moorereppion

The Summer Solstice occurred at 10:51 this morning and today is Midsummer, ¹ the longest day of the year. So, as has become my custom on Solstices and Equinoxes, here is a bit of quarterly bloggins.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to see Robert Lloyd Parry AKA Nunkie Theatre Productions give a genuinely  astounding performance of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine at Square Chapel in Halifax. If you’re not familiar with Robert’s work (which I’m sure I must have mentioned before) then he does these incredible one man performances – usually of M. R. James stories. Here’s a trailer for his latest DVD release.

Robert’s production of The Time Machine is also a one man show, but it’s a lot more physical than his James performances. There are three or four props on stage with him, there are fairly standard (though highly effective) stage lighting effects, and there’s some sound (mostly ambient), and with just those elements I genuinely forgot it was only one person on stage. It was exciting, creepy, funny, moving. It was just brilliant.

The show is touring at the moment and  if you can make it to any of the performances then you should. You really, really should. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

At a few of the performances Robert has invited speakers to give pre-show talks. Some are scientists, academics, and the like, and one – last night – was me.

I managed to arrive at hour later than I was supposed to because of train delays so I literally walked into the venue, was handed a pint of best bitter and launched into my talk. It was filmed, but I’m not exactly sure I want to see that. Here’s some photographic proof (and kind words) though:

Really interesting talk about time travel in popular fiction by john reppion before @NunkieTheatre # thetimemachine pic.twitter.com/nEYQhCqV5H

— Square Chapel (@squarechapel) June 20, 2014

People seemed to enjoy the talk anyway so I thought I might share my notes with you – slightly edited (probably not enough) and minus all the underlining of dates and names I have to do, of course.

[adding a cut here because this post is MASSIVE]

When Robert first invited me to do the talk I had to give him a title. I chose TRAVELS IN TEXT: THE TIME TRAVELLER’S INFLUENCE UPON POPULAR FICTION because I thought that sounded good. I don’t think I exactly lived up to that title if I’m honest so this is more like SOME THOUGHTS UPON THE TIME MACHINE, THE TIME TRAVELLER AND THEIR INFLUENCE. Or something like that.

 

My name is John Reppion. I’m from Liverpool and I’ve been writing for a living since 2003. When people ask you what your job is and you tell them that you’re a writer, they tend to look at you like you’re a bit delusional. The next thing that usually happens is that they ask you what you write. I generally answer with something like “Oh, all kinds of things; articles, short stories…”, but that never satisfies anyone so I have to follow that up with “comics mainly”. Sometimes people misunderstand and ask me to tell them a joke (…“No, not that kind of comics”), but more often they’ll ask “Oh, do you draw the pictures as well?”. I do not draw the pictures.

My wife and I have been co-writing comics together for eleven years now. She doesn’t draw the pictures either. In that time we’ve written a lot of things that I’m pretty sure you’ve never read or heard of, but we have had our brushes with a handful of well known characters too. We wrote a Doctor Who story called The Whispering Gallery; we adapted H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth into an 18 page comic; we turned Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories and Bram Stoker’s Dracula into graphic novels. We’ve also written two original Sherlock Holmes mysteries – The Trial of Sherlock Holmes and The Liverpool Demon.

One thing that became especially clear when writing the Holmes comics actually, was how easy it was for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to cheat when it came to Holmes and his incredible deductions. It’s very easy to sum things up by saying “Of course, I noted the footprint. The orange-tinged clay soil could only have come from Boston!” or “Any fool could see that he angle of the writing upon the wall meant it was put there by a man of six feet and two inches”, but what if you’re readers could easily go back to the page and see if that were true?

In comics, if you say something happened a certain way – a certain person or object were present that play a key part in the climax of the story – there’s an argument that you need to make sure that thing or character is there in Panel One, Page One. That’s how we wrote our Holmes stories anyway – we wanted to make sure that if Holmes was going to have noticed something, it was there for the reader to notice too.

Comics is an interesting medium to work with – I have always seen it as a kind of confluence of prose and film. You have two simultaneous streams of information that you’re giving the reader; there’s written text and there are the images that accompany the text. You can drop the text altogether and just tell the story visually in some instances – but as a comic writer I’d still be dictating what happened in those wordless panels – or you could have a blank panel with just words on it to show, say someone in darkness, or someone thinking, or something like that.

