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Silverberg's Time Machine

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SOURCE: “Silverberg's Time Machine,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 4, Winter, 1982, pp. 345-61.

[In the following essay, Gordon discusses “In Entropy's Jaws” within the context of twentieth-century time-travel literature. He explicates Silverberg's use of that tradition's conventions in his story, as well as Silverberg's extrapolations from contemporary scientific understanding of time.]

According to the science fiction writer Barry Malzberg, when Robert Silverberg began to write science fiction as serious literature during the 1960s, what he did “was to take the clichéd, familiar themes of this field and do them right, handle them with the full range of modern literary technique.”1 This is precisely what Silverberg achieves in his short story, “In Entropy's Jaws” (1971).2 Through a complex narrative structure of flashbacks and flashforwards, he gives us a novel time travel story and a fresh view of the Einsteinian notion of the relativity or randomness of time. “In Entropy's Jaws” is an example of what science fiction can do at its best: it is at once a carefully crafted, dramatic tale in which the structure helps convey the themes; a sophisticated work aware of the conventions of both science fiction and modern “mainstream” literature; and a clever extrapolation from current ideas about information theory, entropy, and the human perception of time. Silverberg weaves together the elements of his story to create a twentieth-century myth about the shift from a Newtonian universe to an Einsteinian space-time continuum.

This is by no means to claim that “In Entropy's Jaws” is a perfect work. Silverberg tries to do perhaps too much, encompassing the materials of a heroic epic in a forty-page story, and his ending is overly ambiguous. Nevertheless, the ambitious attempt extends both Silverberg's range and the scope of what a science fiction story can do; it is worth examining in detail how Silverberg accomplishes his ends in “Entropy.” The short story has been Silverberg's testing ground, where he has pushed the form to the limits of experimentation. As the critic Russell Letson notes, “The novels are formally, if not thematically, closer to traditional science fiction models: there is rarely any doubt about whether an experience is real or not, and never the degree of structural disruption found in the shorter pieces.”3 However, before looking at the “structural disruption” Silverberg achieves in “Entropy,” it would be useful to set his achievement in perspective by examining briefly what time travel has meant in the history of science fiction in general, and in the career of Robert Silverberg in particular.

In Silverberg's view, “The only workable time machine ever invented is the time travel story. … Of all the basic themes of science fiction, I think that voyaging in time is the most fundamental, the closest to the heart of the matter. … The essential science-fiction thing for me is to reveal the future. That was what drew me to science fiction. … Science fiction became my time machine.”4

Silverberg is correct in his assessment of the fundamental importance of the time travel story to science fiction; the rise of science fiction as a genre is tied to changing modern concepts of the nature of time. The tale of a voyage through time became popular in America and England in the late nineteenth century as a response to the accelerated technological development of that era. The citizens of the most highly industrialized Western nations began to feel a disjunction with the past, as though they had been hurled abruptly into the future. The altered time sense of that era is reflected in the popularity of novels about a voyage into the future, such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), or novels about a voyage into the past, such as Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Both are studies of the effects of technological change on the social system, Bellamy's an optimistic view and Twain's a pessimistic one. H. G. Wells's classic, The Time Machine (1895), links the altered time sense directly with the changes wrought by technology; he invents the idea of a machine which transports one rapidly into the future. This is precisely what many late Victorians sensed the machine age was doing to them: displacing them in time. Ever since Wells, time travel stories have been a good index to changing twentieth-century attitudes toward the nature of time and our hopes and fears about past, present, and future, particularly as we have moved from a Newtonian conception of time to the radically new space-time continuum of Einstein.

Robert Silverberg has always been fascinated by time. He recalls reading “H. G. Wells when I was ten, most notably The Time Machine (which promised to show me all the incredible eons I would never live to know). … There was Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which also I read repeatedly. (How early my fascination with time travel emerged!)”5 From the beginning of his career up to the present, he has produced many short stories and novels of increasing sophistication concerned with time travel, including “Absolutely Inflexible” (1956), “Mugwump Four” (1959), Stepsons of Terra (1958), The Time Hoppers (1967), Hawksbill Station (1967), The Masks of Time (1968), Up the Line (1969), “In Entropy's Jaws” (1971), and “Many Mansions” (1973).

Most of these stories show a fundamental ambivalence toward time travel: it is both a liberating experience and a potential trap. “Mugwump Four,” for example, begins as a comedy, with the hero accidentally stumbling on a conspiracy of mutants who shunt him forward in time. By the story's grim conclusion, however, he finds himself trapped in an endlessly repeating time loop: “Inwardly Al wanted to scream. No scream would come. In this continuum, the past (his future) was immutable. He was caught on the track, and there was no escape. None whatever. And, he realizes glumly, there never would be.”6 The protagonist of “Absolutely Inflexible” also is imprisoned by means of a time loop. in Hawksbill Station, the metaphor of time travel as imprisonment becomes literal: the station is a penal colony situated in prehistoric times. And Up the Line, like “Mugwump Four,” begins as comedy and ends as grim tragedy: Jud Elliott at first finds time travel an enjoyable experience, but when he meddles too much with time paradox, he eliminates himself.

