review of
John Brunner's Timescoop
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 30, 2013

The scion of an extremely wealthy family suddenly finds himself at the helm of the empire & is eager to make his mark. Scientists in his employ have developed a "Timescoop", a device that can take a slice from something in the past & incarnate it in the present. One of the 1st things I imagined was bringing a version of the Venus di Milo into the present in a form that predates the damage to it. Lo & Behold! that's precisely what's presented as a possibility in the novel shortly after I imagined it:

""Now just a second!" Harold objected. "Think of all the damaged works of art that people would like to have complete—think of the Venus di Milo! Think of the archeological relics which were robbed before scientists could get to investigate them, like the burial treasures of the Pharaohs which were stolen from the Pyramids!["]" - p 17

The basic premise of the story is that Harold Freitas, heir to a vast fortune, uses this phenomenal Timescoop invention to have a family reunion publicity stunt bringing back from the past his most noteworthy ancestors. Brunner's political subtext being that the ancestors of a wealthy family may've been brutal criminals of the 1st order who've been rehistoricized thru the usual "history of the victor" bullshit. ""No, the Freitas reunion is going to be unique, and—and oh boy! Is this ever going to make the Mellons and the Kennedys and the Schatzenheims look sick!"" (p 19) I don't know whether the Mellons & the Kennedys ever had publicity stunt family reunions but they're certainly wealthy families. The "Schatzenheims" are the Freitas's fictional rival family in the story.

All of the Freitas ancestors turn out to be total shits. However, it strikes me as a little deficient of Brunner to have the only woman be a nymphomaniac - cdn't he've come up w/ something less sexually based? The reader gets samples of the lives of the Feitas clan in their original periods:

""That's as may be, sir," Peabody said, growing bolder. "But next after Mistress Coolman she named yourself."

"There was a stony silence in the room for long seconds. Reverend Freitas could say only one thing in the circumstances, though, and they all knew it. At length he uttered the fatal words.

""Then it was not a true confession, but a wile of the devil to sow dissension among those who hunt down and drive out his black angels. Let her be put to the question in the morning."

"Ellen uttered a stifled exclamation. "But, husband dear," she objected—thinking of what the order implied, thinking of the lashings at ankles and neck, thinking of the blood pouring from mouth and nose and near strangulation making the eyes bulge and the little vessels in the white burst until the balls were the color of cherries—"she is barely more than a child! She is only a few months older than our Eliza!"" - p 45

Now, I've been to Salem, Massachusetts where the famous 'witch' trials took place that this is presumably a reference to. In those trials, "spectral evidence" was used to condemn people (a movie of mine that touches on this peripherally is here: http://youtu.be/PFtodKMQpXE ). In other words, people wd testify to dreaming about the accused & being bewitched by them in the dreams. This testimony alone was enuf to condemn people to horrible punishment. Young girls were the accusers who started the whole mess.

When I visited one of the tourist spots where the story was recounted, the woman telling the story discounted the girls's culpability by making them out to be victims of the patriarchy n'at. This strikes me as ridiculous & contemptible. These girls were responsible for getting off on malicious destruction of their fellow humans, female & male, w/o the slightest trace of conscience. They were completely sociopathic. It seems to me that Brunner wd've been better off showing this side of females rather than 'nymphomania'. That sd, the Salem sheriff, a man, of course, was one of the people to benefit the most from this heinous situation given that he got to keep the property of those executed.

These relatives are MONSTROUS - but as anyone knows who studies history, such monstrosity is the basis of many a fortune - again, this strikes me as Brunner's most important subtext here. Treachery, slaughter, & exploitation abound:

""They're all set up," Buffalo Hank told him. "When they discover that the guns we're giving them are worn-out relics of the Civil War and liable to jam after half a dozen shots, they'll go crazy—especially with the firewater we're shipping in. You did make sure it was well spiked with wood alcohol?"

""Of course."

""Fine. That means the railroad should be free of Indian trouble by the end of the year; they'll just be creeping around the depots in dirty blankets whining for a hand-out. And now, how about my pay for this job, hm?"" - p 49

Chester Waley, the main scientist behind the Timescoop, is a black man. he imagines his own selection of people to be incarnated:

"And there would be plenty of chances later to bring in the really great men and women of history: Malcolm X was high on his own list, along with Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong. The toll call even among his own people was endlessly long." - p 50

Chester knows that Harold's plan will bring major problems but at 1st he's self-searching:

"Maybe that was his trouble. Maybe he was so much a child of the clean, antiseptic twenty-first century that he couldn't face the idea of people from squalid, insanitary days in the distant past. In which case his antipathy to the project was ridiculous and unjustifiable." - p 53

Sometimes when reading Brunner, & other authors too, of course, I imagine what (t)he(y) read before & during the writing of bks. In the case of Brunner's Bedlam Planet (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17865188-bedlam-planet ) he relied heavily on the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (the English version of Larousse Mythologie General). Here, it appears that he was studying history & bringing to the fore aspects of it that mightn't be ordinarily thought of by many people:

"They had talked about books—but what business did a grown man have with books, unless he was a priest? That was why the soft English had caved in before the onslaught of King William's forces: too much book learning had made them forget the martial arts, copying their own King Alfred, who, for all they claimed he had built them a navy, had spent his days in poring over dusty parchments. A king who could not merely read, but even write—it was ridiculous!" - p 68

"There were universal nods. Satisfied, Harold returned to his seat—only to notice with dismay that on his far left the Sieur Bohun de Freitas had picked up his avocado pear and was sniffing at it suspiciously.

