As if Real, Part Two, Notes for Time Travelers, Rebecca Ore

The typical time travel novel is “We go there; X happens; we return or die.”    The notable exceptions are from Joanna Russ in Picnic on Paradise with its tough woman survivor from the past knowing how bad the future situation was, and various military groups traveling into the future (I remember one of David Drake’s novels, remember reading descriptions of others.

The typical time travel novel assumes the past people are naïve about strangers.  We, or the future that we imagine ourselves to be, could fool the past and manipulate it with our special skills.  We could pass for citizens (in a world where the lower classes were extremely local and the upper classes quite cosmopolitan, I don’t think so).  We learn how to spin in two weeks and aren’t immediately stripped to see if we’re really male when we try our spinning on people who’ve been doing it since infancy.

Doing the perfect imitation of even people who are other varieties of contemporary European is seriously non-trivial.  Most spies study their target cultures for years, and have native informants to help them. Most spies aren't Gordon Lonsdale/Konon Molody, who lived in the US from age 10 to his late teens and who passed for Canadian in the UK. Vilyam Fisher/Col. Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, had lived in England as a child, but passed as an immigrant while the resident KBG agent in Brooklyn.Since s.f. writers only have to pass “as if real” in their fictive worlds, those who read it don’t generally bear down on the probabilities this hard, but I thought I’d like to try something that I could, as an undergraduate history major, find more plausibly “as if real.”

In Time’s Child, the rubberbandium stretches along the physics dimension, but my people are obviously from away and bite the hands that feed them, once literally.  The past immigrating to the future is what we all do all the time.   I just made the old countries older.

The other thing is the past brings its own tricks to the table and adapts them to the “as if real” future present.  The future is assimilated as much as the past is.

-- Rebecca Ore