“In Entropy's Jaws” manifests the same ambivalence about the possibilities of time. The hero, John Skein, at first oscillates wildly in time, out of control and “unstuck in time” much like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, though by no means as passive about his situation as Pilgrim. In the end, Skein has apparently overcome his disability and become master of space and time. Or has he? The wording of the closing paragraph makes the meaning ambiguous, as if Skein is trapped in another of Silverberg's time loops: “He feels the sudden swooping sensations of incipient temporal fugue. Before he can intervene to regain control, he swings off into darkness. … Now he understands. The circuit is closed; the knot is tied; the identity loop is complete. He is destined to spend many years on Abbondanza VI, growing ancient and withered” (p. 504). If Skein is master of his fate, then why is he once again suffering from “temporal fugue”? And what is the word “destined” doing in there? Silverberg seems unable to decide between a universe of free will or one of determinism, and so leaves us deliberately dangling. Even though there are certain thematic continuities from an early Silverberg time travel story like “Mugwump Four” to a more recent one, the superiority of “In Entropy's Jaws” as literature is undeniable. It is the difference between a craftsmanlike, formula adventure story and a daring, experimental work of art.

The critic M. A. Goldberg distinguishes between two types of novels: in the old “novel of adventure,” time is chronological, whereas in the new “novel of inner consciousness,” all of time is available at any given moment.7 Since the growth of American science fiction was connected to the growth of pulp magazines, the literature was largely restricted for decades to the adventure story model. Consequently, we hear the complaints of such radical science fiction writers as Stanislaw Lem that, since H. G. Wells, the narrative structures of science fiction have become worn out, “frozen, fossilized paradigms.” Lem writes that “the premise of time travel stories serves frequently as a simple pretext for weaving tales of sensational, criminal, or melodramatic intrigue; this usually involves the revival and slight refurbishment of petrified plots.”8 What we are dealing with in “Mugwump Four,” then, is what Goldberg would call an “adventure novel” and Lem a “petrified plot.” “In Entropy's Jaws,” on the other hand, is akin to the “novel of inner consciousness.”

The fundamental difference between “Mugwump” and “Entropy” is a question of narrative structure. The inadequacy of most twentieth-century time travel stories (and one might even extend that to say most twentieth-century science fiction) is that they fail to follow through on their radical premises in the form of the story.9 To postulate a fundamental change in the flow of time requires a concomitant change in the sequence of time in the narration, yet most time travel fiction follows a standard linear plot progression. As the critic Gary K. Wolfe notes, “Experiments with narrative time sequence … are practically unheard of in science fiction, and yet the problems involved with time as an isolated concept are a staple of science fiction writers from Wells to Asimov.”10

The problem is that time travel stories have been trying to deal with twentieth-century conceptions of time in narrative forms borrowed from the nineteenth century.11 According to the novelist and critic Alain Robbe-Grillet in For a New Novel, most eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction was characterized by the “systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, [and] linear plots.” In such a fiction, “everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable universe.”12 Obviously this form of fiction is inappropriate to portray a universe in which time is now perceived in the light of Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

The Newtonian universe ran on clock time. Time was considered an absolute whose flow was perpetual, unalterable, and measurable by mechanical devices. But, as Lincoln Barnett points out in The Universe and Dr. Einstein:

Einstein discarded the concept of absolute time—of a steady, unvarying, inexorable universal time flow, streaming from the infinite past to the infinite future. … Sense of time, like sense of color, is a form of perception. … And just as space is simply a possible order of material objects, so time is simply a possible order of events. … The time intervals provided by a clock or calendar are by no means absolute quantities imposed on the entire universe by divine edict. … For Relativity tells us … there is no such thing as ‘now’ independent of a system of reference.13

It was not until the late 1960s that science fiction writers began to explore fully the possibilities of time travel stories using the entire range of literary techniques for dealing with time pioneered by twentieth-century authors such as Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf: present tense, stream-of-consciousness to indicate the disjunctions of memory and mental time; dense literary allusion to create the sense of the simultaneity of historically separated events; and abrupt shifts in point-of-view and fragmentation of narrative chronology to suggest the relativity of our interpretation of events and the disjunctive nature of time.

In the late 1960s, as science fiction moved away from the simple adventure novel, we began to get time travel stories which dealt with inner consciousness and experimented with nonlinear chronological structure. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was of course a breakthrough in this area: the narrative jumps with Billy Pilgrim through time and space.14 One can read this either as literal time travel or as Billy's unhinged fantasies—the free associations of a mind fleeing from a traumatic reality. Either way one reads it, the destructured narrative perfectly conveys a “Tralfamadorian” sense of time, in which moments are strung like beads without regard to past, present, or future, each moment equivalent to every other. “In Entropy's Jaws,” published two years after Vonnegut's novel, also juggles chronological sequence to convey a different perception of time. Like Billy Pilgrim, John Skein is on a quest through time and space. “Entropy” is a sort of spiritual pilgrimage with mythic undertones, similar to such other Silverberg works of the late sixties and early seventies (a period we might classify as “psychedelic” Silverberg) as Downward to the Earth (1970), A Time of Changes (1971), and The Book of Skulls (1972).

