Time Travel! Annalee Newitz is playing with it in their new novel The Future of Another Timeline! Or, perhaps, has been playing with it already, or will have been playing with it at some unspecified point in what might have been the future! Maybe! They’re here now to sort all the timelines out for you.

ANNALEE NEWITZ:

I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to tropes. I love to see them done well, but mostly I love to see them turned inside out, mutated, genderswapped, racebent, unraveled, or forced to wear a silly shoes. When I set out to write a time travel novel, though, I knew the tropey situation might be dire. The list of time travel tropes at TV Tropes is instructive: there are roughly a hundred of them, ranging from the Grandfather Paradox to closed time loops, and that’s not counting all the other tropes related to alternate history. 

The Future of Another Timeline (on sale today!) wasn’t even supposed to be a time travel story. It started as an alternate history that was kind of small and personal. I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if abortion had been illegal when I was growing up, and the spectre of getting pregnant was looming over my horny high school self like a kaiju ready to barf napalm. So I started taking notes, building up an alternate reality without abortion rights. Then I added some angry riot grrls going on a murder spree in high school, killing rapists. Because obviously extreme times call for extreme measures. 

But then I started asking myself what would have led to this dire scenario. The answer I kept returning to was time travel. A secret group of feminist time travelers was in an edit war over the timeline with a group of men’s rights activists from the future. The bad guys had deleted abortion rights from U.S. history, but my heroes would go on a mission to revert that edit, trying to create a world where riot grrls could just enjoy punk rock instead of murdering people. 

I already had a pretty unusual premise, so I decided to make my time travel as mundane as possible. I chucked out the “secret time travel” tropes, and the “omg one thing in history has changed we have to change it back” storylines.

Instead, I created a world where time travel has always existed, everybody knows about it, and we all take for granted that the timeline has been heavily edited by travelers for millennia. Time machines are embedded in ancient shield rock formations on the Earth’s surface that have endured virtually unchanged since the Cambrian period half a billion years ago. Nobody knows how these devices got there, or who built them, but if you tap on the rock with a specific rhythm it opens a wormhole to the past. Humans discovered them in pre-history, and have been mucking around with the timeline ever since. In the modern era, geologists are the people who study time travel.

The idea of a heavily-edited timeline felt real to me. Plus, who doesn’t want to push the “go” button on an incomprehensible technology that’s barely distinguishable from nature?

As you might guess, this setup raises even more questions. Why isn’t everybody changing everything all the time? Are there any limits? Who is in charge of running these Machines when we discover them? What I found was that the more I set limits, the more the standard tropes could be helpful. After all, a trope is basically a narrative limit we’ve all seen before, so it doesn’t sound so damn strange when I say that of course there’s an organization called the Chronology Academy that controls access to the Machines. There’s only one timeline (and you know what that means, Back to the Future fans), and we can only go to the past. If you meet yourself in the past, as you know from Tropey McTroperson, BAD THINGS HAPPEN. If a traveler changes the timeline, or is present for a change, only they remember the old timeline. 

Then I came up with more weird rules that I haven’t seen in any trope list yet. For reasons that scientists don’t understand, the wormhole won’t open for travelers unless they’ve lived in close proximity to a time machine for roughly four years. So you have to be pretty damn serious about time travel, and willing to devote a lot of time (heh) to it, before you can jump into the past. 

Most of my characters are women and people of color, so I also played with a trope that’s become quite common recently in our slightly-more-woke-but-not really times. That’s the “scary to time travel if you’re not a cis white man” trope. You’ve seen it on TV in shows like Timeless and Legends of Tomorrow, and much further back in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. The idea is that everything was much worse for women and people of color in the past–and, implicitly, that things are better for us in the present.

In Future of Another Timeline, I wanted to question that idea. First of all, the present is no piece of cake, and in many post-colonial places it’s hard to say things are definitely better than past eras. Yes, there were different hardships in the past, but throughout history there have always been spaces of resistance where women and people of color and other marginalized groups could organize. When my character Tess goes back in time, she’s able to ally herself with 19th century feminists and anarchists; when she travels back to the 1st century BCE, she finds safe haven among priestesses of the goddess al-Lat. I wanted to recognize that there have always been powerful women and people of color in history; it’s just that historians have deleted our contributions.

