Robert Silverberg--Project Pendulum

Robert Silverberg's Project Pendulum, is, unfortunately, a relatively lightweight time travel tale published first in 1987. It's another one of those stories that has an interesting premise, but the author really goes nowhere with it.

The time traveling machine sends twin brothers, one a paleontologist and the other a physicist, on a trip through time that most resembles a pendulum, as the title suggests. Twins were selected because the two travelers had to have similar weights. One twin initially goes back in time while the other goes forward an equal length in time. Then the one going back in time goes forward, while the other goes back. Each "swing" from past to present to past, is longer than the previous stop. Eric first goes back 5 minutes and then moves forward 50 minutes from time zero--the time the experiment began. He then swings back 500 minutes from time zero. Sean, his brother, does the exact opposite--forward 5 minutes, then back 50 minutes, and the forward 500 minutes. Neither stops at the point the other brother stopped on the "outward" leg of the trip. However, they will on the return leg.

This process only allows for a brief period at any stop, though the length of the stop increases as they get further away from time zero. This is the weak point in the story. We really don't get a chance to see much of what each period is like, either going back or going forward. All the reader, and the time travelers get, is a brief glimpse of what that era is like.

I was also surprised that, although they were scheduled to travel millions of years into the past and future, no one seemed concerned about possible changes in the atmosphere. This actually posed a threat to one of the brothers, and presumably will to the other on the return leg, if he isn't killed prior to getting to that stop in time.

While reading the novel, I was almost immediately reminded of another novel, A. E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, first published in the early 1950's, in which van Vogt posits a similar time pendulum. To keep it brief, thousands of years in the future, an energy weapon disguised as a large building is trained on one of the Weapon Shops. The Weapon Shop's energy screen causes the two of them to move through time in opposite directions. A man in 1951 enters the Shop and becomes the focus of the energy beam, and he now moves back and forth in time while the energy weapon building moves in the opposite direction, just as Sean and Eric move back and forth in Silverberg's novel.

Since there is no author's foreward or introduction, I can't say for certain that Silverberg was influenced by van Vogt's novel. In addition, I can't find any internal reference that might suggest Silverberg's familiarity with van Vogt's novel.

Overall, Project Pendulum is a lightweight work, a pleasant but forgettable read. A better introduction to Silverberg's work would be Lord Valentine's Castle, The World Inside, At Winter's End, and Shadrach in the Furnace.

Connections

Many moons ago, I watched a TV series called _Connections_. James Burke, the host, would trace out the link between something in the past and the present day. I think one depicted the linkage between medieval looms and computers. This was an intriguing idea, and occasionally I'd come up with a far-fetched connection of my own. One of my favorites is the linkage between Charles Darwin and _Star Trek_.

In 1831, a British warship was refitted for an exploratory mission. It's task was "to complete a survey of the South American coast and to carry out a chain of longitude measurements around the world." One of the crew was Charles Darwin, who had signed on as ship's naturalist. His task was "collecting, observing and noting anything worthy to be noted in natural history." The ship's name was the HMS Beagle.

What Darwin saw on this exploratory expedition led him to write _The Origin of the Species_ in 1858 and thereby bring the issue of evolution, which had been lurking in the background, out in the open and initiate the debate that still rages in some places today. In 1859, Darwin then published an account of his almost four years on board the ship. The title was _The Voyage of the Beagle.



Some 90 years after Darwin published The Voyage of the Beagle, the SF writer, A. E. van Vogt published a novel titled The Voyage of the Space Beagle in 1950. The novel depicted the adventures of a space ship whose mission was to explore uncharted areas of space--those places where no humans had gone before. The book includes four encounters with alien species, with internal linking created by a basic cast of about ten characters with one or two crew members who hadn't appeared before in each of the four encounters. The encounters were all published separately in various SF magazines, prior to the book publication.

The novel begins with what is probably van Vogt's most famous short story, "The Black Destroyer," the first line of which has remained with me for many decades--"On and on Coeurl prowled." There have been some rumors floating about that Coeurl and the creature from the third episode were influential in the design of the Alien in the film series with Sigourney Weaver. Unfortunately I can't document this story.

In 1956, Jack Vance published To Live Forever, a novel set in a society that had conquered death. In the novel, one of the characters is described as the navigator of the galaxy-exploring "ship, Star Enterprise." It's just a coincidence, I suspect.

In 1966, Gene Roddenberry presented an SF series which depicted the adventures of the crew of the Starship Enterprise on a ten year voyage of exploration--"to go where no man has gone before." Roddenberry has given credit for his idea to van Vogt's novel, The Voyage of the Space Beagle.  Some have thought that he got the idea from another TV series, Wagon Train. However, Roddenberry explained that he used the Wagon Train concept when he tried to sell his idea to network executives. He feared that they wouldn't understand what he was talking about, so he used a more familiar concept, one that they could grasp--a western.

Darwin and Star Trek by way of van Vogt. Significant? Not really. But, it's a break from the day's headlines.