Briefly, “Entropy” is the story of Skein, a man who had reached the top of his lucrative profession as a “Communicator” able to create telepathic communion between individuals widely separated in space. Like other Silverberg heroes, such as Jud Elliott in Up the Line or David Selig in Dying Inside, Skein has everything and then must lose it in order to find himself or to learn the vanity of human wishes. Silverberg has always been very much the moralist, suggesting again and again that it does not profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul. So Skein falls. While facilitating communion between Coustakis and Nissenson, a client and a consultant with very powerful minds, Skein suffers a “burnout.” As a consequence, he loses most of his talent and begins to suffer from “time fugue,” during which he involuntarily relives past or even future experiences. One of the repeated future visions is of a remote planet on which he meets a“skull-faced man,” a guru who understands his problem and leads him to an amoeba-like creature, in a pit, who can presumably cure him. Thus Skein embarks on a lengthy pilgrimage through space to find the planet with the skull-faced man.

This synopsis, of course, does little justice to the skill and complexity with which the story is told: it opens on board a ship in space as Skein is already far into his quest, and it progresses through a series of flashbacks and flashforwards as Skein moves toward a climactic meeting with the man and the encounter with the creature on the planet Abbondanza VI. The story is primarily related in present tense, with a few shifts into past tense. As Skein shuttles from present to past to future, some sections are repeated, though in progressively abridged form, so that we begin to experience, along with Skein, the sensation of “déjà vu.” The flashes to the climactic encounter move forward a little bit each time they are repeated, until we approach the ending, when they become Skein's “present.” Thus the story generates a great deal of suspense. The skull-faced man keeps telling Skein that time is random, but we have no reason to trust him and no idea till the end what the creature in the pit will do to Skein. After Skein is cured, he goes back and edits the scene of his burnout, and then, slipping forward in time, discovers—the story's final revelation—that the skull-faced man is actually himself in old age.

Silverberg must maintain a delicate structural balance throughout the story. On the one hand, “Entropy” proposes that there is no such thing as cause and effect, that time is random. Time is not a river constantly flowing forward. “Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves. We filter them. We screen out what doesn't make sense and admit them to our consciousness in what seems the right sequence” (p. 476). On the other hand, he is writing a work of fiction which must be read in linear fashion in time; he must develop a plot and maintain tempo and suspense to sustain reader interest. A totally random, cause-and-effectless story would be unreadable.

Therefore Silverberg finds a compromise between total shapelessness and standard linear chronology: he scrambles the time sequence enough to allow the reader to participate in Skein's disorientation, but not so much as to baffle the reader and make him lose the thread of the story. He accomplishes this by having Skein's flashbacks and flashforwards follow a definite pattern, revealing information selectively, as it becomes necessary for the reader to know it. The oscillations in time are not as random as they appear, but contribute both to the exposition and to the maintenance of suspense. For example, once Skein has been introduced as a mystery man, on board ship for some unexplained quest, and hints are dropped as to his problem with time, the first flashback takes us to his disastrous burnout during the communion between Coustakis and Nissenson. The reader must watch along with Skein, aware but powerless to prevent the catastrophe we are told is coming. Skein returns briefly to his present on the ship, only to drop almost immediately into a vision in which he meets the skull-faced man. Thus the first two deviations from normal chronology show us dramatically the nature of Skein's disorder and establish the parameters of his journey. We move from his present (we begin “in medias res,” or in the middle of things, like the classical epic) to the point in the past where his problem began, and then to the point in the future where the solution may lie. Once Silverberg has established these markers (past, present and future), he can fill in the incidents in between, jumping back and forth in time without overly confusing his reader. Moreover, even as it oscillates into past or future, the story is gradually progressing in Skein's “present.” This technique corresponds to Conrad's “chronological looping” or “time shift” technique: establishing the main character first with a strong impression and then working backwards and forwards over his past.15

Silverberg also paces the narrative so that the fragmentation gradually increases; that is, the story concerns entropy, and its own entropy or randomness builds as we read. The first ten pages are divided into four sections, the second ten into seven, the third ten into ten, until the last ten pages shatter into sixteen separate units. The greatest degree of fragmentation occurs, appropriately, as the story nears its climax: “A tense, humid night of thunder and temporal storms. Lying alone in his oversized hotel room, five kilometers from the purple shore, Skein suffers fiercely from fugue” (p. 497). What follows is a rapid-fire series of seven flashbacks and flashforwards, each composed of brief or fragment sentences. All of them together take up less than a page; the effect is to increase the tension and the tempo of the narrative at this crucial juncture.

The fact that most of the scenes, whether past, present, or future, are written in present tense, also contributes to the message of the story. If, as the skull-faced man insists, “causality is merely an illusion … the notion that there's a consecutive series of events is nothing but a fraud” (p. 476), then the use of present tense suggests the equivalence of past, present, and future. The deliberate repetition of certain incidents, in whole or in part, adds to the message of the random nature of time.