One of the major differences between our timeline and the alternate one in my novel is that women and freed slaves achieved universal suffrage in 1870 in the U.S. As a result, Harriet Tubman became a senator in 1880. I wanted to center an event that’s rarely glimpsed in time travel stories, instead of the usual (tropey) Civil War and World War II. And the Big Bad my novel, Anthony Comstock, is trying to crush women’s reproductive rights. Only the Daughters of Harriet, a secret organization of intersectional feminist time travelers, can stop him. YES IT’S A TROPE. But it’s swerving in a new direction.

Navigating the trope obstacle course to write about time travel has been delightful and hard as hell. Still, I love that it allowed me to visit a 1992 Grape Ape concert, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the ancient city of Petra in 13 BCE, and the Ordovician period about half a billion years ago on a megacontinent that no longer exists. 

I think of stories as map overlays on a skeletal field of tropes. One story might be like the traffic layer in Google maps, which draws angry red lines down the freeway during rush hour. But another is like the terrain layer, which converts the cartoony perfection of an abstract map into an overhead view of mismatched houses and blobs of unexpected trees. Each new layer, like a new story, offers a fresh perspective on the same old piece of land. I hope The Future of Another Timeline gives you a new way of navigating the histories you thought you knew.

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I’ve been aware of the “Many Worlds” interpretation of physics for some time — longtime readers of mine know it’s intimately connected with space travel in my “Old Man’s War” series of novels. But in the real world, how does it connect to the actual physics we know and (profess to) understand? Actual physicist Sean Carroll knows, and in his new book, Something Deeply Hidden, he delves right into it.

SEAN CARROLL:

If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s another book on quantum mechanics. I mean, who hasn’t written one? In preparation for writing Something Deeply Hidden, I searched on Amazon for books with titles of the form “Quantum X,” and was rewarded with Quantum Eating, Quantum Touch, Quantum Leadership, and many more.

The existence of these books reflects the widespread conviction that quantum mechanics, however scientists might think about it, is fundamentally profound and deeply mysterious, so it could mean just about anything. You might expect to find a countervailing stream of books by sober-minded physicists and science writers, doggedly explaining that quantum mechanics isn’t really all that inexplicable after all. It’s science, not mysticism.

That’s not exactly what you find. Sure, there are valiant attempts to dispel the worst kinds of quantum woo. But even the most hardnosed quantum books seem to agree that the subject is unavoidably murky, something so bizarre and ill-understood that it’s not meant to be grasped by mere human beings. This or that quantum phenomenon is trotted out, accompanied by an implicit shaking of the head – “Can you believe it? This makes no sense at all!”

So my big idea for Something Deeply Hidden was: quantum mechanics is understandable.

To be clear, the challenge is not just that quantum mechanics is complicated or recondite, like general relativity or the standard model of particle physics. It’s that physicists themselves, who are supposed to be experts, don’t understand it, and in their more honest moments they admit it.

Quantum mechanics sits at the absolute heart of all of modern physics; it’s the deepest, most important idea that physicists have. But what we teach our students, as philosopher Tim Maudlin has put it, is a recipe, not a theory.

We can set up a quantum system, like an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom. And we can measure something about it, like its position. The quantum recipe tells us the probability of getting any particular measurement outcome. And that recipe has been tested to enormous precision, and has come through with flying colors every time.

What we can’t actually tell you is what happens when you measure a quantum system. What counts as “measuring”? How quickly does it happen? Do you have to be conscious?

All of these questions are, in the standard textbook formulation, left entirely vague. The resulting recipe is good enough for government work, or for building incredibly complex technologies, but it falls well short of the clarity and rigor we would expect of a well-defined scientific theory.

