Nonetheless, I have been reading several texts of both fiction and non-fiction at my leisure in hopes of garnering a better understanding of the various concepts behind time travel.
Having just now finished Michael Crichton's Timeline, I find myself more adequately versed in the understanding of Multiverses as an alternative to the actual displacement of time and a humans ability to travel within the fabric of it. The conceptual understanding of Multiverses suggests that time cannot be travelled, rather multiple universes exist very similar to our own, which can be visited using a complex means of destroying our partical make-up, only to re-establish it in another time. Per se, this concept does not infer the existence of time travel, rather it denies it. The explanation for it's existence, as introduced in Crichton's gripping work of fiction, but later supported my own heightened googling abilities, speculates that particles on earth are affected by particles in other universes, thus the varying properties of particles i.e. waves, etc.
While my novice understanding of science, specifically quantum physics and the understanding of quanta, slows my ability to grasp such concepts, I remain intrigued nonetheless.
The new found obsession with the varying theorems for the existence of time travel has led me to another book - and alas, this week's Book Of The Week.
I must preface this brief book review by pointing out the fact that I had a great deal of difficulty finding this book, only to discover the Toronto Public Library system had a sole copy. Unfortunately, the book was at the Toronto Reference Library downtown on Yonge just north of Bloor and was only available to be viewed as a reference in the stacks.
As much as I enjoy sifting through reference books amongst the city's homeless people, I vowed to find an alternative - only to find it online, in PDF form. Upon discovering this luxury of convenience, I became both pleased by the efficacy with which I could now read the book, and dismayed by the fact that books are found for free on the internet. Took me a few days to get through this one consistent with my aversion to reading dense quantities of text in PDF form, but alas, I made it.
Let us return from the tangent shall we?
Golf In The Year 2000 (also titled as What We Are Coming To) is a brief read of a novel penned J. McCullough in the late 1890's. It centres around a young Scottish golfer named Alexander J. Gibson, who succumbs to a deep sleep in 1892, only to awake in the year 2000 to a very different land from the one he knew.
The book is as much about time travel as it is about the evolution of societies and 19th century Scottish golf traditions. Where Crichton deluges readers with dense scientific reasoning, McCullough simply describes a place 108 years in the future that is quite similar to the one we currently inhabit. Much like Gene Roddenberry's outlook of future civilizations on Star Trek's maiden voyage, the brilliance of this work is its soothsaying qualities.
The author suggests the existence of high speed rail travel, televisions, digital watches and most noteworthy, the equality of men and women in both daily life and the workforce.
There are several similarities between the context of this book and Jules Verne's The Lost Novel: Paris in the Twentieth Century. In both fictional works, the narrator provides in assessment of modern amenities from the perspective of somebody firmly entrenched in the morays of the time and culture from which they originate.
Golf In The Year 2000 doesn't engage itself in a debate over time travel, but it does mirror many other similar works in the sense that it predicts a time very similar to our own that must have theoretically been a stretch for the author. The contemporary update of the novel features footnotes for many of the 19th century British language, and is a delight for both fans of golf and speculative literature.
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