Thomas Covenant? Unbelievable!

I'm re-living my youth.  As the years pass, I find myself doing this more and more.  This time around, it has to do with a book or, rather, series of books, that I read back when I was twenty-something and am now in the process of re-reading.  It's a Tolkien-esque fantasy series known as "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever", written by Stephen R. Donaldson.

Thomas Covenant is a modern leper, and I'm not using the term "leper" in a figurative sense.  He literally suffers from leprosy.  Before he was diagnosed with the dread disease, he was a published writer as well as a family man, having both a wife and a son.  After his unfortunate diagnosis, his wife left him and took their son with her (can't risk either of our appendages falling off you know) and the rest of society shunned him as well, demonstrating that apparently not much has changed for lepers since biblical times.

"I thought you said this was a fantasy series," I hear my readers thinking at this point, "nothing terribly fantastic-sounding about that.  Sounds more like a melodrama, really."  Well, things do take a turn for the somewhat more fantastical when Covenant walks into town to pay his phone bill one day (an act of defiance against his fellow townspeople who would much rather he avoided any personal interactions) and inadvertently wanders in front of an on-coming police car.  At the moment of impact, his world dissolves from around him, as one might well expect that it would, except that it is then replaced with a different world; not the one that you might be thinking of, Dear Reader, as there is nary a sign of either pearly gate nor fire and brimstone. 

Well, actually, there sort of is fire and brimstone, but it's not what you think.  Covenant has apparently been transported inside a mountain which he will later learn is named "Kiril Threndor" or "Mount Thunder" in the common tongue, having been summoned by a creature known as a cavewight.  In due course, he learns that he has been transported to another world known simply by its inhabitants as "The Land" and he is sent on a mission by the enemy of that Land, one "Lord Foul the Despiser", to deliver a message to The Council of Lords, informing them that Lord Foul intends to kick their collective asses within the next forty-nine years, or sooner, if they don't manage to retrieve the Staff of Law from the cavewight who stole it, and used it to summon Thomas Covenant. 

The reason why the cavewight summoned Thomas Covenant, of all people, has to do with Covenant's resemblance to one of the Land's greatest heroes, Berek Halfhand, so named because he lost two fingers of his right hand during a big showdown between himself and The Despiser.  Covenant happens to be missing those same two fingers, in his case due to his leprosy. 

Covenant, not surprisingly, refuses to believe that any of what's happening to him is real, especially since his leprosy seems to go into remission during his time in The Land, so he officially assumes the moniker of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, just to make it clear to everyone around him that he doesn't take any of them seriously.

Sounding a bit more Tokien-esque now?  Hmmm?  And that, my friends, is my chief criticism of this series.  It's too Tolkien-esque.  Consider:

Thomas Covenant has been transported to a world, much like our own, known as Middle Earth - I mean The Land.

The Land is an idyllic place where both magic and fantastical creatures (cavewights, giants, ur-viles, mystical intelligent horses, etc.) exist and which is in danger of being corrupted by an evil entity known as Sauron - I mean Lord Foul the Despiser.

And here's the clincher; Thomas Covenant holds the one weapon which might defeat The Despiser, his wedding ring, which is made of white gold, which happens to be the ultimate source of "wild magic" in The Land.  An evil entity that can only be defeated by the power of a magic ring?  Really?

And get a load of the first book's description of Drool Rockworm, the cavewight that summoned Covenant:

"Crouched on a low dais near the center of the cave was a creature with long, scrawny limbs, hands as huge and heavy as shovels, a thin, hunched torso and a head like a battering ram.  As he crouched, his knees came up almost to the level of his ears.  One hand was braced on the rock in front of him, the other gripped a long wooden staff shod with metal and intricately carved from end to end.  His grizzled mouth was rigid with laughter, and his red eyes seemed to bubble like magma."

Ummm... did he also happen to make a funny "gollum" sound in his throat, by any chance?

I said that the resemblance to Tolkien's writings is my chief criticism of Donaldson's work.  My other criticism of the Covenant books has to do with the alternately corny and lame monikers with which Donaldson saddles his characters. "Drool Rockworm?"  "Lord Foul?"  Really?  They sound like the names of the evil villains in a typical Saturday morning cartoon show.  On the other end of the scale, we have "High Lord Kevin".  Okay, it's better than "High Lord Bob", I suppose, but just barely.

Now that I've undoubtedly earned the everlasting ire of both Thomas Covenant and Stephen R. Donaldson fans everywhere, let me say that I actually enjoyed the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  Hey, I wouldn't be re-reading the first six books (Donaldson has since written more) if I didn't enjoy them.  They're well-written and they offer an interesting blend of the real world that we all know with the fantastic.  But, hey, I enjoyed "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens" too, yet I still maintain that it's basically "Episode IV: A New Hope" all over again.

