What if...?

Time travel, alternate histories, and what if the Bulls hadn't drafted Jordan?

My Chicago Tribune column this week is about time travel narratives. In the column I discuss a number of different recent examples of time travel stories, including the HBOMax adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, the Apple+ adaptation of Lauren Beukes’ Shining Girls, a Scandinavian import airing on HBOMax, Beforeigners¹, and Emma Straub’s recently released novel, This Time Tomorrow.

In the column I joke about how I went looking for a “trend piece” on time travel stories, but quickly realized a trend piece didn’t make sense given the fact that there is never a time when time travel stories are not common. To drive that point home, as I sent my final copy for the column to my editor a week ago Friday afternoon (as is my practice), I picked up the next book from my reading pile, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, and realized that I was holding a time travel story.

(As an aside, Sea of Tranquility is tremendous. One of those books that you live inside while you’re reading it, you’re sad when it ends, and carry the experience around with you for a few days afterwards, making you hesitant to even start reading another book because you don’t want to break the spell. Mandel is just firing on all cylinders as an artist.)

The insights in the column are not particularly profound - it’s tough to really develop an idea in 600 words, which is one of the reasons I enjoy the freedom of this space - but I ultimately settle on a couple of common themes when it comes to time travel stories. One, of course, is the desire for a re-do, the inevitable wondering if there was a road not taken that would’ve altered one’s future. This is the explicit question of This Time Tomorrow, and Straub explores the question in interesting ways.

The other insight is how often these stories reveal that these alternate choices are something of an illusion, that even if you can go back in time and alter something specific, you’re still stuck with yourself, and ultimately that fact goes a long way to determining your fate.

Straub’s main character, Alice, is a single, 40 year old woman with an ailing father, working in admissions at her old private school in Brooklyn after some halfhearted attempts to make it as a visual artist. She’s not unhappy, exactly, but she cannot shake the idea that there was some other life available to her had she chosen differently. Rather than having her story hinge on some obviously momentous decision that Alice can pinpoint as meaningful, Straub takes her character back to her 16th birthday, a day Alice remembers only in fragments until she starts living it over again.

By using the time travel conceit this way, Straub introduces another genre into her story, the genre that drives the second half of the book, the “alternate history,” in this case, the alternate personal history.

She wonders if she could have a happier and more fulfilled life if she’d chosen differently, which can be a question that plagues just about everyone from time to time.

I am personally fascinated by the notion of alternate histories. There’s a number of well-known alternate history novels that ask us to rethink fundamental aspects of our society, such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which posits a victorious Hitler and an occupied America, or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which asks, “What if we had President Lindbergh, and the United States never joined WWII?”

Hitler seems to get a lot of play in time travel and alternate history narratives. “If you had a time machine, would you kill baby Hitler?” is a classic time travel/alternate history thought experiment that can be fun to argue. I think the answer personally is, “of course,” recognizing both the moral wrong of killing and the possibility of a butterfly effect resulting in something worse than Hitler, but I’m taking my chances on that front.

(This is the kind of hubris that gets characters in trouble in time travel novels, so I better quit there.)

Once you get going thinking about alternate histories, though, it’s tough to stop. Seriously, what if, you could travel back in time and alter events? What would have happened?

Over my years of teaching writing, I found that using the “what if?” alternate history framework is a good way to get students engaged in critical/analytical thinking, and even doing research, without realizing they’re doing research. Ultimately, this wound up with me putting an alternate history assignment in my book of writing curriculum, The Writer’s Practice.

As you see in the screenshot above, in the introduction to the experience, I fall back on my Chicago-guy self for my example of an alternate history scenario, namely what would’ve happened if the Chicago Bulls hadn’t taken Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA draft.

Usually students start at a relatively surface level of analysis, e.g., the Chicago Bulls wouldn’t have won six NBA titles if they hadn’t drafted Michael Jordan, but I then ask them to think even more deeply about some aspect of the so-called butterfly effect of changing some part of the past.

For example, in the case of drafting Michael Jordan, I think there’s a strong argument that Chicago’s west side area near the old Chicago Stadium and current United Center does not gentrify in the way that happened in the wake of the Bulls realizing that they needed a new home arena with some luxury boxes to take advantage of the once-in-a-franchise experience of having Michael Jordan on your team.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and the forces of gentrification in cities like Chicago are truly inexorable. Either way, it’s interesting to think about.