Thus, in the words of Richard Feynman, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

At least, nobody thinks that other physicists understand quantum mechanics. Some of us, including myself, think we do understand the basics. The problem is that there is more than one honest, rigorous physical theory that reproduces the textbook quantum recipe in the appropriate regime. So we have multiple approaches, and have to decide which one is the best description of Nature; but that’s what scientists are always supposed to do.

So in the book I explain my favorite approach to quantum mechanics, the Many-Worlds formulation. It has a bad reputation, as it sounds a little science-fiction-y, or at least like you’re tacking on a bunch of extra stuff (entire universes worth) just to solve an irritating problem in quantum measurement. But the truth is the opposite: the theory is lean and mean, getting enormous mileage out of very few basic assumptions. The extra worlds are predicted by the theory, not tacked onto it.

One of the goals of Something Deeply Hidden is to make all that clear. But the broader, more important message is the one above: that quantum mechanics is understandable. Maybe my favorite understanding will turn out to be the right one, or maybe one of the various competitors. But they’re all ultimately intelligible, not ineffable.

It took me a while to come to this conclusion. I didn’t start out to be a rebel, fighting against the entrenched establishment of physicists who don’t want to face up to the quantum measurement problem. But the more I’ve worked in the field, and the more I’ve thought about it myself, the more irritating and embarrassing it is that we haven’t figure out quantum mechanics once and for all, and for the most part we haven’t even been trying. I’m hoping my book does its small part in changing that.

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Tulips, bitcoin, fantasy worlds — how to each relate to the other? Alexandra Rowland knows, and in their Big Idea for A Choir of Lies, they are happy to lay it all out for you.

ALEXANDRA ROWLAND:

Do you like coincidences? Here’s a cool one:

From November of 1636 to February of 1637, the Netherlands was gripped by the climax of tulip mania, the world’s first-ever economic bubble, and then a sudden crash of the market. At the height of the mania, a single bulb of the Viceroy tulip (which was not even the most expensive variety) sold for 2500 florins, more than $34,000 in today’s money.

From November of 2017 to February of 2018, the internet watched the rise and fall of the bitcoin bubble. There were rumors of people making their fortune because they’d bought into bitcoin years ago for pennies, and of people taking out mortgages to buy-in once the boom hit, then losing their homes when the bust followed.

And in November of 2017, I blithely started writing A Choir of Lies, a novel about fantasy tulip mania, thinking that it was going to be about something very obscure and difficult to explain to people. I wrote the fictional boom during the real boom, and the bust during the bust. To my enormous chagrin, I delivered the first draft to my editor at the beginning of February, 2018.

Yeah, I got nothin’.

Economics is a funny thing. Most people don’t understand it, so they think that it’s dull and boring. It’s supposedly about money and numbers and rules, and we hear a lot of pompous people using terms like “trickle-down” and talking about “the free market” with the same hushed reverence that some people use to talk about their god: An abstract and unknowable force to be worshiped and revered, which moves in mysterious ways and demands that we behave according to certain laws and principles or else.

But, like all the rest of our religions, economics is more about people than anything else. It’s just humans being human really, really hard at each other. We came up with “rules” of the “free market” based on simple observations of how people tend to behave in certain situations, and then we sort of… forgot that it was about them. We talk about the movements of money without thinking enough about who is moving it and why. This causes a ripple which turns into a tidal wave, and before you can think better of the whole sorry affair, you end up with late-stage capitalism and a bunch of CEOs who sweat and agonize about profit margins and, every decade, forget a little more that at the end of the day, it’s still just about people, and that people are important.

A Choir of Lies is narrated by Ylfing – if you’ve read A Conspiracy of Truths, you already know him: the sweet apprentice storyteller with a heart as big as the world. In the wake of the events of the first book (which you don’t need to have read to understand this next one), Ylfing is struggling with his relationship to his calling. He has seen stories used destructively, and he’s lost his connection to his audience. To escape having to tell stories, he takes a job as a translator to a wealthy merchant, Sterre de Wayer. However, as soon as she finds out the real extent of his skills, she persuades him to use those skills for her own ends and fan up a mania for her most recent import: bulbs of stars-in-the-marsh, an exotic bioluminescent flower. Ylfing can do what he does because he knows people. He knows that they will devour stories like a pack of ravening wolves. That’s all that marketing is—feeding your audience a story that whets their hunger instead of sating it.

