@RUTGERS.ARPA,@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA:Dave-Platt@LADC (05/02/85)
From: Dave Platt <Dave-Platt%LADC@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS>
The opinions, conclusions, and other such things in this review are
solely my own, and are not necessarily those of anyone else.
Downtiming the Night Side
Jack Chalker
May 1985
Tor Books 812-53288-0
This is a "time war" novel, taking place in a number of times and
locales spread between the beginning of the Age of Mammals through
to the "leading edge" of time (200-odd years in our future). The
time war is one (very important) aspect of a general war being
fought between Earth (the seriously mislabeled "Democratic
Motherworld") and the Outworlds (populated by genetically-adapted
human pioneers, intent on independence and viewed by Earth-normal
humans as inhuman monsters).
Technical background
Physical time travel is possible, although it requires immense
amounts of power and has some serious restrictions. The matrix of
Time attempts to smooth out and absorb the effects of time
travelers. If you jump back in time, you find sharing the body of a
person of that era... a person who did not exist until you made the
jump. Time performs a "least effort" creation of a person for you
to inhabit... the person created is one whose life or death makes a
minimal difference to that time. The person has a full history,
personality, memories, and so forth, and unless you (the traveller)
make a conscious effort to take control, the host personality
generally goes along pretty much as usual. As time goes by, the
traveller's identity is progressively absorbed by the host's. When
the "trip point" is reached, the host has become stronger than the
traveller... and if the traveller attempts to time-jump out of that
era, s/he ends up with the host's body rather than his/her own. If
the traveller does not leave within a certain (varying) number of
days, his/her identity degenerates to a set of memories with no
consciousness... to abstract data... and eventually vanishes
entirely.
It's possible to interfere with Time, by altering significant events
in the time stream. Earthsiders and Outworlders in the past (and
their recruited agents) attempt to alter historical events in ways
which will reroute history into paths which give their opposing
societies an advantage in the war. Some of these diversions
eliminate the sequences of events which lead to the birth of the
time-travellers themselves, leaving them as "nightsiders" with
memories of a time that no longer is/was. At this point, their
choices are basically: pick an era, jump to it, and be assimilated
(perhaps into their alter-ego in that time path), or jump back to an
era in time before humans existed... if they go far enough back,
there will be no way that their actions can affect human-era time,
and thus Time will not attempt to assimilate them. Many of the
nightsiders continue to act as agents for their particular sides in
the time war; some of them have passed through dozens of trip
points, inhabited many different bodies, and have absorbed (and been
absorbed into) so many different identities that they are no longer
the people that they once were, except in the most tenuous way.
Personal comments and opinions
Chalker dedicates the book to Wells, Williamson, Leinster, Heinlein,
Garrett, Leiber, and Machiavelli. I'm most strongly reminded of
Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" (people looping back on themselves)
and Laumer's "Dinosaur Beach" (ditto, plus the time-war aspects).
The idea of a time traveller's identity merging with that of a host
in the target period (even though the traveller had brought his/her
body along also) is a twist I haven't run into before; it has both
good and bad effects on the story.
One reaction I felt fairly early in the book (and which remained
with me to some degree throughout) was that Chalker's theory of time
travel seems rather contrived... as if Chalker had an idea for a
plot and constructed a minimal time-travel theory to permit him to
construct the story around that idea. In his characters'
descriptions of how time travel works, there were substantial gaps
(e.g., everything between the first detection of backwards-moving
particles in an accelerator, and a working time-suit/time-chamber
setup was glossed over). One character commented, "... this
absorption phenomenon seems designed mostly to counter that sort of
thing." (the Grandfather paradox). I'm sure it was (by Chalker),
but it seems a bit strange to hear a chief scientist speak of the
structure of time as being "designed".
As in the Well World series, Chalker seems to have selected a very
flexible background (alterable time, vs. the selectively-editable
universe-structure of Markovian science) with a lot of room to make
different thing happen... and then tends to use the loose rules of
such an undertaking to "pull things out of his hat" in a fairly
arbitrary way. He sometimes seems to fall into the trap of
depending on a deus ex machina to get his characters out of (or
into!) a scrape.
This story seems to share a characteristic common to many of
Chalker's stories I've read - weak/wooden/bland characterization.
Chalker's characters don't seem to have much in the way of
distinguishing features (differences in phrasing, for example)
except when Chalker chooses to make an issue of them in particular
cases. The blandness was made even more severe in this story by the
fact that the major characters were all subject to repeated
personality fade/shift, as an inherent (and major) part of the
plot. I have a feeling that he tends to think up plots first, and
then construct characters to "go through the motions" of acting out
the plot; I find it difficult to picture them as real people, or to
care what happens to them in the long run. Some of the characters
are stereotypical almost to the point of being caricatures... for
example, Holger Neumann: an intelligent and sensitive homosexual
man, "The only child of an attorney... rather spoiled early on. His
father had been something of a wimp at home, and it was his mother
who dominated almost everything either one of them said or did.".
So... what do I think of the story as a whole? It's typical
Chalker: an interesting read in some respects, but without enough
solid data or speculation to be satisfying as a hard-science story
(a la Clarke, Hogan, or Niven), and unsatisfying as a character-based
or sentient-interest story. As with most Chalker, I'm not sorry I
read it, but probably won't go back and reread it in the future.