MAMMOTH review part 2 (Updated 11.04.05)

Both Rick and I have finished the novel so we will be ready for the discussion on Saturday the 10th.

The preliminary reviews immediately after reading are favorable. The last two Varley novels have demonstrated his talent for engaging the reader in ways other than employing standard SF gimmicks. Although both novels contain a science fiction element, those elements are relegated to a secondary role. In RED THUNDER the 'squeezer' forcefield technology is the muguffin to motivate the characters. In MAMMOTH it is time travel. Both tales are character driven and do not succeed or fail based on the sense of wonder of the technology.
In RED THUNDER the squeezer gimmick is so obviously a gimmick that is frees the reader to devote more attention to the people, and there lies the pay-off, for the characters are likeable. MAMMOTH, like all time travel stories, cannot focus much on the technology of time travel, since even the merest speculation is in the realm of pure speculation, but rather draws our attentions to the effects of this time travel on the characters. In both novels, the characters occupy themselves in trying to exploit a technology they do not understand; also in both, the characters are forever changed by this encounter. This is what Varley is good at: extrapolating the effects of technology on people. He routinely takes a tired science fiction cliche and so completely inserts it into the lives of his people that we have no trouble believing their response to it even though it may be an unbelievable technology.

Chapter Numbering in MAMMOTH
Varley uses a technique I first encountered in Isaac Asimov's THE GODS THEMSELVES. He starts with a chapter other than No. 1 and uses the numbering to simply inform the reader how the story could be laid out chronologically. MAMMOTH begins with chapter 5 and ends with chapter 1, so we know that the last really "happened" first, but due to the peculiarities of time travel the characters do not experience chapter 1 until the "end." This is a simple and effective way to employ flashbacks without giving the reader any opportunity to confuse the chronology of the story. Varley does not employ flashbacks often. The notable exception is his novel THE GOLDEN GLOBE where he uses them to obfuscate the motives and childhood influences of Sparky Valentine.

Little Fuzzy Misdirection
Interspersed with the earlier chapters of MAMMOTH are several episodes in what we are led to believe is a reconstruction of the life of the only mammoth we have been introduced to; the frozen mammoth found by Howard Christian. These excerpts abruptly end when the timeline of Fuzzy the mammoth collides with the lives of Matt and Susan due to a time travel mishap. At first I resented the interruption these excerpts were to the main story of the novel, not knowing that they were an actual reconstruction of events from the life of Fuzzy from eye-witness accounts. This misdirection provided a way for Varley to introduce the character of the mammoth without blatantly giving away that he was not the frozen mammoth we knew about and to set up the environment Matt and Susan would soon be thrust into due to the displacement by the time machine. Looking back I can appreciate just how effective this was on me when I was reading that section.


Time Travel Elements in MAMMOTH

As Paul Nahin puts it, the "Block universe seems to be a mathematician’s proof of a denial of free will dressed up in geometry."

Varley uses many tried and true time travel elements, and like any serious time travel tale, he has to deal with predestination. His characters are so impacted by the convergence of events in their own lives toward the exact sequence they know unfolded in the past, that they wonder if their feelings of free will are just an illusion. In two instances (pages 335.5 and 360.-3) he even evokes the Bilking Paradox by causing the characters to contemplate trying to alter the past just to see if the future is changed, but in both instances the characters are unwilling to do so out of fear of tampering with their own happiness, which is a direct result of events that happened because of time travel.
We will never know if their changes in action would have resulted in the past, or the future being changed. I would argue that the many coincidences in the novel that bring critical events into being demonstrate that this novel presents a Block Universe view of reality, one where neither the past nor the future can be changed. They couldn't have changed things if they had tried. Howard suspects as much when he contemplates leaving a different message on the briefcase. He theorizes that the universe will interfere to preserve the reality that exists and to prevent him from making any alterations from the past reality. This can be considered a variation of the Cosmic Disgust Theory that Varley implemented in MILLENNIUM. In that novel changes to the past were met by ripples in time that would accumulate in a final cataclysm destroying the world. Serious time travel theorists postulate that if time travel is possible, and that's a big IF, then changing the past is certainly not among the possibilities of things to do on your visit. This brings to the surface the discussion of predestination versus my feeling of free will.