From my perspective, the best part about the assignment for students is that it not only allows them to choose a subject of interest, but it requires them to adopt a particular lens of analysis from which to write, a lens which requires them to think and research in ways that are often more sophisticated than the standard “research paper” assignment that was once the centerpiece of my own classes, and remains fairly ubiquitous today.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a difficult task for the developing writers who are tackling it. It’s a difficult task for experienced writers and thinkers to do, and sometimes the end results can be a little iffy, but what I often hear from the students who engage with this kind of experience is that they learned a lot in the doing, which is the point, amirite?

The experience in the book also has what I call a “remix” which asks them to turn the alternate history lens on some aspect of their own past lives, essentially the same conceit as This Time Tomorrow.

Even 15 to 18-year-olds without a lot of miles on their tires can begin to freak themselves out as they think back on the roads not travelled, and the small things that have put them on a particular trajectory. In my case, the number of small coincidences that were unlikely to happen, but happened anyway, leading to the first date between me and the future Mrs. Biblioracle freaks me out if I think about it too much because I’m not a huge believer in fate.

But when I look back at what happened in the past, and how we live in the present, and my hopes and anticipations for our future together, I shudder, as though I’m suddenly cold, then knock on wood, and go find some salt to throw over my shoulder because you begin to wonder if you’re not in charge of your own destiny which is too freaky to think about.

At their core, time travel books are often about the implications of free will. Sometimes agency and free will is supercharged, as with Straub’s Alice, who is given the power to reshape her life.

Sometimes the lesson is the opposite, as in The Time Traveller’s Wife, where the characters are actually consigned to their fates, but traveling through time gives them a choice on how they perceive their own lives, even as the events of their lives are fixed.

As trite as this may sound, I think what these characters struggle with, perhaps what any of us struggle with is a simultaneously simple and complex question, “How can I be happy?”

The way the characters answer this question is often the stuff of compelling drama in art.

In life, it can get kind of annoying, and it becomes more convenient to ignore the question’s existence, but let’s face it, it’s inescapable there too.

Links

Over at The Guardian, Patricia Lockwood (No One is Talking About This) and Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You), have an epistolary (email) conversation about writing and art.

Can this marriage be saved? Sally likes to keep the books she reads. Andy thinks books are “clutter” and should be gotten rid of. Personally, I don’t like their odds.

Mindy Kaling has announced the first two titles coming out of her Amazon “story studio.”

The Washington Post recommends 21 books to read this summer.

Writing at LitHub, Maria Adelmann (How to be Eaten), gives us 11 Novels That Thwart Traditional Narrative Structure (to Brilliant Effect).

NPR has provided a list of books that represent all 50 states. It seems like these sorts of things are designed to be argued over, which I suppose is the fun part.

Recommendations

All books linked here are part of The Biblioracle Recommends bookshop at Bookshop.org. Affiliate income for purchases through the bookshop goes to Open Books in Chicago.

Affiliate income is $129.45 for the year.²

1. Masks of God by Joseph Campbell
2. Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell
3. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
5. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Steve C. - La Grange, IL

Steve has bent the rules a bit here and sent me not his five most recent reads, but five important books to him, but I’m going to allow it just this once because it prompts me to recommend a book for those of you interested in the big questions that sometimes trip us up, like the questions I often ask myself about free will when I start thinking too much about time travel stories: Elbow Room: On the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting by Daniel Dennett.

1. River of the Gods by Candice Millard
2. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
3. The Trials of Harry S. Truman by Jeffrey Frank
4. Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck
5. The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski

Mike L.

Apparently today every list of reads looks like someone looking for meaning in life, which makes me want to recommend other books about someone looking for meaning in life. Even though I am not a person of faith, I’ve found great comfort in Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton’s story of coming into his own faith and view of the world.

Keep those recommendation requests coming, folks. The link below will help you.

Because I’m a lucky person who sometimes gets sent books prior to their publishing, I’m going to spend a good chunk of my Sunday with Jean Thompson’s The Poet’s House, which will be released next month.

What are you reading?

Take care,

JW
The Biblioracle

1. Highly recommended. Definitely check it out.

2. I’ll match affiliate income up to 5% of annualized revenue for the newsletter, or $500, whichever is larger.