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QUINCUNX
February 18, 2010
The James Blish short-novel "The Quincunx of Time"
is a slightly expanded form of a novelet called BLISH
"Beep".
There's a review of it which
manages to be both erudite
and shallow:
[ref]
Robert Wilfred Franson, May 2009
From memory, this is the premise of
the story "The Quincunx of Time": I might as well warn:
A form of faster-than-light SPOILERS
communication has been in
use for some time, called
the Dirac. Using it, each "Dirac communicator" is an
message is preceeded with *excellent* name: to someone
an annoying *beep*... and a who has never heard of Dirac,
discovery has been made, it just sounds like "direct
but kept secret, that the communicator".
Beep is not just noise:
concealed within it is If you're aware that it's the
every message that has ever name of a phycist who was one
been sent via Dirac and of the leading lights of
*every message that will Quantum Mechanics, it suggests
ever be sent*. even more.
This kind of reference
can lay down a trail to
be traced backwards...
OUT_OF_THE_DUMPSTER
There's some sort of government agency
called "The Service" which uses this
foreknowledge for their own purposes,
and yet also appears to be badly
frightened by it.
This knowledge of the future opens
the door to various time travel
paradoxes-- and they don't know
what would happen if someone tried They react by assigning agents
to interfere with the course of to apparently pointless tasks,
history prophesied by The Beep. e.g. "boy-meets-girl"
assignments: the agents hang
around and make sure that
nothing gets in the way of an
apparently chance romantic
encounter.
They want to make sure that
anyone ever mentioned in a
Dirac transmission has a
And this is what I think this chance to be born.
is all really about:
In the universe of this story,
*everything is predestined*.
it all comes out "as it was
written".
This is an eminently logical,
plausible view of time.
The main trouble with it is
it creates apparent problems Myself, I think those
for our view of "free will". problems are illusions
in any case.
If you think of time as just
another spatial dimension, FREEWILL
you can envision human beings
as four-dimensional squiggles The usual way of thinking
fixed-in-place, unchanging. about higher dimensions is
to drop one of them temporarily:
In this story, The Service
is engaging in some insane Pretend space is only
behavior: they're acting two dimensional, and then
as the self-appointed imagine time as a stack
Guardians of Time, when of those two-dimensional
time can almost certainly states -- like cutting up
take care of itself. a strip of film into frames,
and stacking the frames on
This story looks like a each other.
cute, but rather slight
effort, and most of us A figure moving across
just don't think much the screen turns into
about it, one way or a diagonal stripe
another. through the stack of
frames.
Nothing much happens in the plot
of the story... because the 3D_TIC
actual point is that nothing
much really can happen.
My guess is that the "Quincunx"
of the title is intended to have
connotations of architectural
layout: a vision of all of time
in a fixed orderly pattern. BEYOND
What it's actually about is
psychological reactions to
physical proof of a fixed A portrait of
destiny. uncomprehending
bureaucratic panic--
Perhaps a suppressed
guilt complex:
they've profited
greatly through
foreknowledge and
worry about some
cosmic backlash.
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