In terms of narrative point of view, Silverberg has found another effective compromise. He uses a restricted point of view for most of the story, that of third-person, limited omniscience. Skein's is the only consciousness to which we have access, but the narrator provides us a perspective on the action. Thus the tale reflects Skein's bewilderment but distances us sufficiently from him. We avoid both the overwhelming confusion which a first-person narration would have created by plunging us on an unmediated journey into Skein's disoriented mind, and the excessive control which an omniscient narrator would have imposed.

In order to gain some of the advantages of omniscient narration without its drawbacks, Silverberg further fragments the narrative by interpolating brief parables or essays concerning time at strategic points in the narrative (Ursula Le Guin uses a similar device in the planetary myths included in The Left Hand of Darkness [1969]). These essays, which read like lectures or extracts from a textbook, give necessary supplementary information in a neutral, objective manner. They are separated from the narrative incidents and add an extra narrative “voice” which temporarily distances us from the action, providing a philosophical framework by which we may interpret an experience which would otherwise be perceived primarily in dramatic and emotional terms. Such periodic distancing suggests to the reader that idea is as significant in this story as action.

Silverberg diminishes the sense of randomness in the tale by anchoring it, just as Joyce did in Ulysses, in classical mythology. The substructure of “Entropy” is the archetypal quest motif. Skein is both a unique individual and an Everyman who must come to terms with time: Skein means “thread,” suggesting the classical Fates, who spun out destiny on a thread. Like a classical epic, such as Homer's Odyssey, the story begins in the middle of things and ranges over enormous stretches of space and time—in this case, over most of the Earth (Africa, Mexico, and Istanbul), into distant solar systems, and over decades of the hero's life. Skein even descends symbolically into Hades when he goes into the pit to commune with the alien being. His mentor, the skull-faced man, guides him like Dante's Virgil. Silverberg invokes other classical myths when he refers to “the Perseus relay booster” (p. 464), to the “Titanic lightnings” and “laughing centaurs” (p. 466) Skein supposes to be outside the spaceship, and to Skein imagining himself before his catastrophe as “Aeneas relishing a vision of unfallen Troy” (p. 467). Skein is equated with Odysseus when the ship passes through a deceleration station in space known as “Scylla” (p. 480), and the “Panama Canal” of space is a kind of Charybdis, or whirlpool: “the celestial vortex …, the maelstrom of clashing forces” (p. 465). Finally, the flashforwards serve the same purpose of foreshadowing the future as the visions granted classical heroes by the oracles.

Aside from classical mythology, the story also invokes the Bible: Skein before his fall is not only Aeneas but also “Adam looking back into Eden” (p. 467). There is even a naked Eve, here called Nilla (suggestive perhaps of nothingness?), who accompanies him into a tropical paradise. Skein gains forbidden knowledge, the knowledge of the true nature of time, and because of this he falls. Yet, Christlike, he must go apart from men, suffer, and be reborn in the end.

Midway through the story, as Skein skims through the ship's library, Silverberg works in a score of literary references which broaden the tale's range of meaning and reinforce the mythic substructure. We get a rapid montage of brief quotes from works spanning the centuries: Marlowe's Faust, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Keats's “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” Blake's “Tyger,” Nietzsche's Man and Superman, Yeats's “Leda and the Swan,” Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Pound's Cantos, Eliot's The Wasteland, and Lowry's Under the Volcano, among others. Rather than explicate the meanings of each quote, let me suggest some of the purposes they serve in the story. First, many of the quotes refer directly to classical (“Chapman's Homer,” “Leda,” and Portrait), Biblical (Faust, Ulysses, and Under the Volcano), and even Hindu (The Wasteland) mythology, adding to the symbolic reverberations of “Entropy.” Second, some comment indirectly on Skein's situation, as for example the Nietzsche: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—A rope over an abyss” (p. 481). Skein too is a “rope” (his name means “thread”) stretched over the abyss of time; by the story's end, he will become a Superman. Third, as in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, the modernist technique of a pastiche of quotes from different centuries creates new meanings through juxtaposition. For example, consider this linkage of quotes: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hieronymo's mad againe. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken” (p. 481). The first two sentences evoke Kyd by way of T. S. Eliot; the last comes from Keats. The juxtaposition applies to Skein, who is afraid of madness and using bits of culture (his reading) as fragments shored against his ruins—but at the same time he is on the verge of a great breakthrough, like the astronomer finding a new planet. Finally, this collage of fragments, which is interspersed with bits of an essay on time, itself represents the process of disorganization, or entropy.

