The Curse of Time Travel

Twenty-one years ago, when I was twelve, my childhood sweetheart tried to get me into Dr. Who. It didn’t take.  (Possibly because we began at the beginning, with William Hartnell. It’s sure as hell taken now; I waited two hours in the sun on the concrete last year to hear David Tennant speak at Comic-Con.) In the process of it not taking, I read some tie-in novels he loaned me. I liked them better than the TV show.

The Curse of Fenric novelization by Ian Briggs was my first encounter with anything approaching a non-linear plot structure, and I remember being astounded and delighted by the concept. Really, it only barely qualifies: the main story is told linearly, one chapter at a time. But the chapters are interspersed with “documents” (a fairytale, a letter, a school essay, etc.) that provide backstory—a backstory never explicitly given to the characters, only t0 the reader; and moreover a backstory that isn’t dissected and neatly-arranged for the reader, but merely handed over with the implicit direction to figure out the connections yourself. I was twelve. I had never encountered anything like it. It was a lot different than the middle-grade and YA fiction I was usually handed. Come to think of it, my predilection for reading mysteries in my spare time was another reason I’d never before encountered such a thing: a typical mystery novel connects all the dots for you in the final chapter.

The Curse of Fenric (acquired recently second-hand, out of sentiment) has not, um, worn all that well. The linear story impresses me a lot less now than it did when I was a kid. I still like the interspersed documents, though. And the prologue still makes me smile. To be honest, I got the book in part because bits of the prologue had surfaced to the top of my memory in the last month or so.

(Yes, I have a somewhat bizarre facility for remembering things I have read, and being able to quote them long after normal people have emptied those memory cells and filled them with something more useful. I did in fact remember the last two paragraphs of the prologue almost word-for-word, twenty years later. What can I say—I was born with this quirk  instead of with the ability to read maps. The following is not from memory, however. I have the book in front of me. You need to put up with the overwrought philosophy to get to the punchline.)

Every story must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

But it’s never that simple. Think of the planet Earth, spinning gently round its sun. Someone standing on one side of the planet sees the sun rise on a new day—like the beginning of a new story. But on the other side of the planet, the sun is disappearing into the horizon. For someone standing there, it’s the end of a story. Sunset in one place is sunrise somewhere else. And for someone who is standing between them, it’s the middle of the day (or the middle of the night). It all depends where you’re looking from.

All the time, the Earth slowly turns, joining all the stories together—day after day, year upon year. They are joined into one long story with no beginning and no end.

However far back you go, you can never find a first beginning. There’s always something earlier.

Does this really matter?

Of course it matters. How do you expect me to tell this story if I don’t know where it begins or ends? I could start with a woman standing alone on a beach, but is that really the beginning? Who is she? What brought her here? We might reach the middle of the story and then find that something important took place ten years earlier—or even a thousand years earlier. We’d be in a fine mess then, I can tell you.

Yes, I know, I’m just a grumpy old man, and you want me to shut up and get on with the story. You don’t mind where it begins, just as long as it begins somewhere, and I stop talking all this nonsense. All right, then—we’ll begin with a woman standing alone on a beach.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Which has been going through my mind a lot, as I struggle to write my time-travel novel.