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An Appreciation of The Cross-time
Traders by Harry Turtledove
Like many grown adults, I freely
admit to enjoying “cross-over” books: These are young adult (YA) books enjoyed
by adults too. I enjoy being carried away to worlds where, say, preparing for
the senior prom is Real and Earnest. Even more, I like the fantasy world of the
Harry Potter series, yes, and the science fiction (sf) world of The Hunger
Games trilogy, too. What about a time travel book? Would it be experienced as
an adventure of fantasy or of science fiction? It would depend on the author. I
really appreciate the “Cross-time Traders” YA series by Harry Turtledove. It’s
always a pleasure to find a new one.
Every new book takes place on a new
“timeline” with new characters. Harry usually portrays two teenagers: one girl,
one boy; one time traveler, one native. Both teens are putting energy into
questioning and understanding the world they are growing up into. It’s this
driving urge to know that makes the series science fiction, not fantasy. I hope
schoolteachers and librarians are aware of the Cross-time Traders series.
The gimmick is simple: One of the
teens is with parents or an uncle or something, all posing as merchants running
a little store, while surrounded by locals who mustn’t ever learn their secret
identity. In the series, inventing cross-time travel is just as momentous as
inventing the A-bomb, only it’s much, much easier. If the natives ever learned
such travel was even possible, they would soon figure out how to do so too.
Hence the time-travelers are sworn to lonely secrecy.
These traders are “out of time,”
shipping desperately needed grain and resources back to their own world through
a portal in the basement. Cool! Secret rooms and concealed technology! The
twist is the people travel not to different “times” but to different “earths,”
to alternate worlds that have the same date as back home, but are not so
advanced. The traders, as it happens, are in the late 21st century.
Some of the worlds they trade with have computers with silicon chips, computers
as advanced as late 20th century earth, but still not as good as
back in the home timeline. Why not?
Various reasons. And here is where
Harry’s rollicking good plots disguise “teachings” that could help his young
readers gain perspective on the world, just as the heroes are gaining
perspective too. As I see it, maximum “progress” over the generations happens
when everything goes just right. But lots of things can go wrong. Progress can
be delayed, since human societies, alas, are imperfect. My high school history
textbook was divided into sections such as ‘The quest for security,’ ‘The quest
for freedom’ and so on. God bless our children: They don’t realize yet what it
means to be a responsible citizen.
As you know, today’s privileged
school kids usually find “the past” boring. They don’t understand how things of
“right now,” including things as vital as, say, the War On Terror, are easier
to manage if one has an historical understanding of what conditions nurture the
public and democracy, and what conditions are abusive to the public.
Harry offers modern lessons. The
fear today on the streets of Islamist Iran is like on the streets in the world
where the Kaiser’s army got atomics first. Today’s child indoctrination by the
Saudi’s exported “madrasses,” or religious schools, (Islam is under attack,
Jews are ruling, etc.) is like the California boy, some generations after an
atomic war, believing everything he’s been told about the folks over in the
next valley. Today the mullahs (priests) of the Arab world are contorting
themselves to combine old Arabic words to describe new things, while
discouraging innovation and free thought. They are acting like the bureaucrats
in the world where the Roman Empire never fell… hence there was no dark age… a
world where nevertheless, in the 21st century, they haven’t gone
beyond muskets and slavery yet. (An application of the thick best seller Guns,
Germs and Steel)
As for slavery, in one of the
worlds the US, having advanced into the industrial age, no longer has racial
slavery, but they have two levels of citizen, based on race. And in one
state--oh irony!--the levels are reversed: Mississippi. In this world the civil
rights movement, with the federal transport laws supporting the Freedom Riders,
never happened. As well, the locals have a technology that is still a hundred
years behind the home timeline. Their divergence in “fortune,” in both senses
of the word, came some time after 1776 when, for federal taxation and representation,
they couldn’t manage to find the right balance between going by State or by
population. (States like Wyoming have fewer people than New York City) And so
they couldn’t manage to have a Union. This would echo certain far-reaching
mistakes today in the Constitution the US has foisted on Iraq. History matters.
