A Long Time Until Now by Michael Z. Williamson
Cover art by Kurt Miller
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Although one can trace the concept of traveling through time at least back to Charles Dickens and his famous Christmas classic, A Christmas Carol, in which the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge back to revisit the Christmases of his youth, the first work in which time travel is handled as a matter of science and technology rather than the supernatural is HG Wells' The Time Machine. However, even it is as much social commentary as it is an actual extrapolation of scientific and technological development.
It was in the pulps that time travel really became a staple of science fiction. To be sure, there were authors who used time travel as a device to get their characters to a setting in which they could have Adventures as the world was becoming increasingly known territory, much as the BBC television serial Doctor Who would use the Tardis a few decades later. But there were many authors who explored the various ramifications of time travel, particularly the potential to create paradoxes and loops. For instance, Robert A Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" has a man who's summoned to the distant future by an older version of himself, which involves a handwritten dictionary of the future language which the younger version steals, then later recopies -- but where was it originally created? Inevitably philosophical questions of fate and free will began to crop up, questions that go all the way back to the Ghost of Christmas Future and Scrooge's plaintive question of "Is this what will come to pass, or what may come to pass?"
With each new time travel story that came out, subsequent writers had to find new ways to explore the implications of escaping the bonds of linear time, of fixed past and unknowable future. By the 1990's, editors were listing time travel as one of the tropes they advised beginning writers to avoid, along with alien invasions and "...and their names were Adam and Eve" stories, or at most to write one for the dresser drawer, just to get it out of one's system. It was pretty much regarded as a trope that had been played out.
However, no idea is so completely played out that a master cannot find a new take on it. Just as Harry Turtledove's Worldwar tetralogy had breathed new life into the alien invasion story by moving it to an alternate World War II, two writers independently and almost simultaneously produced a new type of time travel story -- S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time and Eric Flint's 1632. The former gave one of the most common names to this new sub-trope "$PLACE in the Sea of Time," which was popularized on Usenet and later the Alternate History discussion boards, but this type of story could just as well be called "Robinson Crusoe in Time," to parallel the various "Robinson Crusoe in Space" stories that were a staple of early space opera and sword-and-planet stories.
The basic idea of the trope is simple: a community or other group of people is cast backward in time by unknown forces, and must cope with the consequences of being in the past. Its roots can be seen in the 1980's movie The Final Countdown, although that one cops out at the end by having the mysterious time storm pop up again just as the captain of the USS Nimitz is about to make a decision about whether and how to intervene in the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By contrast, the time travel in Stirling and Flint's novels is permanent, and the people of Nantucket and the West Virginia mining town of Grantville have to deal with the fact that they're going to be living in the Bronze Age or the Thirty Years' War for the rest of their lives, and their descendants will have to live in the future they make. As they realize they can't avoid changing history, they decide that they might as well change it for the better.
Michael Z. Williamson's take on this new sub-trope of the time travel story goes back to its roots, although instead of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and its air wing embarked, his unexpected time travelers are the occupants of two military vehicles in a US Army convoy moving between bases in Afghanistan in 2012, the year in which the novel came out (the election is mentioned in several places). A number of reviewers have commented on how those two MRAPs just happen to have troops with just the right mix of talents, skills, outside interests and physical abilities to make it possible for them to not just survive, but thrive in the Paleolithic. However, one could respond that it's a situation rather like the Anthropic Principle in physics: much as we notice how perfectly suited for life this universe is because we're here, we're reading the story in which the characters have that Right Stuff because it's the story that's actually interesting to read, rather than the downer story in which Everyone Dies because of a lack of key skills, or the one that's Too Easy and therefore boring because the characters don't have enough weaknesses to make survival a struggle rather than a cakewalk.
The story begins as an ordinary trip between combat bases, or at least as ordinary as any military operation in a combat zone can ever be. Then there's a sharp bang like a bomb going off, and a sudden drop with a thud at the bottom. Except there's no other effect of an explosion, which leaves them wondering just what really did happen.
A quick look around shows them that the rest of the convoy has vanished, along with the road. But larger landforms are still recognizable, in particular certain distinctive mountains, so they know that they're still in the same place. However, the sun is most decidedly at a different position in the sky than it was only moments earlier.
