First Contact and Time Travel - a collection of essays and fiction by Serbian scholar and author Zoran Živković.
In his essays, Zoran analyzes specific SF works by Arthur C. Clarke. Zoran also shares a number of overarching philosophic observations, including the following:
ALIENS – FIRST CONTACT
“When we imagine Others, in our SF works, as either invaders or missionaries, either good or bad, we always anthropomorphize them. We tailor them to our own measures. We project our own motivations on them. But it is only really safe to suppose that they are fundamentally different from us, entities with inconceivable motivations, far outside our anthropomorphic norms.
If this is so, then we have to face a critical question: do we even have the mental ability to imagine genuinely heterogeneous entities? Others which would not be in the least anthropomorphic?”
TIME TRAVEL
“No time machines, at least as far as we know, have been noticed arriving from the future. Not now, and not at any earlier time.
This, to be fair, still does not mean anything. Perhaps the world is teeming with such time machines but we do not notice them, because they either directly or indirectly are not making their presence known, that is, they are not influencing the past.”
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Zoran's essays on first contact and time travel were written back around 1980. However, as Zoran tells us, these essays were not his last word on these provocative themes; rather, he returned to them much later in life when he himself became a fiction writer. Why? Because, as he observes, “these are things one can only say as a writer.” Accordingly, I'll make a shift to Zoran's fiction.
THE BOOKSHOP
The tale's narrator sits at his computer at the counter in his science fiction bookshop and looks out the front window as fog descends late one autumn evening . As per usual, there are no customers, thus he's able to write another one of his own science fiction stories. Just then, as if materializing out of nowhere, a man appears and enters his bookshop. The narrator pushes the 'save' button since the story he's written needs no additional changes; rather, other than a final read through, it is fine as it is.
This small, slight man with wire-rimmed glasses is a new customer. The narrator knows this since he has an excellent memory for faces. Following the usual round of pleasantries, the man tells him the work he's looking for is in this bookshop. The narrator asks the man about title and author but the stranger knows neither. When he inquires about the subject, this stranger with a strange vegetable smell tells him directly, “It is about my world.” The narrator smiles and remains silent. The stranger goes on to explain he's from a star eleven and a half light years away. The narrator thinks, aha, he's in the presence of another one of those - an oddball.
Such a typical reaction. Recall Zoran's questioning our ability as humans to imagine genuinely heterogeneous entities. Could we actually ever 'see' an alien? (Further on, the stranger tells the narrator his usual form is a soft, round ball). To compound this dilemma, think of that passage in Robert Sheckley's Mindsweep: Don Quixote thinks the windmill is a giant, whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. If Quixotism is seeing everyday things as rare entities, the reverse is Panzaism, the perception of rare entities as everyday things. Our very human, all too human tendency is Panzaism – we forever reduce the magnificent of the cosmos to our small, restricted categories.
Back to the story: the stranger talks of traveling via “the fifth force.” The stranger elaborates: humans on Planet Earth know the fifth force as imagination along with things like fantasy and daydreams. This statement is in accord with what Zoran notes about the fairly recent development of “fantastika” fiction - a type of literature transcending the boundaries of traditional science fiction.
And appropriately enough, although the stranger with the queer vegetable smell leaves the science fiction bookshop with a disk containing the narrator's science fiction story, the very work he knew at the outset was in the bookshop, the very work he needs to reestablish harmony in his world,The Bookshop is itself a work of imaginative “fantastika” fiction.
THE PUZZLE
Mr. Adam spent an entire career working at a center where his job was listening for signals coming from outer space. Is there sentient life out there? An entire career and, other than inarticulate noise, nothing, not one shred of intelligent anything for Mr. Adam to report. What a waste, thinks Mr. Adam.
Now that he's retired, Mr. Adam has an abundance of empty hours. He decides to fill his time with various activities – cooking on Sunday, biking on Monday, reading at the library on Tuesday, watching animals at the zoo on Wednesday, visiting churches on Thursday, going to movies on Friday and sitting in the Park on Saturday.
One Saturday Mr. Adam watches as workers construct a bandstand. Oh, no, Mr. Adam thinks, not music, not a crowd to disturb his peaceful sitting in the park. But Mr. Adam is surprised when one day as he sits in his usual spot and the orchestra begins to play, he becomes transfixed and, as if moved by a mysterious force, takes out his notebook and pen and begins marking notation to the music. Mr. Adam fills the last page in his notebook just as the orchestra plays its final note.
Mr. Adam buys paint supplies (he's never painted in his life) and commences to transfer his notebook notes to a canvas via paints. Mr. Adam paints slowly but with passion and when he's done he doesn't know what he's painted but he senses he got it exactly right, just as the music ordered. Mr. Adam returns to the park every Saturday for the next thirteen weeks, this time with canvas and paint, and paints what the music orders. No painting the music on week fifteen however, since the bandstand and music are gone. Anyway, now that he's done, Mr. Adam hangs the paintings up on his wall, all fourteen, and sits in his living room and looks and looks at them, occasionally rearranging the paintings and he looks some more. A week later Mr. Adam has had enough, having looked at the paintings nearly every hour of every day, he now carries the paintings down to his cellar and gets ready to begin cooking.
Sound odd? Please reread the above paragraph with an additional piece of information: those fourteen paintings just might serve as our first contact, our first signals received from intelligent life in outer space. With this story, Zoran has given us an example of the way art can help broaden our understanding of first contact.
THE CONE
Oh, how I wish I could go back in time and visit my fifteen-year-old self on a specific day. No need to go into details here but, let me tell you, I would grab that younger version of my self by the shoulders and plead, “Wake up! Wake up! Please, please, wake up!”
If I could do such a thing, would it really be all for the good? As Zoran conveys in the book's concluding essay, The Cone isn't about time travel per se so much as it's about asking ourselves if time travel has a human meaning - “Do those who receive various time gifts from a mysterious visitor really benefit from them? Are they now any happier? Should an older version of the protagonist disclose to the younger self what the future has in store for him? Or is ignorance of the future the only thing that makes life possible?"
First Contact and Time Travel also includes the four tales that make up Zoran's novel, Time Gifts. Link to my review of this novel: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Serbian author Zoran Živković, born 1948
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