Comics is very much about pacing – about controlling the flow of time from panel to panel, page to page. Time in comics is completely elastic. With a screenplay for film or television the rules say that one page of text will equate to one minute of film, the average person’s reading speed for a novel is about 300 words per minute, but one page of comic can be written to be read in just a few seconds, or two take many minutes to digest. It’s not just to do with the amount of words on the page, or the amount of panels, it’s to do with how much information that’s embedded there. Of course there’s nothing to say that the page that takes mere moments to read has to represent mere moments in time.

I give you a page with just two panels: the first shows the exterior of this building on the day it was completed – a pristine red brick cube, incongruous amongst green cattle fields. The caption reads “Halifax, 1772”. The second shows the building today in its urban setting, cars driving past; people barely looking up from their phones as they walk along the pavement. The caption reads “Present day”. That’s 242 years in just a few seconds.

My wife and I have recently written a time travel story ourselves. It’s going to be part of a big new digital comics thing called Electricomics which we’re involved with. The story is called Sway and its eight pages long but it doesn’t have to be. Because it’s about time travel and each panel on each page represents a certain amount of time, the plan is that when you read it you’ll be able to time travel by jumping from say Page One straight to Page Eight and still have a story that makes sense.

 

Herbert George Wells – better known to you and me as H. G. Wells – did not exactly invent the time travel genre. Edward Page Mitchell’s 1881 work The Clock that Went Backward is widely regarded as the first time travel story in the modern science fiction sense. What H. G. Wells did undeniably invent is the term “Time Machine” – an expression we’re now so used to it seems somehow bizarre to think it is not even 120 years old.

Wells’ The Time Machine was originally published as a serial in The New Review between January and May 1895. He was paid £100 for the story which is the equivalent of about £10,000 or thereabouts in today’s money. That’s definitely not too bad for what amounted to a 33,000 word novella.

Wells had already written a number of successful short stories by this time and these included an earlier time travel tale called The Chronic Argonauts, which had been published in 1888. The Chronic Argonauts is definitely where Wells began thinking about the ideas that would become The Time Machine but the two stories are very different.

The Time Machine has been adapted into films, for television, for radio and audio books; there have been a large number of comic book adaptations – I haven’t written any of them but I definitely wouldn’t say no – and of course it has been adapted for the stage as we’re about to see this evening . Many authors and film-makers have gone further, creating their own sequels to Wells’ original story and continuing the Time Traveller’s adventures.

The Time Traveller is never named in the original story – he is referred to as The Time Traveller throughout – but he’s been given plenty of names by those who followed including Dr. Moses Nebogipfel – a name taken from The Chronic Argonauts – Bruce Clarke Wildman, Theophilus Tolliver, and even H. G. Wells.

Beyond adaptations and sequels, it can be argued that The Time Machine has had a much wider impact and influence, not just on what H. G. Wells called Scientific Romance, but on so much of modern fiction.

 

An un-named traveller, known only by a pseudonymous title. A mysterious machine whose workings and quirks are known only to the traveller – levers must be pulled in the correct order – dials and displays must be monitored closely. The traveller arrives in another time and place and through an unexpected twist of circumstances finds himself separated from his machine. He finds himself amongst aliens of roughly the same physiognomy as himself, though mentally inferior. Nonetheless, the traveller finds himself a female companion from amongst them. Their relationship is platonic, of course… well, mostly… in fact maybe that ‘s just something that’s kind of left unsaid…

And that’s Doctor Who, I’m talking about. But it’s also The Time Machine. The Doctor / The Time Traveller. The Tardis / The Time Machine. The loss of the machine, the companion… well, I don’t want to spoil anything for later tonight.

In March 1985 – when Colin Baker was playing the sixth incarnation of The Doctor – a two-part story called Timelash was broadcast on BBC 1. The plot is a typical Doctor Who one – Tardis gets caught in some kind of time-hole thing which drags it off course and lands The Doctor and his companion on a planet which is ruled over by a dictator. The Timelash is a kind of sucking hole in time and space (it’s the thing which dragged the Tardis off course) which is used as a means of dispatching anyone who questions the regime. Once someone is cast into the Timelash they are presumed lost forever but instead they end up reappearing in other times and places.