Aside from the quotes, Silverberg also includes a wide-ranging and suggestive list of authors and titles for the books Skein reads in the ship's library; it could almost serve as a bibliography for anyone researching Silverberg's reading in literature and science. Besides the abovementioned authors, the list includes Rilke, Kafka, Poe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jung, and Pirandello, and several authors with whom the general reader may be unfamiliar, such as Bury and Eddington. J. S. Bury was a twentieth-century historian whose study, The Idea of Progress, traced the development of the modern belief in progress. According to the skeptical Bury, progress is a myth and belief in it “an act of faith,” for the most prominent fact in the history of civilizations has been “arrest, decadence, stagnation.”16 One can see the relevance of Bury's views to a story such as “In Entropy's Jaws,” for entropy is a measure of the disintegration of systems. Silverberg certainly shows us decadence in his future civilization in such scenes as the callous slaughter of an almost-extinct breed of turtle by venal Mexican fishermen, and the greedy behavior of the tour guides in the cathedral of Haghia Sophia. The twentieth-century scientist Sir Arthur Eddington was another firm believer in entropy, as he explained in The Nature of the Physical World: “The practical measure of the random element which can increase in the universe but never decrease is called entropy. … The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature.” According to Eddington, as we move into the future, randomness or entropy must always increase. He invented the terms “time's arrow” to explain this concept: “Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element, then the arrow is pointing toward the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points toward the past. … I shall use the phrase ‘time's arrow’ to express this one-way property of time.”17 Silverberg refers to the notion of “time's arrow” on four occasions in the story.

I have tried to demonstrate the sophistication of “In Entropy's Jaws” in terms of narrative structure and awareness of modern literary tradition; moreover, as its title indicates, it is unmistakably a science fiction. For the remainder of the essay, I will explicate some of the scientific knowledge from which Silverberg extrapolates: first of all, entropy and information theory and their relation to time; next, the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, “future shock,” and temporal lobe epilepsy on the consciousness of time; and finally, the nature of our unconscious perception of time. Silverberg synthesizes all of these ideas in his story. The fact that Silverberg mixes together in Skein's booklist works of literature, science, and philosophy suggests the interdependence of the three in his fiction. The scientific concept of entropy leads Silverberg to questions of cosmology and the nature of time; physics leads to metaphysics.

The concept of entropy entered popular culture in the 1960s in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. “Entropy” (1960), V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973) use entropy as a symbol of the fragmentation and decay of modern civilization and of the hopeless feeling that it is not just a local energy crisis but that the universe itself is running down. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the novels of Kurt Vonnegut can also be considered entropic fiction in their fragmented structures and wild improvisation. In science fiction. J. G. Ballard's gloomy stories are obsessed with entropy, and George Alec Effinger plays with the concept in What Entropy Means to Me. Like Pynchon, Silverberg links the notion of entropy with the new science of information theory, thus developing the theme of the difficulty of communication. (“The failure of sentient beings to communicate” is one of Silverberg's recurring themes, according to the critic Thomas Clareson.18)

The scientific understanding of communication took a major step forward in the late 1940s with the publication of two works: The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, and Cybernetics (1948) by Norbert Weiner. Shannon developed a universal, symbolic model of a communication system consisting of an information source, a transmitter, a communication channel, a receiver, and a message destination. This model would hold for any message, from something as simple as two people talking (the brain serving as the information source, voice the transmitter, ear the receiver) to something as complex as a television program. Every system has a built-in limit: the channel capacity, or amount of information it can carry in any given instant. Moreover, in the process of sending a signal, an element of distortion, static, or error always creeps in: “All these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise.”19 The noise must be filtered out of the system.

To attempt to convey organized, meaningful information is to battle constantly against entropy in the form of noise and time (for all messages must be sent in time, and entropy, as Eddington points out, always increases in time). According to Norbert Weiner, inventor of the science of cybernetics, “Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its disorganization: the one is simply the negative of the other.”20 To convey organized information is therefore to create negative entropy (also known as negentropy).

Therefore, when Silverberg writes a story in which the protagonist is a “Communicator” who is swallowed up “in entropy's jaws,” we see that he is extrapolating in fiction from current ideas about the science of communication. Silverberg makes us inescapably aware of the theme of communication from the opening lines of the story: “Static crackles from the hazy golden cloud of airborne loudspeakers drifting just below the ceiling of the spaceliner cabin. A hiss: communication filters are opening” (p. 464). Skein as a communicator deals in information; in fact, his office is flooded with it: “With the amplifiers on he can see as far as Serengeti in one direction, Mombasa in the other. Count the fleas on an elephant in Tsavo Park. A wall of light on the east-southeast face of the dome, housing his data-access units. No one can stare at that wall more than thirty seconds without suffering intensely from a surfeit of information. Except Skein; he drains nourishment from it, hour after hour” (p. 467).

The theme is further developed when Coustakis approaches Skein for help with a problem in communication: “Coustakis has almost invented a system for the economical, instantaneous transportation of matter. … However, Coustakis has not yet perfected his system. For five years he has been stymied by one inescapable problem: keeping the beam tight enough between transmitter and receiver. Beam-spread has led to chaos in his experiments; marginal straying leads to loss of transmitted information, so that which is being sent invariably arrives incomplete” (p. 470). Thus both Skein and Coustakis deal in information, and both will suffer problems from communication breakdown.

Skein's burnout is caused by an overload in his channel capacity: when he tries to filter the telepathic communion between Coustakis and Nissenson, the synergy of the two minds overwhelms him. He simply takes on more information than he can handle. Skein's mind is overly sensitive: “he cannot disengage; he has no mental circuitbreaker” (p. 472). Excessive feedback builds up, similar to the effect of noise or static created when one turns a live microphone back towards its amplifier: “A fiery oscillation is set up. Skein sees what is happening; he has become the amplifier of his own doom” (p. 472).