The big idea for this book might seem fairly dry at first glance—a fantasy novel about economics? Really? YAWN—except that when I say that this is a book about economics, I mean that it’s a book about hunger and desire, about floods and famines, about how we determine our values (in every sense of the word—our worth, our cost, our morals). And, of course, woven through every line of it, it’s a book about… people. Just people being people as hard as they possibly can, with everything that that entails—the capacity for great kindness and self-sacrifice, the capacity for great greed and selfishness, and for the ability to hold those two contradictory impulses simultaneously in one hand.

Economics isn’t boring at all, it’s fascinating. It is as fascinating as political intrigue or comedies-of-manners or religious persecution or war, because all those things too are just people-being-people, coming up with intricate rules of a game that they’ve decided is terribly, terribly important, and then forgetting that that they can make new games with new rules, if the old ones no longer suit.

At the heart of the game of Economics (Late-Stage Capitalism Expansion Pack) is the idea that money is the most important resource. The big idea of A Choir of Lies, in one sentence, is just a question asked very softly: “But what if it isn’t?”

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In today’s Big Idea for The Innocent Dead, a famous Muppet is revealed to be a master of teleology by author Steven S. Drachman. And that’s not the wildest idea on display today!

STEVEN S. DRACHMAN:

My Watt O’Hugh books (they’re now at long last a “trilogy”) are about a time-roaming 19^th century gunman and his seemingly hopeless battle against a magical, secessionist, Utopian movement known as the “Sidonians.” The Sidonians, and their showy ruler, are responsible for the deaths of those Watt has loved, and are to blame for the shambles that his life has become. Shortly into the third book, this obsessional fight takes Watt all the way to the Hell of the Innocent Dead, the 6th level (out of a total of 18).

It is a land born from Chinese mythology, where those who die before their time go to await justice. It’s not the worst possible Hell: no one is on fire, but everything smells really bad, it’s damp and always just a little bit too cold, and the food is awful. Still, it is terribly unfair, a torment for someone who has really done nothing wrong, who simply cannot leave behind the terrible injustice of his death, who haunts the living when he sleeps.

But it is something more, too. It is not just a place, but an idea.

“Hell was invented by humans,” a long-time denizen explains to Watt. “Somebody thought of that and someone believed it. And here it is.” (He unwittingly quotes Kermit the Frog, who seems to have had a good grasp of the nature of Hell.)

The idea that consciousness plays some kind of role in the life of the universe is an old and appealing idea; and it is also an unprovable one, at least until we learn, Doolittle-like, how to talk to electrons. Still, physicist Arthur Eddington once announced, “The stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and, as the New Yorker writer Jim Holt noted in Why Does the World Exist, this opened a whole panpsychist Pandora’s box of philosophical musings (and some scientific musings as well, notably by Roger Penrose).

If the stuff of the world is mind stuff, and our consciousness comes straight out of the stardust that swirled about during the Big Bang, then you are really not an insignificant fleck of sand in an indifferent universe of two million quintillion planets. Instead, every atom is conscious, and we are all part of a single, universal thought.

So, in my tome, the 6^th level of Hell still exists in the 19^th century, because somebody thought of it long before, and the rest of us believed it, and it will be there until we collectively come up with a better theory, and prove this better theory. The superstitions of the past are not things we proved false and outgrew; they are things that used to be true and are not true anymore. At one time, in other words, there were turtles all the way down, and the stars in the sky were just pretty lights.

“We were eternal,” says Billy Golden, a colleague in the anti-Sidonian resistance. “At one ‘time’ you — we — were half-Divine. Then, we still danced with eternity. Beauty still existed, then. Now we are chromatids and centromeres, and our ‘soul’ is nothing more than ‘subjective experience,’ a part of evolution, a necessary survival mechanism. Look what we gave up when we rewrote the story.”