Block Universe scenario: Here I am visiting back in time at the Ford Theater the
night Lincoln is to be shot by Booth. What is to stop me from interfering with
the assassin and preventing the murder? Answer: We don't know what will stop you
but something certainly did stop you, because you did not stop the shot. Lincoln
was killed despite your presence. In this Block Universe view, if you are there
now, you were there then when it happened and failed to stop the President from
being killed.

Another time travel element is that of the Time Machine. According to Paul Nahin, this a defining element elevating scientifically plausible time travel from fantasy.

Problem No. 1: No Spatial Displacement. Varley's time travel has the travelers moving only in time but not in space. They arrive near the location of the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard in the same geographic location on the earth that they left thousands of years ago. Since the earth orbits and rotates and the galaxy revolves some compensation would have necessarily had to be in effect. But since we are never told that such compensation is not in effect, and the time travelers themselves do not understand the method of their time travel, this could well have been taken into account by the machine without them knowing. We will give Varley the benefit of the doubt and say that spatial compensation was in effect.

Problem No. 2: What time machine method is used? None of the methods recognized by Nahin seem to apply: Tipler cylinders, black holes, Godel rockets, cosmic strings, and superluminal spacetime warp drives (Nahin TIME MACHINES p23.2). Once Varley does mention String Theory (page 322.2) but this is only a character's guesswork as to the method utilized by the time machine. But, again, since the method is not specified, Varley gets a pass on this as well. When dealing with time travel it is best to remain vague about the details.

Problem No. 3: Causal loop. Matt's Seiko watch is caught in a type of causal loop. (1) Matt buys the watch after his return from the past, (2) Howard steals it and takes it to the ice-age, (3) Charlie steals the watch from Howard's cold dead body, "before" Matt buys it, and (4) later meets Matt in a bar; both are wearing the same watch. Where did the watch originate? Answer; In the Seiko factory of course. Even though chronologically the watch existed before it was built, before any watch was built. Causal loops do not imply that events within keep happening over and over, but rather that, like a roller coaster, the events happen only once but seem out of place because of our linear-forward-sequential sense of the passage of time. Oddly, plausible time travel does not prohibit such counter-intuitive paradoxes as a single unique watch appearing in two places at the same "time." I think this does pose a problem for the material in the watch: Can a molecule exist in more than one place? Perhaps Quantum Theory will reveal that there is no such thing as a unique molecule that persists for a long period of time, but that the sub-atomic particles are constantly replacing each other in much the same way that cells in an organism are dying and being replaced while maintaining the integrity of the organism and the same physical appearance.

Problem No. 4: The Time Machine has no origin. (1) The Time Machine is dug up, frozen under a Mammoth. It already has scratches on the case. (2) Matt duplicates it and gets one of the copies to work, sending himself back in time; but he has no idea how it works. (3) Matt comes to some intuitive understanding of the working principle of the Time Machine and returns to the present. (4) Christian activates the Time Machine, trapping himself in the past. Dying, he scratches the case, taking care not to alter the scratches in any way from the scratches on the one that was found. So, at one time, before the Time Machine is trapped in the past with Christian, it, like the Seiko watch, exists in two places at the same time; the "original" and the "copy" on Matt's lab bench. Where did the Time Machine originate? Answer: We are not told. Unlike the Seiko watch, the Time Machine's prior existence cannot be speculated because we don't have any knowledge of how such a device came to be. One thing we know for certain: Matt certainly cannot be considered the originator because he only copied the one found frozen under the Mammoth, and does not have sufficient understanding of its principles to even reverse engineer one, unless he later sends the "original" back to his earlier self. The intellectual property of how the Time Machine works, is the problem. Such knowledge could only come from someone with a deep understanding of the universe. Such knowledge must necessarily have had an inventor. Such knowledge has to have had an origin beyond the causal loop of the story. The Time Machine is a Twonky; something plunked down from another time or another dimension. Somewhere, somewhen, the Time Machine inventor built one. The story of how it then came to be in the hands of Matt will never be known, unless Varley writes a sequel.