The thing all things devours
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers
Gnaws iron, bites steel
Grinds hard stones to meal
Slays king, ruins town
And beats high mountain down!-- J.R.R. Tolkien,
The HobbitThe answer to Gollum's riddle, of course, is Time. It's the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, the lane down which
entropy rolls. It is crushing and inexorable.
Most time-travel literature deals in motion backwards, sideways, or even looping. But there's another branch of time travel which focuses on the direction we normally go: forward. Even a brief jump is disorienting, which causes problems in releasing convicts from prison as they struggle to adjust to a world that has moved on without them and sometimes changed quite a lot. There's a term for that,
jail-lag. The longer the time, the worse the effects. In fantasy, we have the old story of
Rip Van Winkle, the iconic figure of forward time-traveling, who slept for at least twenty years.
My January 8, 2013 Poetry Fishbowl spawned the poem "
A One-Way Trip," about time travel deployed as a weapon. Then
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chordatesrock wrote the haunting fanfic "
After." In the future after a devastating war and a brutal victory, life ... somehow ... goes on. There are currently seven poems in this series, plus the fanfic; you can find them via my
Serial Poetry page.
This is very dark science fiction. It deals in
deep time, stellar time, as well as time on a human scale. Billions of years pass within the span of that first poem. The rest of the action then plays out in the
far future. Not much science fiction is written that far down the timestream, because it's so hard to predict or even imagine what it would be like. I cheated a bit by taking characters from a much closer time, and wiping out everything else from their timeframe, thus creating a pretty clean slate to work from in the future.
As the storyline progresses, the protagonist finds a habitable planet and settles there, gradually learning about its plants and animals. Depression is a constant threat due to survivor guilt and isolation. But time flows only one way; there is no going back, only forward. The poems are written in
second person ("you) and
present tense, both uncommon literary techniques which create a sense of immediacy and immersion.
What are your thoughts on forward time-travel and the deep future?
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trope_bingo fest. You can find other poems in the series Tripping into the Future via my Serial Poetry page.