Feedback is nothing more than the regulation of a system by its own output, like a heater which switches itself on or off according to its output. The same term can also be applied, as Norbert Weiner does, to biological systems. Feedback is not perfect; it is always subject to delay and may either undershoot or overshoot. If a system has no dampener—if it is oversensitive—it will not be able to steady the channel but will instead go into unrestrained and increasing oscillation. As Norbert Weiner notes, “a badly designed thermostat may send the temperature of the house into violent oscillations.”21 This is roughly analogous to the catastrophe which overtakes Skein.

One way to explain his resulting disorientation in time is that it constitutes entropy's revenge. As a Communicator, Skein was constantly battling entropy, matching positive entropy with negative. Now, with his filters burned out, he finds himself trapped in continuous wild oscillation between the two stages of entropy. But, as Eddington explains, to increase in entropy means to move forward in time; to decrease it means to move backward in time. Thus Skein “was no longer anchored firmly to his time-line, but drifted in random oscillations of twenty years or more in either direction” (p. 483).

Skein's problems throughout have been those of communication, and his solution comes through communication, when he “makes communion” with the alien being who heals him. The necessity to find a higher form of communication, to merge in a mystical union with the alien in order to gain awareness and spiritual transcendence, is the message not only of “Entropy” (1971) but also of Silverberg's Downward to the Earth (1970). Thus “Entropy” is concerned with communication in the late 1960s and early 1970s sense of communion, union with the cosmos or with all sentient beings. As I mentioned, “Entropy” was written during Silverberg's psychedelic phase, when his stories reflect an interest in the attainment of cosmic consciousness through hallucinogenic drugs or other means. Skein can be seen as breaking through to a “countercultural” mode of perception of reality.

According to the psychologist Robert Ornstein, the normal modality of time perception in Western civilization is linear. Certain other cultures, such as the Sufis, Zen monks, Trobriand islanders, and the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest see time as a patterned whole or gestalt.22 During the late sixties, with widespread experimentation in consciousness-altering drugs, some Americans began to break through to a nonlinear perception of time:

Certain drugs, such as marijuana, psilocybin, LSD, and the amphetamines, including MDA, may occasionally alter the “reducing valve” of the normal sensory system. If the dosage is mild, the great increase in the contents of consciousness may produce an effect similar to increasing the amount of information reaching the person. … But with stronger doses the effect sometimes overwhelms the linear mode of consciousness entirely, and induces a nonlinear mode of experience. … These experiences, for many, represent the first significant break from a normal linear consciousness, normal reality, and normal time. For some, the break into a new area of experience is unsupported by the remainder of their lives and their training, and they may not be able to return to normal consciousness. The very discontinuity of these experiences is difficult for many to deal with.23

This is one way to understand Skein's dilemma: he has broken through to a nonlinear mode of perception, and as a consequence he is “freaking out.”

Yet another way to interpret Skein's case of information overload is that he is suffering from what the sociologist Alvin Toffler calls “future shock.” Toffler invented the term in the 1960s and popularized it in his book Future Shock (1970); Silverberg was probably aware of the concept when he wrote wrote “Entropy.” According to Toffler, the accelerated pace of modern life strains our information-processing abilities—in other words, our channel capacity. Psychologists and communication theorists who tested to discover the limits of the channel capacity of the human organism found that “overloading the system leads to serious breakdowns of performance.” The psychologist James G. Miller speculates that “information overload may be related to various forms of mental illness” and perhaps accounts for the common symptoms noted among “battle-stressed soldiers, disaster victims, and culture-shocked travelers.”24 In such an interpretation, Skein's disorientation merely reflects, in extreme form, the cognitive overstimulation to which all of us are subjected just in getting through the day.

Whereas Silverberg may have had the experiences of the drug culture and of victims of “future shock” in the back of his mind as models for Skein's disorientation, he also seems to have patterned it directly on a medical model, a disorder known as “temporal lobe epilepsy.” Neurosurgeons have recently discovered by stimulating sections of the brain with electrodes that we all carry a permanent record of the stream-of-consciousness, like a tape recording or a film. “The evidence suggests that nothing is lost, that the record of each man's experience is complete.”25 Certain people suffer from occasional, involuntary stimulation of the centers of memory in the form of epileptic seizures. According to the neurologist John N. Walton: “The typical major attack may begin with an aura or warning which indicates the situation of onset of discharge, but quite often this sensation is indefinable and little more than a ‘sinking feeling’ or ‘an odd sensation in the head.’ It is rare for an aura to last for more than a second or two and very often there is no warning at all. Consciousness is lost, the patient falls to the ground.”26 The attack itself “may include intense emotional experiences (fear, depression, anxiety), feelings of unreality (depersonalization) and a sensation of intense familiarity as if the patient were living through a vivid past experience (déjà vu).” This past experience is not so much remembered as it is reexperienced in its entirety, complete with all the attendant past sensations and emotions. Subjects report a feeling of doubleness: simultaneous awareness of present circumstances and the past experience. Powerful sensory stimuli can sometimes provoke these temporal seizures. “Conversely, it is sometimes possible to abort an epileptic seizure by means of sensory stimuli which presumably compete for the occupancy of the fibre pathways along which the epileptic discharge is spreading.”27

