Short Story Showcase #11: Floaters Can’t Float

This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective.  This week, let’s talk about time travel.

Time travel is one of the oldest science fiction tropes, but it’s also one of the hardest to do well.  Not only does its age and popularity make it difficult to write anything original on the topic, its sheer scientific implausibility make it even harder to write something that doesn’t make a decent fraction of your audience want to tear its hair out.

There are a number of potential solutions to this problem.  Doctor Who tends to play fast and loose with the paradoxes involved in changing history, unless the plot requires something to be unchangeable.  The T.A.R.D.I.S., being super-advanced and quite possibly sentient, also manages to time-travel straight to the precise galactic coordinate of the planet it wants at the time it wants (which, given stars’ motion relative to the galactic core, is no mean feat) without ending up inside of a mountain somewhere.  That level of precision strains credulity, but it lets you do some really cool things with a narrative.*  

Stories that endeavor to add more logical consistency to the capabilities of time travel are much harder to pull off, both from a consistency perspective and because of the more limited narrative options available to the writer.  For a brief master class in how to do so at the novel level, I recommend To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis.  At the short fiction level, though, I’ve never seen anything like Floaters Can’t Float, by Pip Coen and published in Compelling Science Fiction.  (See?  I got there eventually.)

Coen deals with the effects of time travel from a devastatingly human perspective, writing of a city literally replaced piece-by-piece by the soon-to-be corpses of time travelers who got the time and momentum right, but were a few meters off in terms of location.  How much does a few meters matter?  Well, that depends.  How far are you from the nearest wall?  Now imagine what would happen to both your, and its, structural integrity if the two of you got mixed up, and then multiply that by a few dozen people in some of the larger buildings.  Safer to stay outside, then?  Not everyone rematerializes inside of a building.  Sometimes they pop up just outside of one, and sometimes just inside of a pedestrian.  

This carefully plotted story unfolds in two directions that somehow converge perfectly at the end.   The story’s conception of time travel is perfectly consistent internally, and each revelation, by the time it comes, feels obvious in retrospect.  The two main characters are also well-drawn, and while they seem to play to archetypes when they’re introduced, they each have secrets complicating their motivations.

My one complaint is actually with the formatting of the story.  It would be much easier to understand, in my opinion, if each section that started with an italicized question had a different background color for the entire section, or different font, or something else to set it apart from the primary narrative.  As it is, I didn’t realize until I got to the second such section that the first one should be treated as such, rather than the italicized portion at the beginning comprising some sort of quasi-epigraph or something.

Anyway, it’s an excellent story, and I think it’ll stick with you for a long time.  

*For the record, I quite like Doctor Who, but I personally find Niven’s Law of Time Travel more compelling from a logical perspective:  “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”  Please see Niven’s “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel” for more detail on this subject.