Blackout and All Clear and Telos

[jsburbidge]

This is not so much a review as a reflection on the time travel issues in Connie Willis' Blackout and All Clear.

What I'll call the "theoretical resolution" of the books -- that slippage and the other misbehaviours of time travel were to ensure that the historians changed the past (in a particular way), rather than defences of the continuum -- seems to be missing two components, which are tightly interrelated:

1) The time-travel adjustments on their own aren't enough -- to take a simple example, just delaying and redirecting in space Mr. Dunworthy would not guarantee that he would knock down the WREN Wendy Armitage.  Not even the interference by Alf and Binnie would do that.  It required an additional factor of the specific path he then took and the specific frame of mind he was in.  Polly getting her shoe caught so that she heard Sir Godfrey and was able to save his life is a low-level coincidence requiring that her foot land just so.

2) What is the "neutral baseline"?  Or to put it a different way, why is the continuum focussing on ensuring that the war was won?  After all, "war was won" is a pretty high-level concept.  As I see it, there are two possibilities.

1. There was some form of ur-Time Travel error which caused the war to be lost, and everything since then is a response to it.  This is what is implied as a model at the end of To Say Nothing of the Dog -- that there's a source of disruption stemming from even further up the timestream, and everything connected to 2060 is a correction for it.  I have trouble with this, because editing for that kind of disruption would seem to be most effectively done by close-up surgical correction, not a a Rube-Goldberg machine of falling dominoes which will eventually correct the "important" parts of the continuum (while leaving all sorts of extra changes propagating forward, like Eileen's DNA).
2. The ur-baseline really is a lost war, but it never "actually" occurs because in this universe causes work in different directions, and there are a whole set of forces showing up both as time travel blips and as coincidences (making over-extensive use of the Hodbins, maybe because once they've been saved their lives are dependent on the Oxford-2060 future coming to pass -- which would also explain why Colin becomes available as a "tool" to save Polly and Mr. Dunworthy, as he's also a product of it).  In this case, you pretty well have to assume either a meddling set of still-higher-order beings setting up the coincidences, or you have to assume that the continuum itself has or manifests intentionality and a capability at high-level chunking (i.e. can form and act on concepts like "the Allies win the War").

I'm inclined to answer both these questions by taking the view that Willis is presenting a model of the continuum which is indistinguishable from Divine Providence.  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will", and it's quite capable of working at the micro level (stuck shoes, accidental collisions) as well as a more macro level (shutting down time-travel access to an entire period of the past once it has its actors in place.  In addition, it has a telos towards which it works, which encompasses a "Allies have to win" as well as a "Colin has to be born" level and "We need cats in the future and a mass die-off isn't going to prevent it" level.  It may be important that the thematic core of the book is a sermon (even if a sermon at the funeral of someone who is not, in fact, dead), and that the dramatic core centres around a night in which St Paul's Cathedral was saved.

It's worth noting that Willis has a Presbyterian background, and that she is frequently quoted as saying "It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir".