Eddie Bush is an artist and an employee of the Wenlock Institute, founded by the psychologist who realized, around 2090, that the only thing constraining us within the flow of time is our mind -- more accurately, our perception. It seems we have an undermind that's usually under complete control of our overmind, which governs such things as our perceptions of the reality around us. By use of various mental disciplines (effectively, a mantra) and a magic potion, people can prise their undermind free of the clenched iron fist of their overmind and thereby travel through all of past time, although the task becomes more difficult the closer the traveler comes to the present of 2090. Travelers who encounter each other in the past can interact directly with each other -- can punch each other on the nose or make love (Eddie tries both) -- but cannot influence or in any way be detected by the denizens of the visited era; when they walk there, it's not on the actual ground but on a sort of averaged out version that may be above or below the one the ancient critters around them tread.This seems the first of many major scientific problems the tale has, because the difference between the ground level of where you are now and what it must have been in the Devonian, which is where we first encounter Eddie, is likely to have been very considerable, not just a matter of inches. (There's a brief acknowledgement of this later in the book, but it's glossed over fast.) Besides, there'll have been continental drift . . .Whatever, Eddie has various adventures before deciding he should return to his own time; he has stayed away for far longer than his mission decreed. When he wakes up in the Wenlock Institute he discovers that there have been many changes. His old boss has been shot; his new one has a certain smack of O'Brien, in George Orwell's 1984. Wenlock has been discredited and locked up in an institution. The military regime ruling the UK has become ever more dictatorial; shortly after Eddie's return it's overthrown, and an even harsher one put in its place. By then Eddie has been given a new commission: to go back in time and try to hunt down and assassinate Silverstone, the sidekick of and rival to Wenlock (the Jung to Wenlock's Freud) who is perceived as an even bigger threat to the regime than Wenlock himself. Eddie has in fact already encountered an incognito Silverstone, back in the Devonian; although the two men were antagonistic then, Eddie's self-imposed mission becomes to save Silverstone from any other of the regime's murderous minions that might have been sent after him. After a diversion to a northern English town in what's at a guess the 1950s and much shenaniganning in Queen Victoria's Buckingham Palace, Eddie, his girlfriend Ann, Silverstone and various other players take refuge in the deep past, where Silverstone expounds on his whizz-bang new theory of time.Which is that it's going backwards. At some point farther into what we'd call the future than 2090, the folk of the almost infinitely ancient human species, who saw time the right way round, were traumatized to discover the planet had just a few billion years to go and humanity itself far less than that, just a few million years, before it devolved into lesser primates, its final destiny being as an indistinguishable ingredient in the primordial soup. So shocking was this discovery that it triggered a psychological defense, a sort of mental block whereby thereafter (or therebefore?) everyone perceived time as flowing from past to future rather than from future to past. There's quite a lot of discussion -- far too much, in fact -- of the consequences of this new understanding, such as what defecation really involves, and then we're into the closing sections, which are filled with a sort of Stapledonian flamboyance to make sure we all understand this ain't just, like, Buck Rogers we've been reading.There are some visionary bits earlier on, too; one neat passage [pp38-40] reminded me in its intensity and vividness of William Hope Hodgson's excellent visionary novel The House on the Borderland (1908). That comes in the first half of the novel, which, although shortish, is divided into two almost equal halves: Book One and Book Two. There's a marked difference in the standard of writing between the two "books", almost as if Book One were a work of juvenilia dragged out and dusted off once Aldiss had (deservedly) made his name for other work. That's not to say Book Two doesn't have its own mighty problems; it's just that it's a lot better written.At the opening of Book Two, Chapter 7, Silverstone is expounding on the true nature of the cosmos as revealed once we accept his time-running-backwards explanation: "Not being a physical scientist," he says, "I cannot go too technically into this side of the matter . . . which I imagine will be a relief to all four of you. Nor have I or my associates had the chance as yet to begin any research into this side of the matter." [p189] In other words, folks, there's a huge copout: we're not going to get any proper explanation of how backward-running physics could possibly work, or of why it should run backwards to the way we plebs believe it to be running. There's a fair amount of flim-flam to try to distract from this great hole at the novel's core --"The celebrated second law of thermodynamics, for example -- we now begin to see that heat in fact passes from cooler bodies to hotter: suns are collectors of heat, rather than disseminators." [p190]-- but nothing that offers any explanation of how a physics could work in which, for example, you can backwardly combust noxious wastes to produce a lump of coal or a gallon of gasoline, derivatives of organisms that won't be backwardly born for tens of millions of years yet. Waffling about entropy operating in a different direction, from less toward greater organization, doesn't really cover this. I'm not sure if the problem the novel faces here is that Aldiss wasn't up to working out properly the implications of his sciencefictional idea or if the notion of backward-running time is just inherently a silly one; I'm inclined toward the latter explanation, since none of the few authors who've tried backward-running-time stories has yet managed to make much of a fist of it. However that might be, by the time Silverstone, having supposedly boggled us all with his first theory, suddenly announces he's next going to describe his "new concept of animal and human existence" [194], it's hard not to burst out laughing.Aldiss has become something of a literary giant. I can remember being riveted by others of his early works, back when his reputation was confined to the genre ghetto -- Hothouse, for example, and Greybeard. I can also remember being bored rigid by items like Report on Probability A, but that was in the day when it was a mark of sf distinction to bore your readers rigid. Cryptozoic! -- or An Age, to give it its original, and better, UK title -- seems to lie in a sort of no-man's-land, lacking the narrative drive of his earlier and later non-experimental work, while also not bringing a great deal of conceptual meat to the table. A disappointment.
