(This is a review of the short story, "In the Mirror of Eternity")
Short stories about time travel, with the associated paradoxes, have been among the classics of SF since the 1950s: think of Ray Bradbury’s "A Sound of Thunder", Poul Anderson’s "Delenda Est", or Robert Heinlein’s "All You Zombies". Sixty-odd years on, finding an original angle on the time travel short story can’t be easy. Derek McMillan has however managed it in his brief but excellent "In the Mirror of Eternity".
Instead of the actions of time travellers creating problems for history, as is usually the case, here just observing the past is the problem. Schroedinger’s cat and the multiverse provide a scientific underpinning. An irony of the story is that both the narrator and the time machine’s inventor, the louche Xavier, remain totally unaware of what is happening as their own history too changes: indeed, Xavier reassures the narrator more than once that merely observing the past can have no consequential effects.
The narrator’s (and, one suspects, McMillan’s) interest in early twentieth-century politics provides the alternative history background, with history changing at almost dizzying speed towards the end.
The originality of the conception demands further development, and McMillan has provided this in four sequels.
Short stories about time travel, with the associated paradoxes, have been among the classics of SF since the 1950s: think of Ray Bradbury’s "A Sound of Thunder", Poul Anderson’s "Delenda Est", or Robert Heinlein’s "All You Zombies". Sixty-odd years on, finding an original angle on the time travel short story can’t be easy. Derek McMillan has however managed it in his brief but excellent "In the Mirror of Eternity".
Instead of the actions of time travellers creating problems for history, as is usually the case, here just observing the past is the problem. Schroedinger’s cat and the multiverse provide a scientific underpinning. An irony of the story is that both the narrator and the time machine’s inventor, the louche Xavier, remain totally unaware of what is happening as their own history too changes: indeed, Xavier reassures the narrator more than once that merely observing the past can have no consequential effects.
The narrator’s (and, one suspects, McMillan’s) interest in early twentieth-century politics provides the alternative history background, with history changing at almost dizzying speed towards the end.
The originality of the conception demands further development, and McMillan has provided this in four sequels.
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