They're not complete mundanes, so they have sufficient basic familiarity with science fiction tropes to realize that they've either been flung backward in time or into an alternate universe. A little observation, particularly of the night sky, makes it clear that they've been thrown backward in time, somewhere in the Paleolithic, when humans first began to spread out of Africa, but before the development of agriculture or the domestication of dogs.
Once they no longer have that immediate need to secure their own survival to focus their attention, the implications of their situation begin to sink in and they all go into a state of shock, barely able to function. Fortunately this area is sufficiently sparsely inhabited that they get the necessary time to get through that psychological shock and pull themselves back together, rather than being immediately attacked as easy prey.
Recovered from the shock of being thrust backward in time, they realize they're going to need local help, local knowledge, if they are going to survive longterm. After a relatively brief search they contact a small tribe of Paleolithic people, astonishingly gentle and friendly. With the help of one of the troops, who has a natural skill for languages, they establish communications, and the tribe's elders invite them to stay in one of the longhouses.
In fact, the Paleolithic people are just a little too friendly, and our heroes are constantly having to warn them away from items of modern military technology that could be incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands, from firearms to steel knives. These people have no real sense of personal property, or even personal space, and thus don't really grasp that they're constantly violating their guests' basic norms of social behavior.
Although the Paleolithic people would happily welcome these people with their mysterious and powerful (albeit demanding and restrictive) spirits, it's clear to our heroes, and particularly to their commanding officer, that they are not culturally compatible to form a single community. Instead, it is better that they be good neighbors and co-operate, but continue to live separately. So the troops depart to scout a more suitable place to set up camp, and then move their MRAPs to the new location. There are some serious moments, as when the medic reminds everyone how important it is to maintain one's health, and some funny ones, like the moment when another character says, "My Indian name is Bob," bringing to mind the experience of calling a help desk and getting "Hello, my name is Bob" in a strong Hindi accent and realizing you've been sent to the call center in Mumbai again.
While the process of setting up a modern military encampment in the distant past is fascinating in many ways, it's only when a new group of time travelers are introduced that things truly become interesting. The newcomers are from the Neolithic age, and from a a region that in modern times is under the Baltic Sea, but in their era was still dry land as a result of lower sea levels. They have begun to domesticate the dog (what the Paleolithics call "the wolves that walk beside them") and are much more aggressive than the Paleolithic people.
The first thing they do is take over the Paleolithic encampment, killing or driving off the men and taking the women and children as slaves. It makes a grim sort of sense: hunter-gatherers in a region of low population and relative abundance can afford to be peaceful for the simple reason that conflicts over resources can be resolved by one side agreeing to move on and follow the herds of game animals elsewhere. By contrast, agriculturalists' food supply is rooted in the ground, and to be driven off one's land is to be effectively doomed to starvation. As a result, maintaining control over one's productive land becomes a major focus of an agricultural society.
It also fits with the idea that slavery began as a humane alternative to the extermination of rival agriculturalist communities, when someone realized that the vanquished were more valuable alive than dead, if they could be subjugated both physically and psychologically. The Nelolithics not only see captives as potential assets, but also have a social structure that focuses on establishing dominance and control in such a way that captives will actually be a net asset instead of a net drain.
When our heroes discover that their first friends have been subjected to such horrors, their initial response is outrage. However, they also know that they don't want to do anything rash. So three of their number are sent as a diplomatic mission, with directions to see if they can free at least some of the Paleolithic captives.
The visit quickly turns ugly, and by overwhelming force the troops liberate the enslaved Paleolithics. Even as they head back to their base, which they call COB Bedrock, a reference to The Flintstones, they wonder how the Neolithics will respond after the initial shock subsides.
As it turns out, they've already acted, making a serious attack in numbers on COB Bedrock with its incompletely built palisade. It's an ugly and very uneven fight, and in the end, we get to see how much the lieutenant has learned about leadership. He's not going not have any of his troops do anything that could be considered a war crime, so he deals with several of the mortally wounded but lingering Neolithics himself, albeit at a considerable psychological cost.
They finally get the Neolithics to stop troubling them after a second visit to their camp, which includes an unpleasant encounter with a lioness and cubs. The troops then claim they're trying to capture lion cubs and raise them as domesticates, the way the Neolithics have their dogs, and in the process score some major badass points.
