12 parsecs

I highly recommend this background reading on interstellar trade by none other than our own Professor Krugman. My favorite quote: “I do not pretend to develop a theory which is universally valid, but it may at least have some galactic relevance.”

The reason I mention the above paper, which explains how economics is compatible with special relativity (and does it with exceptional sass), is because Nova’s economics is much more straightforward: vaned spaceships do not obey relativistic time dilation, and interstellar communication is uninhibited by causality; these have become traditional assumptions in SF. Yet Nova also comes with a history of political, economic, and cultural shifts—the Von Ray family, the Outer Colonies, and the Vega rebellion—which in part depend on former technological constraints which have since become irrelevant. For all of the benefit associated with the new system of labor and the prospect of sudden “regime change” sitting on the new Illyrion-nova economy, there is nothing quite new about the overall system of economics, which proceeds as a larger-scaled but faster (not slower as in Krugman) version of events which may conceivably have happened on Earth. Part of this is that time in Nova is more or less linear, which brings to mind the notion of progress and the anthropological equating of long times into the past with long distances out in space.

In Nova, the past invariably revolves around the 20th century, but there is no clear allegorical reading which suggests that going to Earth, or any other destination (like Phoenix’s Alkane Institute), is equal to going to the past. On the other hand, since Katin is the author of the narrative constructed after its described events, what we are reading is more closely the narrative of Katin’s (read: Earth’s) relationship to its own history, some recent events experienced firsthand but most designed as retellings, e.g. of Lorq’s past (originally argued about Maus by Young). Because Katin’s perspective of time is the same as everyone else’s, his narrative has historical value when he synthesizes the narratives of those he encounters, like Mouse, into his own narrative. In other words, in the world of Nova all narratives see other narratives in parallel, so that there is not only egalitarian labor but also egalitarian history. As a commentary on history, the narrative also uses nonhistory—tarot readings and myth—not so much as irony than as a continuation of putting ideas and retellings of the past equally. This was not true in The Time Machine, where the Traveller’s mind is not in the same time as the future world and repeatedly fails to analyze it using 19th-century methods, or in The Left Hand of Darkness, where the express nonlinearity of the different perspectives of time available to Genly Ai makes it difficult to write an unbiased linear history.

Nova’s simplified economics allows the narrative to present a presumedly fair scheme of historical retelling (historical outsourcing, anyone?), because Katin’s narrative stands in for Terran introspection toward Earth’s own history. But it’s not really fair, as there must have existed interpretations of history, especially that of Vega, which were selected against and disappeared from the contemporary perspective in which Katin participates.

The other and the self through time and space

H.G. Wells’ time traveler expounds quite a bit upon the idea of representing time as the fourth dimension. He notes that a cube, despite occupying space in three dimensions, cannot exist without occupying a particular time as well; he also boldly proclaims that “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” What is implied, of course, is that technology might permit the liberation of such consciousness from its fourth dimensional prison. The Time Machine itself is a vessel that does exactly this by allowing its rider to move along the fourth dimension as if it were merely space.

Nevermind the questionable and vague science behind the physics of time travel in Wells’ universe; the perception of time as a pseudo-spatial dimension is rather groundbreaking in and of itself. In the context of alterity in science fiction, it reconceptualizes the colonial theme of discovering new worlds (and new peoples) with respect to a different frontier: that is, instead of visiting other worlds in outer space, time travel allows us to visit our own world at different points in four-dimensional space. In a sense, it is the ultimate representation of Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” – what can be more disconcertingly familiar and unfamiliar than a dystopian vision of our own future?

How, then, can we reconcile our notions of alterity with the idea that the “other” may simply be another version of ourselves? Theoretically, cognitive estrangement creates perspective to emphasize discovery of self, but the discoveries we make through time travel are often more overtly representative of the human condition than those made through space travel. In The Time Machine (particularly in the novella), the descendants of mankind are so estranged that they may as well have been an alien species; however, because they occupy the very (three dimensional) space in which the time traveller grew up, he is inclined to apply his knowledge of man to explain their situation. His theories are actually never fully confirmed; the reader can only rely on the time traveller’s speculations, speculations which are heavily rooted in late 19^th century intellectual thought.

It should be noted that throughout history, man has not been afraid to frame new discoveries within older schools of thought. For example, the time traveller’s journey to the world of the Eloi and Murlocks can be seen as a classic, colonial tale of conquer and salvation: educated Englishman arrives in new (four-dimensional) place to educate and inspire the simple-minded aboriginals. The film adaptation even offers a sexual parallel to this conquest with its depiction of Weena (though one can argue that the book alluded to the same conquest in less explicit terms). Nevertheless, the time traveller is actually unable to fully decouple himself from his fourth-dimensional space. That is, though he is able to physically traverse the space of time, his consciousness is still embedded in his present. Yet, because his ideas are founded upon thousands of years of human intellect, not to mention influenced by prediction and expectation, one might say that moving through four-dimensional space is not so hard after all. In addition, if human intellect can be reasoned to transcend the fourth dimension, then the Eloi and Murlocks (and any "other" that may exist) can be understood as future manifestations of the self.