Most time travel fiction comes with a hefty dose of wish fulfillment, which is part of its charm. Heroes and heroines tumble into past eras yet retain their superior modern knowledge (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court); they can engage in hands-on historical research (The Doomsday Book), swashbuckle through a romantic era (Outlander), change the course of history (Lest Darkness Fall) , meet the love of their lives as a child (The Time Tra
veler’s Wife) or, heck, even meet themselves (By His Bootstraps). So it’s unsurprising that British sci-fi master Christopher Priest—known for his dystopian and delirious worlds like the Dream Archipelago—has dabbled in time travel only occasionally, in stories like “An Infinite Summer” and “Palely Loitering”. Both appear in his 1979 collection An Infinite Summer, and both reveal time travel as a dark vortex of a force, powerful as gravity or electro-magnetism, and difficult to contain.
Freezers
In the title story, set by the Thames in Richmond, travelers from the future freeze small groups of people, known as “tableaus”, taking them out of the time stream for years or even decades, while the world goes on obliviously around them. Thomas Lloyd was one of those frozen—in the year 1903, while courting his truelove, Sarah Carrington—and he didn’t unfreeze until 1935. As the Blitz unfolds in 1940, he continues to visit Sarah, still frozen in that moment of 1903, reaching to touch his hand. Somehow, in the freezing process, he has gained the ability to see the tableaus. He can also see the time travelers, known as “freezers”:
The freezers, from some unknown period of the future, as ethereal to ordinary men as their wishful dreams, moved like shadows through light, stealing sudden movements with their instruments.
Thomas Lloyd seems as shadowy as they, separated from both his love and the future world he’s awoken in, yet able to witness both. The disturbing undercurrents of the story derive in part from the freezers, who come from an unknown in inexplicable future, and in part from the way they can snip an organic, breathing moment from a person’s life and crystallize it, like a laboratory specimen. In most cases, the subject is in an interesting or dramatic pose, such as a German parachutist who has ejected from his airplane and is about to land in the river:
Now that the man had been frozen it was possible to see that his eyes were tightly closed, and that he was holding his nose with his fingers in anticipation of the plunge. But at the same time it was clear that he had been wounded in the aircraft, because blood was darkly staining his brown flying jacket. The tableau was at once amusing and poignant, a reminder to Lloyd that however unreal this present might be to him, it was no illusion to the people of the time.
Lloyd’s alienated passivity might make for a tepid plotline, but Priest, skilled storyteller that he is, alternates between 1903, 1935 and 1940 to give the story a surprisingly dramatic thrust. Yet it’s the still, sad, immaculate imagery of the tableaus that comes to my mind whenever I think of this story.
By the River of Time
Longer and more meditative, “Palely Loitering” reads like the B side to “An Infinite Summer”. It shares the same Edwardian background, but in this case time travel, known as Flux, was developed in some distant and more technologically advanced past. It’s unknown whether this is an alternate reality story or if it is simply set in a recidivist future where English culture has returned it to its Victorian roots. In either case it has the future-in-the-past feel that would coalesce in the 1980s under the moniker of “steampunk”—a subgenre that Priest had no small hand in creating, and one he would return to in later novels like The Prestige.
Mykle, the narrator of the story, tells how as a boy he would go with his family once a year to picnic in Flux Channel Park, and choose to cross one of two bridges: the Tomorrow Bridge, from which they could visit the opposite bank where the next day was happening, or the Yesterday Bridge, which brought them to the previous day.
The sun reflecting from the silvery surface of the flux-fluid (we sometimes called it water, to my father’s despair) made it glitter and sparkle like rippling quicksilver. Mother would not look at it, saying the reflections hurt her eyes, but there was always something dreadful about its presence so that no one could look long. In the still patches, where the mystifying currents below briefly let the surface settle, we sometimes saw upside-down reflections of the people on the other side.
On a boyish whim, Myckle jumps from the rail to the bank on the Tomorrow Bridge, rather than simply walking off the end.
Although I did not realize it at first, in leaping from the bridge and moving up through a part of the flux-field, I had traveled in time. It happened that I landed on a day in the future when the weather was as grey and blustery as on the day I had left, and so my first real awareness, when I looked up, was that the pagoda had suddenly emptied. I stared in horror across the parkland, not believing that my family could have vanished in the blink of an eye.
A strange young man helps Myckle get back to his present, but before doing so he points out a beautiful young woman named Estyll, with whom he’s obviously infatuated, sitting on a bench by the Flux Channel, literally watching the river of time. As Myckle grows into adolescence, he continues to make the leap to the same future period and find Estyll, with whom he, too, becomes fascinated; only later does he realize the young man on his first visit was an older version of himself.
“Palely Loitering”, has in its way, the same sort of tableau structure as “An Infinite Summer”: the same woman on the same bench, awaiting her lover, while various incarnations of Myckle from different years look on. In this case, however, the scene represents the dream-like ideal of true love, and the wistful notion of reliving life with different choices made the second time around.
Both stories were written in during the same time period as Priest’s novel The Space Machine, which blends HG Well’s best-known novels, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, by placing human time travelers on Mars just prior to the Martian invasion of Earth. In the Introduction to An Infinite Summer, he writes:
“An Infinite Summer” was written because there was one strong feeling that would not fit in the novel: the sense that layers of time exist, that places do not change so much as people.
This “layering” effect can also be seen in “Paley Loitering”, with its trip across the Yesterday Bridge and Tomorrow Bridge.
Civilized Entropy
Though similar in tone and vaguely Victorian setting, the two stories differ in the technical details of time travel itself. The time travelers in “An Infinite Summer” use a small device to freeze their subjects:
This was shaped rather like a modern portable camera, and was carried on a lanyard strung around the neck, but it was much larger than a camera and was approximately cubical in shape. At the front, where on a camera would be a bellows and lens, there was a rectangular strip of white glass, apparently opaque or translucent, and it was through this that the freezing-beam was projected.
How the travelers themselves got to 20th century England is, however, unknown. By contrast the Flux Channel in “Paley Loitering” is in plain view throughout the story. Originally built to launch a starship, it covers more than a hundred miles of land and now helps power civilization.
…I knew by my tenth birthday that it had taken more than two decades to build, that its construction had cost many human lives, and that it had taxed the resources and intelligence of many different countries.
The starship had never returned, and no more were launched, so now Flux Channel Park, with its bridges at different angles across the channel, served as a picnic destination. Although Myckle asserts that “the principle on which it worked was well understood today,” there seems to be no travel itch—through space or time—left in humanity. This entropy of civilization—or at least the loss of a sense of adventure—is hardly a dystopia; I for one would much enjoy a stroll through Myckle’s bucolic future world. That said, a note of melancholy seeps through “Paley Loitering”, as it does through “An Infinite Summer”. Neither piece is exactly the stuff of wish fulfillment. Yet Priest’s quiet, naturalistic prose, romantic characters, and an imaginative understatement give the stories a lifelike (dare we say literary?) charm quite different from most “gee-whiz” science fiction stories. It’s as though Christopher Priest has caught a glimpse of 
something entirely outside the genius of his own brilliant mind—the more subdued but stranger future that’s really out there, waiting.
And fortunately for us, that future will almost certainly include more fiction by Christopher Priest—his latest novel, The Gradual, was released this past fall.
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