However, they've no more than established the pecking order than new arrivals upset everything. They're Romans, along with Mughal sepoys, what the Romans would call sociali. At first it looks like the troops have established their strength without fighting, and have convinced the centurion that America is Rome moved west (which is not entirely a lie, given how much of our government and military tradition is drawn from Roman models, and how much of Modern English comes from Latin roots). However, that honeymoon period doesn't last long -- the Romans are conquerors, not allies, and intend to establish their dominance over these strange people, who may have many Latin words in their language, but clearly as a superstructure over a Germanic core.
The resultant fights are very ugly, and the lieutenant seriously considers just wiping the Romans out and being done with it. However, doing so would mean losing a hundred men who understand such technologies as the forging of steel with pre-industrial equipment. They just need to be taught who's the top dog here -- but how?
After several fights, they reach an uneasy modus vivendi, and even do some iron-working together. And then more time-travelers arrive to toss everything in disarray. They are two incredibly ripped dudes in a futuristic car that seems to be just cram-packed with futuristic tech. They speak English, but so mutated by time that it's hard to understand and make themselves understood, and even when they get the pronunciation of words down, there are still so many presuppositions not shared that communication is difficult. There's also evidence that a great deal of knowledge has been lost between our heroes' time and their own, viz their needing to locate the troops' home time in reference to the life of Abraham Lincoln (as someone born and raised in Illinois, I was proud to know that Lincoln should be still remembered in their time).
Unsurprisingly, the future people, who suggest the name Cogi (the Knowers or the Wise) as a referent for themselves (after rejecting appellations such as "the Watchers," which suggests the Nephilim from the Old Testament and various deutocanonical Jewish religious documents), are quite cagy about a number of things, from the capabilities of their technology to just what they know about these time displacements. As a result, our heroes are uneasy about what these guys' motives are, no matter how friendly they seem to be. Not to mention that the troops are all too aware that they're now effectively in a "be done by as you did" situation.
In particular, the question of just how much the Cogi do or don't know about the time displacements (which seem to go deeper in the past as well, given things like the herd of mammoth that migrate through the camp) raises the question of whether they (or at least their people) are the ones who caused the displacements in the first place. But the Cogi aren't talking, at least beyond the announcement that they've re-established contact with their people in the future and can get all the time-displaced people, including the Romans and Neolithics, out of this era. It means some unhappy partings, since a number of the Romans and Neolithics took Paleolithic wives or concubines and must leave them behind (which raises the question of the consequences if any of those women were impregnated by uptimers -- will the consequent children with time-displaced genetics have effects on history, or will they be lost in the general shuffle of humanity).
Both Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson end with the marooned protagonists reunited with representatives of civilization. However, the time rescue of our protagonists by the Cogi is not the end of this novel -- and as the troops arrive in the future, they begin to wonder just how much of a rescue this really is. Do the Cogi regard them as fellow human beings, or as some kind of experimental animals, or something worse? One of the troops overhears something about "we can let them live," and realizes that the Cogi did not necessarily have the unit's best interests in mind. In fact, this segment of the novel made me think about the part of Robert A. Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel in which Kip and Peewee are in the Galactics' hands, and especially the trial.
This is a Baen book, so we can rest assured that there will indeed be a happy ending -- although their return home will not go nearly as smoothly as Kip and Peewee's did at the end of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Hardly surprising given the security situation -- Afghanistan is a war zone, and security forces have to be aware of the possibility of troops turning coat, then returning as double agents.
Although this novel is complete in itself, and would be fully satisfying even if it were all that Michael Z. Williamson ever wrote about these characters, I found that I'd come to enjoy them enough that I'd really like to know more about them. Yes, there was the problem of characters sometimes being referred to by first name and other times by last name, so I had to work a little to remember who was who, and there was a fair amount of military jargon, but on the whole I really enjoyed their struggle to survive, and then to thrive, in the distant past -- and then to sort out a future culture so different that it might as well have been aliens. I think the sergeant may well have been an Author Avatar, but handled in a way that never becomes an Author Tract (for instance, the character is an atheist, but at one key turning point tells the deeply religious character that his faith is an important part of who he is, and he should not discard it just because some of the particulars of his holy book have turned out to not fit with the past they visited). And I'm happy to know that yes, there will be a sequel, coming out at the end of 2021, titled That Was Now, This Is Then.
Buy A Long Time Until Now from Amazon.com
Review posted September 5, 2021
