Peter Askew - Essay or Explanation?

Almost 2 years ago the first draft of Peter Askew emerged from the status of short story to short novel. I then wrote up an essay to try and put down on paper what it was I was attempting to do with this strange story of the physics professor who falls through Time. What I emerged with was somewhat off-putting to some of my friends when they discovered that the ideas beneath this little tale were actually both scientifically, psychologically, philosophically, and ultimately, if you take the idea to its logical conclusion, religiously heretical (although, only if you are deeply traditional and believe in the out-moded concept that God is the old guy in the chair in heaven.)

And so I took to spending the next two years reworking the book around the central character instead of the concept, while never changing the concept at all. It's been a long road.

Even as I considered publishing this book myself (and thus suffering the potential abuse of people I actually know) the essay lingered as a possible intro to the book. I really struggled over this. Was it too much? Would it set the right tone? Would it put people off? Should I put people off? After all, my first book (Fear the Company - 1995) was altogether ruined by listening to people who didn't really read much fiction beyond what they picked up in the supermarket. That would be my fault for being young and uncertain.

At the last moment I decided to drop it altogether as just too challenging for an intro and pointless as an afterward. If you read the book, you will either totally get it or totally not get it. If you have already spent the money and don't know what you are getting yourself into, well ... that's capitalism for you.

I publish it here and now to answer that question people seem to want to ask, specifically as one person put it, "What is the ... point of the book?"

I do honestly hope you will like the book. It is a human story.

Michael Fuller
May 30, 2007



Peter Askew
Essay or Explanation?

By Michael D. Fuller

The main premise of Peter Askew was to poke holes in the common assumptions of Time Travel. Time isn’t some line that can be jumped in and out of at random. That is an assumption - an abstraction as Henri Bergson put it. Bergson said the conception of Time was based upon the human mind’s limited ability to perceive, but the logos‘ will to conform rigidity to structures that exist in nature. He also endeavored to prove that we can only perceive things spatially. This limitation is proven again and again in other areas of the abstract. For example, a sound, which has no substantial physical presence apart from the “invisible“ waves which produce its vibrations, creates a spatial world when these vibrations bounce off other objects. Tonal vibrations can be music or noise. This is mere aesthetics. But, nonetheless, we abstract these vibrations spatially in our minds. This is a very convenient, though accurate way to control and describe something which, in itself, has no other substance other than our personal experience. We all might agree that a piece of music is beautiful, but it cannot be known a priori without collecting data from many experiences.

As with music, Time exists only in our immediate ability to perceive duration. For example, we know how long a minute is by a watch or how long a day is by the rotation of the Earth, and so on. But, science defines it far beyond this perception-phenomenon. Because we are limited creatures with a small stretch of Time allotted to us, it has a fundamentally phenomenal nature consistent only with the perceiver. So, if as one person you cannot know what another person can perceive “in itself” then how can one individual - or even a collective - understand the entire nature of Time other than as a collective abstraction?

This is not particularly popular in the scientific world. Nor is Bergson a particularly credible source in the philosophic community. But, being the writer of this novel and a student of such things, I have found very little to refute Bergson. So, in effect, I went about trying to prove him by example.

But, as I wrote this novel Peter Askew, I set as my task to become involved with the central character. To write a dull, dry treatise on the nature of Time would not have been “good writing.” Indeed, it might have been as boring as this explanation. No, I needed the human element, the individual perceiver, to tell us the tale. Peter Askew (with the nice - and, yes, deliberate - parallel word-play on his last name) was meant to represent a rigid person, defined by rigid scientific explanations of the world. But, his world is at a moment of flux. A decision that must be made about his life, but his turgid view of the world won’t allow for the possibility of “possibility” itself. He is in love but doesn’t quite know how to embrace this love without losing something that defines him, as he goes about defining the world.