But a made-up reality that might change under your feet is a no-less deadly reality. So Watt is chagrined but not surprised to discover that the Sidonian rebellion is full-blown even in the 6^th level of Hell, where he is soon designated a “general” as the battle approaches.

In the world of Watt O’Hugh, we’re all helping the universe decide what it wants to be when it grows up. And the Universe, as with any sentient, conscious creature, will either grow up to be “good” or “bad,” live a long life or die young.

Its prognosis, furthermore, doesn’t look good.

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Reboot, reimagine, reinvent — there is nothing new under the sun, as they say, and humans find ways of looking at old stories in new ways. This is an idea that acclaimed editors Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe have taken to heart in their new anthology The Mythic Dream. Here they are to go into the details.

DOMINIK PARISIEN and NAVAH WOLFE:

We’ve always known that old stories have power. And as editors and readers, we’ve always been drawn to retelling those old stories. There’s something uniquely compelling about seeing authors taking the bones of an old tale and giving it new life. There’s a certain kind of narrative truth that comes from reading a familiar story turned on its head.

Retellings are a pleasure for authors to write, and for audiences to read and fall into. They give that shiver of recognition, that thrill of having something familiar refocused in dramatic ways. They’re also a joy to work with as editors. On a commercial level, there is of course the benefit of working with stories that people recognize. But, more importantly, putting together these types of anthologies is an incredibly creative process for editors, much more than simply compiling narratives. We get to delve deep into the bones of those stories, work with our authors to help them determine which bits might be worth exploring, which might resonate in today’s world and how, to juxtapose familiar and unfamiliar tales and find the connective threads between them across time and cultures.

Our first anthology, The Starlit Wood, was born on our shared love of fairy tale retellings. It was an absolute joy to get to immerse ourselves in an editorial project that let us explore and play with the stories we grew up with, the stories that shaped our narrative, story-loving minds. For our second book together, Robots vs Fairies, we went in a very different direction, but retellings still slipped in as reimagined versions of Pinnochio, Peter Pan, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We couldn’t quite leave retellings in our rearview window.

And so for our third project together, we knew we wanted to return to that same familiar territory, but like a retelling, differently. We wanted to play some more in that liminal space that comes when you retell an old story in a new way. So it was immediately clear to us what our next anthology should be.

We’ve always been fascinated by myths. Not just the two of us—the human race. And how could we not be? Myths are stories with power. They resonate across ages and cultures and help us understand the world, as it was or might have been, as it could be. Our myths define us. They’re the stories we tell and retell that shape our past, that tell us where we come from, how we got here. They anchor us into a common history, and make us feel rooted, like we belong. If our stories have been told for generations, then we’ve been here at least that long. Where stories have history, so do we. But what happens when our origin myths fail us? When the stories that define us don’t leave space for marginalized voices and identities?

When we were figuring out what we wanted this book to be about, one quote from Madeleine L’Engle kept resonating with us: “When we lose our myths, we lose our place in the universe.” We knew we wanted The Mythic Dream to use myths to reclaim our place in the universe. And so we asked eighteen brilliant writers to take these classic stories and reimagine them, to explore our collective past, examine our present, and take hold of our future.

And we couldn’t be happier with the resulting stories. Alyssa Wong imagines an Artemis and Acteon, where the hunting ground is the internet rather than the woods. Seanan McGuire puts Persephone in a carnival. Amal El-Mohtar gives Bloddeuwedd back her voice, her agency, and her vengeance. Arkady Martine’s Inanna takes command of galaxies and starships. Carlos Hernandez’s Cuban bogeyman becomes a source of hope instead of terror. Indrapramit Das asks what happens when an Indian AI become a goddess. Carmen Maria Machado’s Erysichthon gets a powerful dose of consequences.