""What's this—hog's food?" he roared, his high-speed English lessons having taken to such good effect that everyone for twenty places either side heard him clearly. Panicking, Harold gestured for Helen's attention.

""Blazes, of course—in his day they ate practically no vegetables!" she groaned. "I'd forgotten about that. Never mind, I'll just ask for his main dish to be served at once."" - p 94

"Accordingly, it had occurred to him to track down Joshua, whose—ah—former existence had overlapped the so-called Age of Reason, who had shared a century with, for instance, the philosophers of the Lunatic Society. he might have some data to indicate how those brilliant but informal experimenters got away with it in face of what could not have been much less frustrating obstacles." - p 104

The "Lunatic Society"? of course my interest is sparked!! I found this online (http://ssmag.wordpress.com/category/history/ ):

"Science before the twentieth century wasn’t done by “scientists.” There was no such word. There were educated amateurs and self-taught tinkerers, building their own labs in search of discovery or a patent. And so there wasn’t such a distinction between science and culture — the smart set went to “electrical parties” to see demonstrations of the newly discovered force. Ben Franklin wrote,

"A turkey is to be killed for dinner by the electric shock, and roasted by the electric jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle; when the healths of all the famous electricians of England, France, Holland, and Germany are to be drunk in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrified battery.

"The best example of the public nature of science in Enlightenment England was the Lunar Society, a club of industrialists, natural philosophers, and intellectuals that met in Birmingham at the full moon between 1765 and 1813. The port and talk flowed. Joseph Priestley was a regular member: a self-taught chemist, political radical and Unitarian minister, he discovered oxygen and its necessity for animal life, invented seltzer water, and supported the American and French revolutions. Also a “Lunatick” was Josiah Wedgwood, the great ceramics industrialist and founding member of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. James Watt, the inventor of the modern steam engine, attended meetings regularly. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin visited occasionally; Antoine Lavoisier corresponded with Society members; John Smeaton, the father of civil engineering, and Joseph Wright, the painter of the Industrial Revolution, were also regulars."

Adding further to my fascination is that there was also an Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society that was an advocacy group started by former asylum patients and their supporters in 19th century Britain, & that there was a Belgian Old school punk rock band (est. in 1992), & that there's a Lunaticks Society of Newcastle wch is a society of Newcastle digital and social media enthusiasts. I'm tempted to start my own!

Alas, Chester gets an ugly reminder of what such an aristocrat of the 'Age of Reason' might've really been like:

""And what makes you think a gentleman would wish to talk with you?" returned Joshua, obviously drunk but bright-eyed and clear of speech. "You're a black, damn it! You're not for talking to—you're for buying and selling!"" - p 105

Brunner pulls it off again! This story operates at multiple levels. At one level it's an entertaining story about the possibility presented by a new technology, at another it's a critique of the accumulation of power, at another there's hope for the beneficiaries of such power to benefit from taking a realistic look at their past. ( )

This is early Brunner, I would say, being written prior to 1961. This book is like the film "Time Bandits", with deeply irresponsible people going wild with inappropriate technology. Not a hint of the ability revealed in "Squares of the City" or "the Sheep Look Up." I'm glad he was encouraged to write more after this. ( )

Industrial magnate Harold Freitas wants a publicity stunt that will devastate his competitors when he launches his company's Timescoop capability, and so he decides to organize a family reunion -- the other family members being distinguished ancestors of his hauled out of the past by the Timescoop technology. What he doesn't realize is that the genealogist advising him on the distinction of his ancestors has done as all genealogists do in such situations: he gave a flattering depiction of the ancestors in question. So Freitas finds himself trying to limit the damage cause caused by a motley crew of psychopaths, sexual deviants and sleazebags. This is all rather reminiscent of the kind of lightweight, modestly entertaining, moderately amusing novels Robert Silverberg used to write way back in his early days, although to be honest is not as good.

The way that Timescoop works is of more interest, though. The chronon is (for the purposes of the tale) the smallest possible duration -- the unit of time. If you excise a chronon-thick layer (as it were) out of something's or someone's timeline, no one could ever notice, the gap between the two bits of the timeline being substantially smaller than an instant. Thus you avoid any possibility of a pesky time paradox, because you've left the past to all intents and purposes exactly the way you found it. Once you have the "cross-section" back in your 21st-century laboratory, you can simply let it behave the way nature intended: continue to exist along the time dimension as well as, of course, in the three spatial ones. "[R:]ight here, in the shape of this statue, is proof that it can be done, and even though we saw it -- uh -- grow in the Timescoop lab this morning, it is in every possible respect the original which we located in Praxiteles's own workshop and cross-sectioned just before its dispatch to the temple it was commissioned for." (p11)

It's depressing that the man responsible for such significant novels as Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, who with The Shockwave Rider effectively invented cyberpunk years before anyone knew what it was, probably earned himself a better hourly rate churning out -- quite probably in his sleep -- such dreary, supposedly funny, instantly forgettable, wholly unnecessary crap as this. Them's the commercial imperatives of the book trade, ain't they? ( )

Amusing, though the cover copy is way misleading.
--J. ( )