First published in
Astounding Science Fiction, April 1948.
This is another one
that’s available free from Project Gutenberg.
In a coincidence that
Charles Fort himself might have enjoyed, Piper and this story in
particular are name-dropped in the latest issue of Fortean Times.
An article by Bob Rickard outlines the close relationship between SF
and Forteanism, and a photograph of Piper shaking hands with John W
Campbell illustrates the article: an example of a writer who used
Fortean ideas in his ficiton.
I’ve mentioned this
before, of course, in relation to a lot of different stories,
including Don’t Look Now and Up There. Science fiction and Fortean
interests are also commonly associated in the public mind – SF fans
are almost always as UFO nuts in popular culture , and the reverse is
even more true. The reason for this is easy to spot, of course:
they’re united by a love of UFOs and aliens, animal cryptids and
the secrets of lost civilizations.
From my earliest
memories to today I’ve loved these things and I think it’s about
more than just the shared imagery. Story types bleed back and forth
between them, building on and influencing each other: the alien
abductee, the mysterious creature in the bushes, the adventurer
archaeologist tales that power both Indiana Jones and the likes of
Graham Hancock and Erich von Daniken, the free-energy utopias and
ruthless oppressive secret dystopias.
I think SF fans are
predisposed to this kind of story. Fortean tales ask the reader to
make the same kind of imaginative leap that SF does. You need to make
connections and build a secondary world, a world implied by a
contingent interpretation of the facts in the same way that SF worlds
are implied by a contingent interpretation of various scientific
theories. Both types of story rely heavily on speculation: for
example, what if that light in the sky isn’t the sun reflecting off
a flock of migrating geese after all but the beach head of an alien
invasion?
This story story is
based on the mysterious disappearance of the English diplomat
Benjamin Bathurst in 1809. What if, Piper imagines, that rather than
being robbed and murdered he slipped through the shackles of time and
space itself? Where might he end up?
The sort of alternative
history time line he finds himself in is a familiar scenario in SF.
This story is often held up as one of the finer early examples but
doesn’t really do much with the idea.
The closest we get to a
central point is the issue that lies at the boss of all these
stories: the key event that lies at the moment of divergence. Here
it’s due the absence of of Benedict Arnold from the Battle of
Saratoga, which leads to the defeat of the revolutionary army in the
American revolutionary war. With no successful revolution in the
Americas, the French revolution never occurs and there are no
Napoleonic wars.
After he’s made his
point about alternative histories, Piper has Bathurst killed off
stage and a somewhat limp and irrelevant punchline is provided in the
last couple of paras. I recall a few years ago reading a collection
of detective stories based in alternative time lines of this sort and
most of the stories suffered from the same sort of problem:
ultimately the plot is just a vehicle for demonstrating a bit clever
world building.
It can be done well.
The alternative world forms part of the central metaphor in stories
like The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling or The
Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. Most of the time,
though, it’s just a kind of shaggy dog tale and that, ultimately,
is what we get here.
Themes: alternative
history, time slip, Forteanism, historical clever dickery.
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