A woman called Vena who threw herself into the Timelash deliberately to escape capture ends up in Victorian Scotland where a teenage boy called Herbert who is there on holiday thinks she’s a ghost he’s accidentally summoned by playing with a Ouija board. Like I said, typical Doctor Who plot. The Doctor goes off to find Vena and ends up taking Herbert back with them to the dictator’s planet. Lots more complicated stuff happens – including some nasty monsters called Morlox – with an X— but it all works out all right in the end. At the end of the second episode, when Herbert is returned to his own time, he hands The Doctor his card. His name is, of course, H. G. Wells and his adventure with The Doctor is what provides the inspiration for him to begin writing science fiction.

That’s one of the nice things about writing time travel stories, I suppose – you can off-set fact that you’re nodding heavily to something by pulling the old “Ah, but what if this story actually came before that one?” trick. And it is a good one.

 

The first description of a time machine in The Time Machine reads:

“A glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance.”

The Time Traveller then says:

“This little affair is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal. Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another. I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future Time, and disappear.”

This mini time machine and its comparison to a clock could be a deliberate nod by Wells to Mitchell’s The Clock that Went Backward – a way of subtly saying “my time machine is bigger and better than yours”. Maybe.

The description of the prototype always reminds me of something from another favourite author of mine, H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote Weird Fiction – which in his case was generally a kind of horror of the unexplained or unexplainable. His work did sometimes incorporate science fiction elements, especially towards the end of his life.

Published in 1936, Lovecraft’s The Shadow out of Time is a sci-fi horror about time travel. The travel is largely done via a kind of personality exchange across time and space with alien consciousnesses swapping places with human ones. Very much like the way things used to work in the television show Quantum Leap – although the aliens aren’t trying to make sure that anyone marries their high-school sweetheart or anything like that.

The story is told through the eyes of Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee who is struggling to piece together what he was up to during a period of his life which he can now, for some reason, not recall properly. At one point Professor Peaslee describes a strange machine which he apparently had constructed:

“A mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of any one intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it – a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper – say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.”

When Peaslee later learns of other people who have suffered similar memory loss to himself he discovers that they also had similar machines made. All of which have now vanished – passed into future Time, and disappeared.

 

Lovecraft was certainly a fan of Wells’ work, mentioning him in his lengthy essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. There are even larger similarities between another of Lovecraft’s stories and The Time Machine.

The Lurking Fear was originally published as a serial between January and April of 1923 in Home Brew.

It’s the story of a thrill-seeking adventurer who makes a terrible discovery. I can’t say too much about it here because, again, I don’t want to spoil anything for tonight’s performance. What I will say is this: some of the changes which Wells thought might come about after millennia, Lovecraft seemed to believe might only take a few hundred years. But as the saying goes, “In England a hundred miles is a long way, in America a hundred years is a long time”.

 

The 1960 US film adaptation of The Time Machine is possibly still the most well known version of the story besides Well’s original – highly successful at the time (winning an Oscar the stop motion work) it’s been re-run seemingly endlessly on television ever since. I actually watched good chunk of it on daytime telly only a month or so back.

The film was produced and directed by George Pal, who also made the highly acclaimed 1953 film version of Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The Time Traveller’s name in Pal’s version is given only as George, but a plaque on the Time Machine in the film reads “Manufactured by H. George Wells”.

At the same time as the film was playing in cinemas, academic interest was growing in the original text. Throughout the 1960s and 70s The Time Machine found its way onto the reading lists of many universities. Today the text is studied at everything from GCSE level up to Masters and PhD.

The importance of H. G. Wells’ 1895 story about one man and his invention is hard to overestimate; our world – both real and fictional – might be very different had it never been written. What would happen if someone used a Time Machine to go back and stop Wells working on the manuscript? Would the idea of the machine they used still exist, or would the whole thing just cancel itself out? It couldn’t even be called a Time Machine! Thankfully Wells avoided Paradox Theory so maybe should too.

It seems very fitting that tonight is eve of the Summer Solstice – the longest day. Some would argue that time is really just an invention of the human mind – something we’ve been working on ever since we started counting the moments of darkness and of danger back in our caves; dreading the long winter nights and praising the long summer days. There’s a great passage in The Time Machine in which The Time Traveller sees all this from his new and unique perspective.

“The whole surface of the earth seemed changed–melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun-belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.”

Tonight you and I shall see things – shall witness The Time Machine as we have never experienced it before (unless you’ve already been to any of the other shows on the tour). So, let’s raise a glass to the star of the story, and of the show. A man who has journeyed here to 2014 from the Victorian Age and never aged a moment. Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s drink a toast to the Time Traveller!