Time Travel

"Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward? That's the trouble with time travel, you never can tell."  - Dr. Who, The Androids of Tara

Since the days of H.G. Wells (and probably before that) dreamers, idealists and lovers of science fiction and fantasy have speculated about the possibility of travelling backward in time; revisiting people, places and events that have gone, or at least changed. 

The very concept immediately raises several questions.  If it were possible to go back in time, could we only do so as passive observers or, as Charles Dickens put it, "shadows" that could watch history unfold without being able to affect it, or might we be able to interact with the past and possibly change the outcome of events?  If this were possible, all sorts of paradoxes come into play.  If we could change the outcome of historical events, would it not also change the future?  Might we find, upon returning to our own time, a radically changed world?  What if we were to meet an earlier version of ourselves, or somehow prevent our parents, grandparents, or any of our ancestors, for that matter, from conceiving the children that they did.  Would we suddenly disappear?

These questions have been amply considered by a myriad of fictional works (and that's only counting the Star Trek series!) but it's still fascinating to ponder on the nature of time, and how it works.  This is not just the province of dreamers and science fiction writers.  Much less fanciful and more learned intellects, such as Albert Einstein and Dr. Stephen Hawking (to name but two well-known examples) have theorized on the subject.

Einstein put forth the remarkable premise that time is relative to each of us, and is affected by speed.  The faster we go, the more slowly time passes.  If you could travel at, or near, the speed of light, theorized Einstein, several thousand years might seem as only a single year to you.  You could traverse the galaxy for one year (or, at least, half a light year's worth of it, allowing for time to return) and, upon returning, you'd find that the Earth, and everyone on it, had aged considerably more than you.

Dr. Stephen Hawking agrees with Einstein's theory and concedes that it makes it possible to travel forward in time if we could only go fast enough.  He asserts, however, that it would not be likewise possible to travel backward in time, because it "violates a fundamental rule that cause comes before effect."

I realize that I'm going out on a limb here, disagreeing with an intellectual giant the likes of Dr. Hawking, but I'm going to do so anyway.  I suggest that travelling backward in time would not violate the "fundamental rule that cause comes before effect", because there is no direct relationship between time and events.  Allow me to explain using something that I like to call the "Garden Hose Analogy".

Using a garden hose as an analogy to explain what time is and how it works is by no means an original idea of mine.  It's been used before, often to explain the concept of "SpaceTime", which brings physical space into the equation, suggests a relationship between space and time, and generally makes the whole concept very weird and confusing. 

My analogy is a simpler one, focusing only on time and leaving space out of it, in the interest of simplicity.  Think of time as a garden hose, and events as the water running through it.  The hose itself is always there, and certainly it's possible to travel through it in either direction (assuming you're small enough), but the water passes through it but once, and is gone.  You could certainly go from the hose's end to its source (effectively travelling "backward" through it), but you'd never find the water that had passed through it before.  It's gone.  There is no connection between the water and the hose, save that the hose acts as a conduit through which the water flows.

By the same token, I believe that we make the mistake of mentally linking time and events when, in fact, there is no direct relationship between the two.  Time, like the hose, is a conduit and it may be possible to traverse it in any direction, but events, like the water, come and go.  You might be able to revisit Kittyhawk in 1903, but you'd never meet Orville and Wilbur Wright.  They're not there anymore.  They have passed through the conduit of time, and are gone.

But what if the water is still flowing?  Surely we would still find water there.  True, but it wouldn't be the same water, it would be new water, which brings us to the ironic possibility of future events unfolding in the past; a strange concept at first blush, but not so strange if you accept the premise of there being no direct link between time and events.

And what about travelling forward in time?  What if we were to move down the garden hose in the same direction as, but faster than, the flowing water.  Then we would find nothing, because the water hasn't arrived yet.  We would be in a void, of sorts, until we slowed down and waited for the water (or events) to catch up to us.

And how do I reconcile these concepts with those of scientists much more learned than I?  Well, let's apply my analogy to Einstein's theory.  If a bit of the water suddenly flowed much faster than the main body, it would travel down the hose more quickly.  In so doing, it would arrive at the end of the hose long before the rest of the water.  Put another way, the main body of water would "age" much more by the time it reached the end of the hose, than the bit which sped up.  So the analogy still works.

These are the sorts of thoughts that flow through the inscrutable mind of the Halmanator, as he stands in his back yard, idly watering his flower bed, on a midsummer's evening.

"But surely it's late October!" I hear you protest.

What can I say?  Apparently the water flows through my hose somewhat more slowly than through yours.