Harry Turtledove’s stories, by
encouraging thought experiments, can teach in the way “games” do. As for games,
in one novel, Gladiator, the cover shows a hand holding up a typical
multi-sided Dungeons’nDragons die. In Italy the teen hero is posing as a
typical high school student, helping to run a gaming store, selling Gladiator.
In this world the Soviets have won
the contest for “the hearts and minds.” Here Western Europe has joined the east
in being under a planned economy. And the children are true believers. At
least, supposedly: Just as today’s Islamists need capital punishment for
“blaspheming,” so too, the Communists need their scary thought police. The hero
is brave. Besides selling Gladiator, he is doing something more: Under the
noses of the Reds he is also selling a game about capitalists building
railroads. How subversive. This in a world where anyone from Russia
automatically has high status.
I don’t think Turtledove is
deliberately trying to teach young students, not exactly. He reminds me of an
excited developer who once scribbled on paper to describe to me how he would
buy and sell hotels to own more and more. I think of the car lover
experimenting with fuel mixtures, the old military historian playing his WWII
board games, or the starving college business student manipulating a computer
spread sheet. What if? Whenever you are fascinated by something you want to get
involved. Plainly, Turtledove loves history. And therefore, like a science
fiction writer, he asks, “What if--?”
Possibly he has learned old skills
like riding a horse, or grinding his own wheat (Sore shoulders!) and then
baking his own bread. (Easy to burn!) Perhaps he boils soap. Maybe he even
dresses as knight in the SCA. (Society for Creative Anachronism) More likely, I
suppose, Harry is a typical English literature guy, feeling most at home curled
behind his desk. What strikes me most about literary folks, as compared to my
friends who write science fiction, is how they are very unlikely to subscribe
to Scientific American. Instead, for them, the most fascinating thing in this
world is people. While history looks at characters wholesale, with persons
being embedded in their culture, writers look at character retail. Individuals
vary. Not all adolescents grow up to be clones of their parents—thank God!
I found one of Turtledove’s
cross-time novels to be especially literary. In The Disunited States of
America, a girl travels alone with just her grandmother—in a world with no
federal Interstate Highways. It’s hard. Not the physical travail, but the
emotional. While her dear mother, left back home, is really nice, (why?) her
mother’s mother is horrid and immature. Why? The girl begins to look at people
to imagine what their choice points were: How did they become who they are? I
thought this imagining of “alternate people” was a delightful variation on
alternate earths.
The Cross-time Traders series
deserves more notice. I look forward to a re-issue of them, this time with
matching covers—so I can read them all again! Then maybe they would be noticed
by the general public. I suppose a movie might launch the series, but then
again, no, for I don’t see how a movie could ever work…
After all, they can’t film
Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield, either. The enduring value of Finn, and
the Cross-time Traders, is their youthful inner thoughts. It’s something the
“moving pictures” can never capture. And it’s something I never tire of
reading.
Sean Crawford
Living in the best of all possible
worlds,
(Except for some hanging chad and
butterfly ballots)
Calgary, 2012
Footnote: It’s neat how Gladiator
takes place in Italy, because as a boy I read a (translated?) collection of
amusing short stories about a poor village in Italy, written from the viewpoint
of the village priest, stories where the priest and the local union leader keep
competing for whether the villagers will convert to communism.
Sidebar: The mother of all US time
travel stories is Andre Norton’s 1958 novel The Time Traders. The hero begins
as a lonely juvenile delinquent unsuited to a near-future society. But he ends
up wearing furs in the prehistoric Bronze Age, as part of a little team of
traders, one of many little teams intently searching along the timeline.
Everything they carry or wear must be authentic or disguised. And for good
reasons: They don’t want to change history, of course, and besides: they don’t
want to be noticed by the Reds, who also have teams. The Americans desperately
need to know where the Reds are getting their lost technology. As the cover
shows, it turns out to be ancient aliens. It’s quite a story. I once met an
anthropologist and sf writer, Joan D Vinge, whose interest in prehistoric
civilizations had been started by that book.
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