Silverberg seems to pattern Skein's attacks according to the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. First, the seizures are preceded by physical sensations and an aura: “Skein feels the familiar ugly throbbing at the base of the neck, as if the tip of his spine is swelling like a balloon” (p. 466). During the seizure, he may lose consciousness, as he does in the first episode on board ship, or fall, as he does from a stool while talking to a fellow passenger in the ship's lounge. His seizures are also accompanied by fear and feelings of depersonalization. Again, like the epileptic, be experiences déjà vu and a sense of doubleness: “Quite clearly most of them invoked scenes of his past, which he would relive, during the moments of fugue, with an intensity so brilliant that he felt he had actually been thrust back into time. He did not merely recollect, but rather he experienced the past anew, following a script from which he could not deviate” (p. 477). Like an epileptic's, Skein's seizures are sometimes provoked by powerful sensory stimuli, as when he slips into fugue while the ship is passing through a celestial vortex: “Outside the ship the universe is being wrenched apart; some of that slips in and throws him into a private epilepsy of the time-line” (p. 466). Conversely, he can sometimes forestall temporal seizures by means of sensory overload, as when he reads compulsively on board ship: “He finds this heavy verbal overdose helps, to some slight extent, to fight off the fugues; his mind is weighted, perhaps, bound by this leaden clutter of borrowed genius to the moving line of the present, and during his debauch of reading he finds himself shifting off that line less frequently than in the recent past” (pp. 480-81).

However, Silverberg adds a few features to the medical model of temporal lobe epilepsy. First of all, Skein experiences both flashbacks and flashforwards. Second, Silverberg suggests that it may not be a disorder at all but a breakthrough in consciousness. Skein then is not so much a temporal spastic as he is a seer who has gone beyond the normal, limited human categories of perception. One is reminded of Aldous Huxley's account of his experiences with hallucinogenic drugs in The Doors of Perception. As the skull-faced man explains to Skein:

Your brain has been injured; what was destroyed was the center of temporal perception, the node that humans use to impose this unreal order on events. Your time filter has burned out. The past and the future are as accessible to you as the present, Skein: you can go where you like, you can watch events drifting past as they really do. Only you haven't been able to break your old habits of thought. You still try to impose the conventional entropic order on things. … (p. 496)

In other words, Silverberg incorporates current medical knowledge about temporal lobe epilepsy into his story, but as any good science fiction writer must do, he goes beyond it, using it as the basis for speculation, for a philosophical critique of the limitations of conventional Western perceptions of time.

Apart from the extrapolations in the story about the effects of temporal lobe epilepsy, Skein's bizarre experiences convey a fundamental truth about the nature of unconscious time. The story has, as I indicated, an archetypal, mythical substructure. Skein on his quest or spiritual pilgrimage must grow up, undergo a rite of initiation like the typical mythic hero. The twist here is that his guide, the skull-faced man, turns out to be an older version of himself. There are premonitions of this throughout the story: Skein is described in the opening as having a “high-vaulted skull” (p. 464), and later, when he asks the old man, “How do you know so much about me?” the skull-faced man replies, “I was injured in the same way as you” (p. 496). Thus the surprise ending is carefully prepared for, and even has a certain inevitability. Psychologically, it makes sense, for the theory of the unconscious has shown us that the past persists in the mind. As one critic puts it, all phases of human development are “present at the same time in the unconscious,” and are “constantly modifying conscious behavior.”28 We all carry into adulthood earlier versions of ourselves, and like Skein, we all must become our own parents and help these younger selves to survive and to change. So the story is true to psychological time.

Silverberg claims that the science fiction story is the only workable time machine, but he forgets that it is modeled on the operations of the original time machine: the human mind. In the opinion of the critic H. Bruce Franklin, “When one says time travel what one means is an extraordinary dislocation of someone's consciousness in time. Every day we all travel in time in a number of ways. … Time travel fiction simply asks us to exaggerate some part of our everyday time travel. We may do this by observing and thus sharing someone else's extraordinary movement of consciousness in time.”29 And, as the psychologist R. H. Knapp notes, “In dreams, fantasy, hallucinations, and the arts, time indeed may stand still or even reverse itself as though it obeys our deep wish that it assume the flexibility of spatial extensibility and yield to the relative mastery by which we govern space.”30

Time travel stories, as I suggested before, are a way to express our wishes and fears about time. According to the critic Mendilow, the twentieth century has been particularly “time obsessed” because of the acceleration of change, “the widespread sense of the transience of all forms of modern life.” Time, the agent of entropy, seems to be working against us, constantly cutting away the ground on which we stand. We all feel caught in entropy's jaws: “The universe has proliferated into a multiverse. … We are bewildered and frustrated in our attempts to synthesize for ourselves a new, harmonious and stable pattern of living and thinking.”31 Science fiction writers offer a particular expertise in coping with change, in dealing with new syntheses. The deliberate dislocations in time and space of science fiction can give us a perspective on the dilemma of the human situation in modern times.

