broke across her countenance.

"Insane isn't it, having to run the gauntlet every time you want to go out for a drink? Didn't even want one when I set out from home, but I bloody well need one now. You look as though you do too-"

"-Just... you're cutting off the circulation in my arm!"

"What? Oh sorry!" She released her grip and his numb arm flopped down by his side. He started shaking it to try and get the blood flowing again. It looked like he was trying to throw some robotic dance shapes. She looked at him incredulously, but was beyond forming judgements without the prejudicial prod and warp of alcohol.

"Here we go. Our temporary oasis. Should be relatively peaceful this early in the morning. Thank god for all day opening hours eh?"

He looked up. A squat building sat behind a wire mesh fence. Its once white walls had been almost completely obliterated by graffiti and an enormous sooty scorch mark beneath a boarded up window. The rest of the windows were behind thick steel grilles. There was razor wire along the low slung roof, interspersed with embedded broken glass that was catching the sun as it was beginning to break through the clouds. For a temple, it certainly didn't seem very welcoming of a congregation.

"Looks like the last building left in a city siege doesn't it?" offered Hayley dispassionately. "If the aliens ever landed here as their first taste of Earth, they'd head right on out into the Cosmos again and who could blame them? Well, come on in. I’ll stand you a drink. It’s the least I can do... So, what’s yours then?"

      Alcohol, he was actually going to get to taste the forbidden nectar that was alcohol. He looked around the bar for a menu on any of the tables. None was forthcoming. He did nonetheless, remark that the tables and accompanying stools appeared to be chained to one another and the chain tethered to the floor. "Er, whatever you're having."

Genesis of "Time After Time"

I love the "Terminator" movie series (apart from "Terminator 4"). Schwarzenegger makes the perfect machine with his sculpted body and wooden facial acting. Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor is truly a warrior female, who will do anything to protect her future progeny.

But there was always something that bugged me about the films' concept. Actually there were two, but the second would serve as a spoiler for my own novel so I'm not going to discuss that here. It's the other bugbear I have with the movies that became the starting point for me when I was thinking about my novel "Time After Time". In fact it even lies behind the novel's title.

                                      

In "Terminator 1"a cyborg assassin is sent back through time to kill Sarah Connor to prevent her giving birth to her son that will become the future leader of the resistance to the rule of the machines. The Resistance also manage to send one of their top men Kyle Reese back to protect her. This is where the human brain goes into meltdown, trying to pick all the logical flaws and frays that accompany these assumptions.

Let's say the terminator is successful in his mission and kills Sarah Connor so she never gives birth to her son. The future therefore ineluctably proceeds on to the triumph of the machines and the extinction of the human race. Then what happens/happened to that version of the future where the machines were so up against the rack against the resistance that they needed to send back a Terminator to kill Sarah Connor? It happened in the narrative once, so it can't be uninvented. Yet the future now has no John Connor and no potent human resistance.

Second, Reese comes back and not only protects sarah Connor, but both impregnates her and dies in the earth of the past in the line of fire. So John Connor makes it to the future, but with the DNA of a father who should be one of his troops in the Resistance  and indeed in one version of history was, but yet Reese died back in the past and didn't ever make it back to the future to take up his 'normal' place in the timeline. How can he have been sent back from the future when he's already died in the past and not lived to make it into the future in the first place? Presumably time splits between two versions here, but I'll pick this up a bit later. Also, before Reese was sent back, he is fighting alongside John Connor. Yet that John Connor should not even be alive, since it is only Reese going back in time and making Connor's mother pregnant that gives life to John Connor in the first place...

The usual logical way round these paradoxes is to suggest that time is not singular, but that there are many versions of reality, with differing outcomes and narratives. These are often referred to as parallel universes and are tied into Quantum theory to explain the differing probable and possible outcomes even from the same set of circumstances. Reese says that the current reality he and Sarah are embroiled in with its implications for the future, "one possible future", but then feebly proffers that as he "doesn't know tech stuff" he can't explain it in any more detail. Well parallel universes only get us so far.

So there are many possible futures and even possible veering off of the present. In some versions the Terminator will be successful and the machines will rule the future. In other versions Reese and Sarah foil the Terminator and John goes on to lead the Resistance to victory over the machines. In a coiling of time back on itself, the strange goings on of Reese siring John or Reese dying in the past before he can return to the future to be sent back to the past are just bumped over into the next version in an infinite loop. But then if the machines win some futures and the humans win others, what does it matter? You have a chance to live in the future where man prevails, or you are unlucky and end up in one of the timelines where you become extinct. But both exist. Just hope and pray you end up in a lucky timeline. But it means the human race can never be wiped out, because in some realities it persists. Equally mankind cannot ever fully extirpate the machines, because elsewhere in a parallel universe they still rule the roost. Parallel realities show the entire spectrum of outcomes, they can never lead to a single, ultimate one.

Hence the title of the book, "Time After Time". I do try and deal with these paradoxes of time and make clear that my assassin's mission has to be successful in every version of reality, for him to wipe out the presence of the 'mother of the future' from ever existing. But chance, different timings and the like mean that there will always be other outcomes of his mission, that it can never yield the same result time after time after time.

What my book does, is draw a parallel between the mission of getting up close to  a stranger in order to assassinate them, and getting up close to seduce them. The same variables of timings, chance, circumstance, missed signals, misread signals and the like all impact on the outcome. The book is less about assassination, but more about the countless number of outcomes when a man and a woman are in the same place, at the same time and trying to get close to one another. And the humour derived from the tiny differences that can alter the outcome so radically. I also draw lightly on "The Butterfly Effect" from Chaos Theory, which can be summarised as the mere flapping of a butterfly's wings can change a whole weather pattern the other side of the world through a linked change of circumstances that build up on the back of that one tiny event. Again, I feed this principle into that panoply of words and signs a man and women display during the initial time of their suit.

And finally we return to the concept of time and its paradoxes. Time is just a human concept that helps us to pattern our perceptions (night/day, the seasons, shadows, the planets etc). It has no existence beyond our conscious mind. The Big Bang theories state that there was no Time before the Big Bang and that it only came into being at that point. Matter came into being and started moving away from the Big Bang explosion, travelling through space at a velocity measured in time and also that the material of planets started to age from that point on. Einstein came along and actually merged time with space to form our fourth dimension of spacetime, an oblique concept for most of us who can only conceive of things in three dimensions because that is how our minds have been taught to perceive and it's a good enough method for us to negotiate our way not only through life, but to be able to send rockets to explore planetary bodies beyond our atmosphere. But it it is this fourth dimension of spacetime, or any fourth dimension of conceptualising matter (as offered by recent theories like String Theory or multiverses) and our brains start to malfunction and logic breaks down, because we simply don't have the mental apparatus to be able to think in four or more dimensions. And it is in these failings in our perceptual and conceptual apparatus that allow the paradoxes of time travel to remain unsolved and to stay at the heart of films like "The Terminator" and books like "Time After Time". As Sarah Connor says towards the end of "T1" "a person could go crazy thinking about all this stuff". Did I already mention that I love the "Termiantor" film series?

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