My new habits of caution had not dissipated. I wanted no accidents. To be on the safe side, I aimed initially to create something so far removed from the actual future that it could not possibly become a viable alternative. For that, I decided a fantastical world would be ideal, so I could check the machinery and complete all the theoretical calculations without fear of any unpleasantness. Even that would be difficult enough at this early stage, but I could always shut it down in an emergency.
I should explain how my device worked. It operated by manipulating the ether, that non-existent substance which physicists had rationalised out of their theories on the usual grounds that if it could not be converted into one of their little numbers it could not possibly be there. Einstein’s biggest mistake. This assumption was what stopped the advance of human knowledge in its tracks for the better part of a century and a half. The collected material I converted into complex algorithms and then projected them into a static, neutral space which was as abstracted as it was artificial.
Particularly, I wanted to monitor the way imagination distorted the ether (which is really just an archaic term for the universal totality of information flows). Once properly processed I could (in theory) bring a universe to life by taking an imaginative invention, projecting the information it represented into a confined space and then allowing it to extend far beyond its original size by logical progression. For this I needed a robust but simple outline, a world of the imagination which, however incomplete, was coherent, structured and — most of all — possible. Not only that, it had to be different enough from the current strand that variations could be measured and contamination avoided. Put enough information in (and what are we all but information in peculiar packaging?) and the universe would construct itself in a sort of chain reaction. Simple.
I found nothing in France which met my requirements. There was almost no one with the fanciful, whimsical sense of invention that I needed. Modern French novels were either too rooted in a rather grim reality or increasingly obsessed with sober meditations on the pointlessness of existence. The few writers of science fiction knew little science, and children’s books for the most part involved an awful lot of cooking. I considered seeing what would happen if I projected a world full of talking elephants, but decided that the improbability of success did not merit the effort.
The English were a different matter. As their lives were so dreary and constrained, the fanciful exuberance of the human spirit was forced to take refuge in the imagination, which was the only place it could exist without attracting disapproval. There it flourished like a wild flower in spring. Even so, my task was hard and frustrating until Henry introduced me to his friend Tolkien. One day when he and his family were out, I set up sensors in his house. The information they slowly harvested was then processed and decanted into the device to see what happened.
Alas, quite a lot. I nearly killed myself.
It took a long time before I could figure out what went wrong, but every time I tried, the whole thing shut down. I thought initially that it was the magic, the population of dragons, orcs, trolls and all those beasts that he used. So I edited them out, but it still did not work — every time I ran the test, the universe would come into existence, work seemingly well, and then suddenly the entire cosmos would implode, leaving nothing but a void.
Once I thought I had succeeded. I had decided that the problem was with his wizards, who every now and then exhibit magical powers. So I reprogrammed those passages to make them ordinary people with funny hats. A world without rings, hobbits, dwarfs, dragons, elves, wizards and very large eagles became more boring, but I was desperate by this time, and finally what I hoped was Middle Earth flickered into existence. Through the entry into the controlled space I could see a seaport set into a cove, with tall, ancient buildings shrouded in mist so thick they were scarcely discernible, climbing the hills. I could see a single strange sailing ship, of a sort which fitted the style of the book but which was nowhere described in the actual text. I was excited. The device had taken the parameters of the story and extended them outside its own limits. In order to create that ship, it must also have assumed a history of shipbuilding, of carpentry, of seafaring, of past generations who had evolved the necessary techniques. It wasn’t perfect, though — the buildings were fog-bound because they were still ill-defined.
Still, it was there and was sturdy enough to prove that my work had been correct in most particulars. I left it running for a few days to go off and celebrate, and it both grew and remained stable. So I foolishly gave way to temptation, decided to take a closer look and very carefully stepped through.
Much about it was satisfactory. It was indeed real — there was air, wind, land, the smells of vegetation, a sun in the sky. The ground was firm and clearly defined. But there were no animals — no birds, no sign of any fish. That worried me. Such a world cannot be stable: someone had built the ship. If people did not exist, then the ship could not have been built, which was obviously a dangerous inconsistency.
I was right to be worried. As I stood there, I felt the temperature of the wind changing, from mild to freezing cold, then hot in a way that nature, no matter how constructed, could not possibly emulate. I saw the sun change colour, then seemingly begin to melt in the sky. The buildings turned into something resembling mud and slid down into a sea that was no longer made of water but was sticky and glutinous, shining with a light that came from deep underneath. Even the hills themselves began to turn fuzzy and smudged round the edges.
I ran. Luckily I had ventured in just a few paces, but even so I had only seconds to spare. I got through, back into the safety of the Tolkiens’ garage on Sandfield Road, and looked back just in time to see an entire universe collapse into chaos, then nothingness, before my very eyes.
I had worked hard for years, and the only thing to show for it was a universe that lasted a few hours. I had little choice — I shut down all the machinery, stashed it into a safe lock-away in a small village to the north of Oxford, and disappeared back to France to do a lot of work. It took me the better part of a year before I thought I’d worked out the difficulty. A whole series of issues had combined to make the creation of a universe derived from Tolkien’s imagination impossible. Luckily they had done so, because each of them was enough to create something unstable enough to collapse eventually. I was fortunate that it had done so speedily.
The first problem was with Tolkien’s world itself. In it he plays something of a trick with religion. For the most part, the tale unfolds without the divine, yet at the same time it is part of real history. As a human tale, of course this is normal. The Bible is both myth and history, and we do not know whether the ancient Greeks believed in the gods of Olympus or saw them merely as stories. Human beings can believe and disbelieve at the same time. Physics, alas, cannot, and faced with Tolkien’s indecision on the matter my machinery tried to summon the gods into existence. This was a little beyond its power; it could create a belief in them, but not the actual gods. So my world was empty. As long as I did no more than observe it from the outside, all was well, but the moment I entered, it was forced to confront the contradiction and shut down.
Another problem was that it needed to be located (theoretically at least) on the line which ran from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch through Oxford 1959. Before or after did not matter, but it had to be somewhere. Tolkien’s world was neither in our past nor in our future. Either it or the present had to go for the universe to be coherent. Oxford 1959 could not vanish as the machine controlling it was there, so Tolkien’s world had to.