Silverberg's fiction, in such stories as “In Entropy's Jaws,” reflects the bewilderment and frustration of modern individuals dislocated in space and time. His stories ceaselessly absorb new information and play with ideas, always searching for new integrations, for “a new, harmonious and stable pattern of living and thinking” in the face of an apparently indeterminate, discontinuous, and aimless universe. Chaos can be a trap, suggests Silverberg, but it can also be liberating: if time is random, then it is up to all of us to become time travelers, to pattern it as we wish. Time has, as the title of another Silverberg story puts it, “many mansions.” One may live in any or all of them.

“In Entropy's Jaws” is a twentieth-century myth about the trauma which ensues when you leap from absolute, linear, Newtonian time into the relativistic, Einsteinian space-time continuum. As mythic hero, Skein stands in for all of us, defeats the evil dragon Entropy and restores harmony to the land. Yet, ironically, the order he brings to the wasteland is not that of the status quo ante, but the radically new consciousness of the Einsteinian universe. This universe is a product of our consciousness, suggests Silverberg, and we have all the bewildering variety of space and time in which to exist. “Abbondonza” is the name of the planet on which Skein finds what he is seeking, and “abundance” is what this rich story seems to promise we will find amid the chaos of our time.

Notes

  1. Barry Malzberg, “Robert Silverberg,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Apr. 1974, p. 69. See also Thomas D. Clareson, “The Fictions of Robert Silverberg,” in Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Vol. 2, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1979), p. 2. “In short, by the 1970s Silverberg was writing science fiction much as such of his contemporaries as Barth, Reed, Barthelme, and Coover were presenting their renditions of everyday American life.”

  2. Robert Silverberg, “In Entropy’s Jaws,” in Modern Science Fiction, ed. Norman Spinrad (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1974), pp. 464-504. Further references are to this edition of the story and will be given in parentheses.

  3. Russell Letson, “‘Falling through Many Trapdoors’: Robert Silverberg,” Extrapolation, 20 (1979), 114.

  4. Robert Silverberg, Introduction to Trips in Time: Nine Stories of Science Fiction, ed. Robert Silverberg (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1977), p. 1.

  5. Robert Silverberg, “Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal,” in Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (New York: Harper, 1975), p. 11.

  6. Robert Silverberg, “Mugwump 4,” in Trips on Time, p. 112.

  7. M. A. Goldberg, “Chronology, Character, and the Human Condition,” in Critical Approaches to Fiction, ed. Shiv K. Kumar and Keith McKean (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 20.

  8. Stanislaw Lem, “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction,” in Science Fiction Studies: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1973–1975, ed. R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin (Boston: Gregg Press, 1976), p. 7; and “The Time Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring,” (same volume), p. 21.

  9. I am indebted for this idea to R. B. Kershner, Jr., “Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness: The Alien Self” (unpublished essay): “Science fiction frequently, often naively, alters some fundamental characteristic of our world or of ourselves. Only the most sophisticated writers are able to follow the implications of such a change on the level of a book's hypothetical universe and on the level of the literary work. Cosmology determines literary structure.”

  10. Gary K. Wolfe, “The Limits of Science Fiction,” Extrapolation, 14 (Dec. 1972), 34.

  11. See Frank Orin Sadler, “Science and Fiction in the Science-Fiction Novel,” Diss., Univ. of Florida 1974, p. 20: “The science-fiction novel of the first half of the twentieth century shows little or no modification or development from its ancestry. The form of the novel remained essentially unchanged while the ideas it presented and treated underwent a radical and revolutionary change.”

  12. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard, 2nd ed. (1963; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 32, 30.

  13. Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (New York: William Sloane, 1948), pp. 39-41.

  14. See Sadler, p. 151: In Slaughterhouse-Five, the “relativistic and associative concept of time results in a nonlinear and discontinuous effect in the structuring of the novel.”

  15. See A. A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (1952; rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1965), p. 104.

  16. J. S. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1932; rpt. New York: Dover, 1935), pp. 14, 342.

  17. Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928; rpt. Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan, 1958), pp. 74, 69.

  18. Thomas D. Clareson, “Robert Silverberg: The Compleat Writer,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Apr. 1974, p. 74.

  19. Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949; rpt. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1964), p. 8.

  20. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (1948; rpt. Cambridge: M.I.T., 1969), p. 11.

  21. Weiner, p. 97.

  22. Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1977), p. 112.

  23. Ornstein, p. 108-9.

  24. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970; rpt, New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 353.

  25. Wilder Penfield, “The Permanent Record of the Stream of Consciousness,” in Readings in Physiological Psychology, ed. Thomas K. Landauer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 371.

  26. John N. Walton, Essentials of Neurology, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966), p. 105.

  27. Walton, pp. 103-4.

  28. Mendilow, p. 5.

  29. H. Bruce Franklin, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford, 1978), p. 364.

  30. R. H. Knapp, “Personality and the Psychology of Time,” in The Study of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser, F. C. Haber, and G. H. Muller (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972), p. 313.

  31. Mendilow, pp. 6, 7.

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