Basel, Switzerland, in the year 2125, an ultramarine paradise on stilts in the Sea of Switzerland. Dystopia has never been this good
Time and place (let’s call it space) play a big role in the novel Drifting on the Edge. The reason is simple. I’d just read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. But I had also been reading a very different book — one about refugees crossing the border near where I live on the Swiss frontier outside Basel. In eyewitness interviews, people talked about how WWII changed their lives on the border, how refugees (many from Eastern Europe) crossed each day to flee the Nazi regime, how the border closed, and how eventually it was sealed by a barbed wire fence.
The fence ran from the Rhine downstream and upstream from Basel, cutting through fields and dense forest along the way. One small section was left open, though. It’s called Eiserne Hand (Iron Hand), and it’s less a hand than a finger of Switzerland that pokes into Germany’s fleshy rump deep in the Southern Black Forest.
The Nazis wanted to put their fence across its narrow opening, because anything else would have meant fencing off the entire perimeter of about 4km. The Swiss thought they might not get it back after the war. So, heavily guarded, this slither of land remained unfenced. As I write this, it is about 100 meters behind me.
Other books influenced the novel too. I was probably reading some pulp fiction at the time, because I’m decidedly “carefree” about distinctions between “high” and “low” literature.
These three things came together in Drifting – Hawking’s book on time, another book on the region during WWII, and pulp fiction.
It’s About Time
Space was not a big problem in the book. It’s set on the border of France, Germany and Switzerland — around that imaginary point in the middle of the Rhine river just downstream from Basel.
Time was a problem, though, because I’d set the novel in the present, past and future. The characters aged only nominally in the future, but otherwise they stayed the same age, much as they do in Ettore Scola’s 1983 film Le Bal, which tells the story of a ballroom over five decades.
So far, so good. But blocktime, which is how most physicists see time, is counter-intuitive for readers, who are used to a beginning, middle and an end arranged in a linear timeline. Even when plots in novels jump back in time or skip to the future, they’re still pretty much linear. There are novels with cyclical time. One is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. And, of course, different cultures see time in different ways.
But can you really spin your characters back to WWII, put them on the balcony of a fine hotel and have Joe Jackson’s Steppin’ Out (1982) playing over loudspeakers?
You can if everything exists everywhere all at once.
NOVELISTIC BLOCKTIME – A BUMMER FOR EVERYONE
At the end of this blog you can find a video from Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist, who explains blocktime.
As she puts it:
“ALL EVENTS EXIST NOW. ALL OBSERVERS’ VIEWPOINTS ARE EQUALLY VALID — EVERYTHING EXISTS NOW.”
That’s the essence of blocktime: past, present and future all exist in the same spacetime. What changes is not time itself, but our experience of moving through it.
But Novels Have Imaginary Time
It becomes even more complicated when we add another layer: the novel’s own sense of time. As well as real time, novels create their own imaginary time, which we accept as totally believable and real. We immerse ourselves in this fictional world and accept its own sense of time without question.
I’m sorry to say it’s complete and utter fancy.
But we suspend our disbelief, accept the fictional timeline the author has given us, and get on with enjoying a ripping yarn until we reach THE END. Then, this imagined time ceases and real-world time kicks in again. At least, we hope it does.
DRIFTING IS PROFANE
So much for time. Drifting is also profane in other ways.
Drifting disregards the distinction between high and low literature. It’s as if you put Kinky Friedman in the same shoebox as Shakespeare (Shakespeare is quoted quite a lot in the book) and tell them that everything exists now and that their perspectives are equally valid. Isn’t that what a theoretical physicist would say too?
And it’s not such a far-flung idea. Shakespeare was a popular writer in his age. Both Kinky and the Bard were masters of the crude joke, profane language and innuendo.
WHY SOME READERS FIND THIS MADDENING
Profanity can get the goat of some readers.
I know this, because I’ve sat at dinner tables and in authors’ groups with them. A few really lost the plot. Shakespeare, alongside a Jewish cowboy from Texas who thinks all cats are Republicans? You must be joking!
Yes, I am.
Now the Video
In this excerpt, Sabine explains blocktime and, unwittingly, almost explains why, in one chapter of Drifting, two characters watch the same football match at Basel’s football stadium but see different things happening at the same time.
Well, they would see different things happening if they were moving at vastly different speeds or were separated by vast cosmic distances. They’re not.
But their drinks were spiked with an unknown substance, so it’s not surprising that their perceptions become somewhat warped.
I recommend going back to watch the whole thing afterwards, as you’re being thrown in the deep end here.
DOES THE PAST STILL EXIST