And that’s the big idea of The Mythic Dream. Taking the stories that shaped and defined us, and shaping them in turn, in order to create the world we want to see around us. So join us in The Mythic Dream, and reclaim your place in the universe, one myth at a time.

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David Koepp is already one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, with films like Jurassic Park, Spider-Man and one of my personal favorites, Death Becomes Her, to his name. Now he’s turned his attention to novels with the bio-thriller Cold Storage. Koepp is here to tell you how the novel began, and why this time it is a novel, not a screenplay.

DAVID KOEPP:

New York City, as is its habit, pushed the big idea in front of me, disguised as a very small one.

I was walking down the street in mid 2017, up early on a steamy August morning. It was only 7 a.m. but the city was sweltering already, and walking the two blocks from the deli to my apartment had covered me with a thin sheen of yuck.

It was the look on the guy’s face that I noticed first. He was a Hispanic guy in his mid-twenties, thin and looking exhausted, dressed in a security guard’s uniform. I figured he was on his way home from the night shift. Then again, it was 6:30 in the morning, so he might have been up early. Coming or going, his expression told me he hated his job.

I thought back on jobs I’d had and hated when I was his age, and that despite my loathing, I was grudgingly grateful to have had them. Maybe this guy felt the same way. I wondered, if something weird happened at his boring-ass job that night, what if he decided that, even though it was a shitty job, it was his shitty job, and god damnit he was going to do it well.

That’s a guy you could tell a story about.

All my ideas for the past thirty years have come in movie form, so I assumed this one was a film as well. I collected string for a few more months, waiting for other parts of the story to pop into my head from my daily life – a mysterious beeping smoke alarm somewhere in the attic that took weeks to find, my own fears of infection and decay – and then I sat down to start throwing words at it.

Movies often begin as treatments, horrible documents that reflect neither good prose nor good screenwriting but are more a summary of what a script could be. For some reason, after the first couple sentences on this one, I couldn’t face working in this-happens-and-then-that-happens form for the umpteenth time and decided to try it as half-decent prose. I think that because the story originated as a character idea – a hard-working, resentful but earnest young man trapped in a polyester shirt on a hot August morning — the telling of it began as thoughts inside someone’s head.

Yowza, what a difference.

In thirty years of movie writing, I’d never written a character’s inner thoughts before. Lame, but true. The script writer is limited by the tools of the medium, able to write only what an audience sees or hears. If a character doesn’t see, say, or do it, you can’t get it in your movie. The lucky writer of prose, by contrast, gets to write anything, anywhere, anytime. Thoughts inside a person’s head? No problem. The point of view of an inanimate object, like a deadly fungus? Sure, go right ahead, sounds cool.

And the pace of a book! Movies are slaves to plot, they thrive on constant forward movement. Tarantino digresses for ten or twelve minutes and everybody loses their mind; we’ll be talking about his boldness for decades. But in a book, an author can wander off in any direction at all, like a four-year-old chasing a butterfly in a meadow. The reader will usually hang with it. Mostly, the butterflies I chased were the inner thoughts and feelings of that night shift security guard.

Maybe I got him completely wrong. Maybe he loved his job and just didn’t like the heat. Maybe he’d just started his own private security company and was overcome with responsibility, or maybe he STOLE the uniform and had left the real guard dead in a doorway somewhere. All I had to base my 300 pages of assumptions on was the look he had on his face in a single moment.

In the couple years since the moment that sparked the book, I’ve had time to think about the big idea lurking behind that chance moment of passing, the question raised by that flash of perceived insight into the life of another person.

How come we don’t know each other anymore? Our communication is broken down, despite unprecedented ability to get our thoughts out into the public discourse, and to read and hear the thoughts of others we might not agree with. Of course, we don’t read and hear them, we click away at the speed of light, and because we can’t see their faces, we’re never forced to wonder what makes them tick.

But the city knows better, it pushes us into each other’s paths. The city said “hey, check out this guy,” so I did; it asked “what’s his deal?,” so I wondered.

I hope your day at work was unshitty, dude. With zero deadly fungal outbreaks.

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