At the end of the twenty first century, a “moderately expensive” drug allows humans to “mind-travel”, to transport themselves to some past era where they can see but not hear, smell, taste or touch their surroundings and not be seen or sensed by the residents of the past. One flaw in the novel is that it isn’t very clear where exactly the bodies of these mind travelers are while they are in the past. They go into a room in the 2090s, take the drug and leave behind a living sample of their tissue and a vial of their blood (sacramental symbolism, anyone?) in order to enable themselves to return to their own time, then they are off into the past. They are able to walk or even ride small motorbikes around the world of the past as well as interact with other mind travelers visiting the same era, to the extent of conversing, having sex or exchanging punches. Though their progress seems affected by the state of the landscape in the 21st century (sometimes their feet are above or below the ground they see in the past), it does not seem as if they are physically walking around their own “present” world. The novel follows the progress of Edward Bush, a blocked artist, who, nominally on a scientific mission, hangs around the Devonian age looking for inspiration and sex and getting into altercations, much as he might in the Haight-Ashbury of a realistic novel from the same period. Complications ensue as characters cross each other’s or their own time paths and political changes in 2093 affect the purpose and nature of “official” mind travelers sent by the government into the past. The plot switches gears at several points, not always in a convincing manner, leaving the reader to catch up with the new reality the characters find themselves in. Several chapters toward the end are taken up with a long discussion between the main characters of a new understanding of the nature of Time; following the action and human interest presented in the first two thirds of the book, these chapters are talky and static in the worst “golden age” tradition of telling, not showing. Though the book is well written, I did not find Aldiss’ prose in the novel as well-tailored for its subject matter as I found in his short stories I’ve recently read in various anthologies. This is an interesting and mostly entertaining book for fans of time-travel stories, but probably not a neglected classic. A very similar concept with a tighter historical focus was to be used two years later by Daphne du Maurier in her novel The House on the Strand, which, curiously, I have never seen listed as a work of science fiction.
What do You think about Cryptozoic! (2002)?
After reading the flawed but compelling "Against a Dark Background", it was refreshing to read an older work, with a straightforward central premise. In "Cryptozoic", humans have discovered that they can (through the aid of drugs and mental discipline) project their consciousness back to visit the distant past. They can observe but not interact with the past, thus avoiding any number of paradoxes. The main character is an artist, who intends to exploit the past as inspiration to express the spirit of the time-travelling age that is his native time.[return:][return:]I won't give away the ending of the book, but will say that my experience of the climax of the book was somewhat dimmed by my particular copy of the book, which had pages 17-32 printed a second time in place of pages 161-176. I thought at first that the character had backed himself in some kind of time paradox, and was reliving past events with an increased awareness of their real meaning. On closer inspection, it was clear that the text was repeated without variation, and that it was unintentional. I'll have to find a better copy of the book at some point, but honestly, the plot was straightforward enough that it was easy enough to fill in the gaps.[return:][return:]This is a good book, but still firmly a part of the older and simpler school of Science Fiction. The novel's central conceit is like a single diamond in a simple setting. Tasteful, easy to appreciate, but not quite as appealing to the jaded palate as a glittering and ornate Ken MacLeod or Iain M. Banks novel.
—Tony Atkins
Can the disenchanted artist protagonist find happiness with a dirty slut who doesn't bathe enough? Can he overcome the relationship problems caused by falsely calling her a traitor and gunning her down with a laser pistol? Can he overcome his Freudian distrust of all women caused by his mother locking him out in the garden in his boyhood? And do we have time to care when the sophomoric proposition the time is actually flowing backwards becomes chillingly TRUE!?? And the only reason we haven't no
—Dmadden
