Cronos

CRONOS: AN INTRODUCTION by Robert Silverberg

The theme of travel in time has been central to me, both as reader and writer, throughout my lifelong involvement with science fiction. I first encountered it in H.G. Wells ’The Time Machine' when I was ten or eleven years old, more than half a century ago, and came away stunned by Wells’ visions of future eras, which culminates in this unforgettable depiction of the very end of time:

“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant,dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after another, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping toward me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black. . . .

“Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood stick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles railed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. . . .”

Soon after, I encountered John Taine’s Before the Dawn, which provided a glimpse of that long-lost age when dinosaurs walked the earth, and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, which told me of the grotesque intelligences that would inhabit the world millions of years hence. And then I found Robert A. Heinlein’s dazzling story “By His Bootstraps,” which introduced me to the perplexing paradoxes that time travel engenders.

I was hooked—forever, as it turned out. I knew that my own time on earth was finite; but here was a kind of fiction that pierced the veil of the future. Out of an aching curiosity to know what lies ahead, not merely seven months or eleven years or even two centuries ahead, but millennia, thousands upon thousands of millennia, I searched out all the science fiction I could find, looking in particular for tales of time voyages, wanting desperately to believe, at least for the nonce, in Wells’ argument that “A civilized man . . . can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?”

It was inevitable that when I began writing science fiction myself, just a few years later, I would turn my developing skills to time-travel stories almost from the first. The earliest I can recall was a piece called “Vanguard of Tomorrow,” pretty much a straight imitation of “By His Bootstraps,” which I wrote when I was fourteen,and which, I am relieved to say, never has seen publication. A rather more skillful job was “Hopper,” which I wrote when I was nineteen, and then the time-paradox story “Absolutely Inflexible,” a few months afterward. I sold both of these to magazines and they were published in 1956, “Hopper” appearing in the appropriately named Infinity and “Absolutely Inflexible” in Fantastic Universe.

Over the years I have returned again and again to the theme, eventually producing not simply imitations of classics by my betters, but original contributions to the literature of my own. Among these I would class “Hawksbill Station” of 1967 and the novel Up the Line of 1969, Son of Man of 1971, “When We Went to See the End of the World” of 1972, and “Many Mansions” of 1973; and I have continued writing time-travel stories ever since, with the most successful of them, perhaps, being “Needle in a Timestack” (1983), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1985) and “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” (1989).

The volume you now hold provides three examples of my fascination—obsession, if you want to call it that—with time travel.The Time Hoppers,which I wrote in the spring of 1966, just as I was beginning to find my mature voice as a writer, was an expansion of my 1954 short story “Hopper” to book length—a story that reflects the use of time travel not so much as a means of exploring other eras as of escaping from one’s own. Project Pendulum, from 1986, was one more attempt at wrestling with the time-paradox concept, a book that involved me, somewhat to my own dismay, in a structure that could have easily been employed in a novel ten times the length of the one I actually wrote. It was a struggle to hold it to the dimensions I had intended, but I think that doing so increased the dizzying effect of the story. And Letters from Atlantis, which I wrote in 1988, is not only a time-travel story but also plays with another idea I have been poking at, on and off, for many years, my not very seriously proposed speculation that the legend of Atlantis is derived from memories of a lofty technology-based civilization that existed on earth in Neolithic or even Paleolithic times. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to restore these three books to print in this new edition.

LETTERS FROM ATLANTIS

. . . it waits for that serene moment when the brain is just in the apt condition, and ready toswitch on the other memory,as one switches on the electric light with a turn of the switch. . . .

—Kenneth Grahame

. . . now in the island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire, which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over part of the continent; and besides these, they subjected the parts of Libya within the Columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia .... But there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain the island of Atlantis disappeared, and was sunk beneath the sea.

—Plato: Timaeus

1.

The prince is sleeping now. Dreaming, no doubt, of the green and golden island of Athilan, its marble palaces, its shining temples. All unknown to him, I have borrowed his body—his good strong right arm—to write this letter for me.

So:

From somewhere in what I think is Brittany or Normandy, on what I think and assume is Christmas Eve in the year 18,862 B.C.,greetings and merry Christmas, Lora!

(Will this ever reach you, out there in the frosty eastern land that will someday be Poland or Russia? Less than a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose, even though you’re right here in the same prehistoric year I am. But a whole continent separates us. With transportation what it is here, it’s almost like being in different worlds.

I’ll cause the Prince to slip it into the regular diplomatic pouch that leaves next week, and the royal Athilantan courier will take it with him when he sets out across the tundra to the trading post where you’re supposed to bestationed. With any luck you’ll actually be there, and whoever you’re riding in will be someone who routinely has access to the royal documents that the courier brings. Considering that I’m writing this in English, he won’t have the remotest notion of what it’s all about. But you will, looking at it through his eyes. And maybe you’ll even be able to write back to me. My God, that would be wonderful, getting a letter from you! We’ve only been apart a little while and already it seems like forever.)