To say that Peter Askew is not a “likable” character might be accurate at first. He is meant to be something of a troubled person. The fact that we find him in a moment when his world should be complete, yet he is on the verge of destroying it is the Duex Es Machina that science fiction loves. The novel is science fiction, but only this sense. The device or conceit of thrusting him into his own “problem” of a temporal anomaly is not merely meant to criticize this conception of scientific dogma, but also it is an indictment of the psychological implications of such scientific certainty. In short, if science is telling us something that it cannot fundamentally know as a “strong” truth (according to A.J. Ayer’s analysis of knowledge in Language, Truth, and Logic), what does that do to our psychological make-up? It is this precise dilemma that our main character finds himself. How can he love another who does not fundamentally understand him? As a scientist, his delusions stem from an unrealistic romanticized version of love at odds - seemingly locked in battle - with this unresolved psychological paradox inherent in scientific dogma. He believes this dogma and seems willing to sacrifice even his own happiness and well-being to preserve this “truth.”

The next interesting decision which I made was there from the story’s conception. It was to introduce the logical absurdity inherent in Time Travel itself into this mix. Our main character falls through a wormhole and travels back in time to the previous evening. The first, and most obvious problem in Time Travel stories is the one that is always glossed over. In the story, I give the example of a person traveling back in time to kill Hitler before his rise to power. But, if Hitler was killed at that time, then he would not have risen to power and, therefore, obviously, the person traveling back in time to do the killing in the first instance would never know who Hitler was and most especially would not have cause to kill him. This is the very definition of a temporal anomaly. It is the very thrust of the absurdity of Time Travel itself. I use the word “absurdity” with deliberateness, for all Time Travel are absurd. Laughable. Impossible.

My novel is, at its heart, absurd. Peter Askew sees himself from the previous evening doing everything he did a mere half-day before in the second instance. The view-point of the temporal anomaly is absurd and so I accentuate this by having the time traveler refer to himself as Peter 1. Of course, he is really Peter 0 and it calls into question the point: Who is the “real” Peter Askew if he exists in the same place twice? Another Dues Ex Machina occurs when the duplicated Peter Askew attempts to confront his previous self. This is impossible, as we have demonstrated with the Hitler example. In the story, the other Peter cannot see or feel him. However, everyone else can.

I take this liberty because I’m trying to prove a point and to exaggerate the absurdity. And, to add fuel to the fire, I introduce several thousand “previous” duplicates of Peter Askew existing in the same time period. Peter 1, as he thinks he is, is actually peter 20 plus thousand, as he soon discovers when he meets the “first” duplicate version of himself: an old man, well past the age of fifty.

This conceit (a term which is perhaps more valid here than usual) is the point. The old man gives Peter 1 a word; a unique word said at a critical moment. Up until that point, Peter 1 has been doing exactly the same things in his second time stream as all his other duplicates. The word “individuates” him from his other duplicates. At this moment, though they are all the same person, they are completely divergent personality types.

To go into these variations of personality types is irrelevant to this writing. However, the confusion of writing a novel based around many, many versions of the same character is in itself absurd, because our language hasn’t the ability to adjust personal pronouns in this way. They are often given descriptive terms such as “old man” “middle-aged man” “young man” to distinguish each from the other, though they are in proper nominative terms the same. What a nightmare!

The question of the “true” Peter Askew is constantly put forth, but ultimately we find that the “purpose” of the whole thing was not to find the “true” Peter Askew, but the “right” Peter Askew. The right man, not the true man. It is somewhat deliberately put forth in humanistic, even quasi-religious terms, as that is the only metaphysical sense in which such dilemmas are ever discussed. There is a scientific/narrative explanation, if somewhat implausible, but even Peter 1, as he continues to refer to himself, does not fully understand how the resolution will work out until “fait” steps in and the solution is applied. Ultimately, the psychological evolution of his character is the central concept. Scientific determinism is rendered meaningless by human determinism.

None of this invalidates anything scientific, philosophic, psychological, or even religious. It merely “is.” The fragility of the human being portrayed in the crossfire of all these concepts in one absurdist fantasy. But, for a point, I assure you.

As of this date, its unknown if anyone will read this book, much less this essay. I am writing this really to make sure that the ideas I have in my head match the work. Not all of these ideas, if any, will be apparent to the reader. It is, after all, a novel. However, I am also an adherent of another of Bergson’s propositions: humor, however oblique, is a form of social corrective. And, nothing needs more social correcting than science right now.

Michael D. Fuller
September 25, 2005