The Weekly Screed (#945)

The Wayback Machine 

and the Manchurian Zombie

by David Benjamin

“Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?”

— Michael J. Fox (Marty McFly), Back to the Future

MADISON, Wis. — Ever since I watched Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux fighting off the Morlocks sometime during the 80th century in George Pal’s film version of H.G. Wells‘ The Time Machine, I’ve loved time-travel stories. Mr. Peabody and Sherman are two of my all-time favorite cartoon characters. One of the novels I admire excessively is Jack Finney’s unappreciated journey backward to a bygone moment of love and mystery, Time and Again. 

As an author, however, I’ve not much indulged in fantasy fiction. Rather, the lesson I’ve taken from the fertile realm wherein Marty McFly and Dr. Brown zip yester and yon in their DeLorean, is the mutability of time and memory. As long as you’re telling stories — not writing history or reporting the news — you can fool around shamelessly with when it all happened. You can drop a character into an historic moment in the past…

Ah, the dulcet baritone of Walter Cronkite: “A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. And You. Were. There.”

… Or you can launch your protagonist years — centuries —forward.

Futurist fiction tends toward two divergent themes. One is that progress will advance faster than even Moore’s Law can explain. In Back to the Future II, for instance, you get flying cars, huge 3-D LED screens and Marty’s pink hoverboard. 

The unequal and opposite theme is that all thermonuclear hell will break loose. This seems to be the preferred option, what with Planet of the Apes,Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Book of Eli, Escape from New York(but what a great name for the hero — Snake Plissken!), and all those zombies. 

Because of my penchant for nostalgia, I favor the air-conditioned comfort of the Wayback Machine. Seven of my books and manuscripts are, by some measure, “historical,” harking back as recently as the 1990s and as distant in time as the first century AD. Four stories feature the same character, who keeps coming of age and then doing it all over again. I call him Cribbs, but his friends call him Cribbsy — except, well, in his first story, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, he has no name at all. In the second he’s more or less me. 

My “hero” doesn’t morph into Cribbs ’til number three. At that point, he also gets a different family and a relocation. But the voice? Still the same.

A true storyteller is uninhibited by factuality. He or she has license to alter his or her characters capriciously because the story is not the truth (although most fiction writers will argue that a well-crafted story contains more truth than one fat Sunday’s worth of the New York Times.) Even more pleasingly malleable than the specs of a recurring character is the time in which this protagonist dwells. 

Take Cribbsy. When we meet him (before his Cribbsification), he’s a smalltown grammar-school kid growing up on the cusp of the Sixties. In the same story, he’s also a high-school kid in the “big city” of Madison. In Book #2, he’s back in Tomah, in seventh grade. In his third appearance, They Shot Kennedy(which goes to press this year), he makes his debut as Cribbsy — still talking in a familiar tone of bruised innocence. In They Shot Kennedy, it’s November, 1963. The kid’s back in Madison, and now suddenly — two years ahead of schedule — he’s a junior at a fictional high school, coping with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and a barrage of other, more intimate troubles.

Flash forward five years. Cribbsy, who was scheduled in the previous book to finish high school in 1965, is instead a fresh graduate of the class of ’68. I altered his chronology so he could be on the scene, at a Chicago-based summer camp in East Troy, Wisconsin (based on a real place), for the violent, tumultuous and transformational Summer of ’68 — which is the title of the book.

Because Cribbsy is a figment of my imagination, he — like Mr. Peabody — can bounce hither and yon in the fluid continuum of time and space to serve my narrative whimsy. 

This isn’t just authorial fun and games. Most storytellers (and their more astute readers) are devout believers in the capacity of fiction to explain the human dilemma better than data, reportage and the annals of history. 

Consider, for example, Richard Condon’s Cold War masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate. Even as early as 1959, when Condon’s book was released, informed students of espionage and intelligence were aware of government “brainwashing” programs, using powerful drugs and psychological coercion. One of the most notorious experiments was carried out by the Pentagon, exposing American soldiers to a regimen of psychedelics that no one really understood. Condon’s novel dramatized rumors about Chinese and North Korean doctors attempting to warp the brains of American POWs. 

The problem with the facts that inspired Condon’s story is that little could be proven about what the Chinese were doing and little could be revealed about Top Secret American experiments with drugs and mind control. Everybody was doing it but nobody was telling.

Hence, the best and most compelling exposure of these sinister efforts and diabolical techniques was Condon’s novel. He collated a hodgepodge of alarming facts, created a cast of vivid characters and fashioned a story that revealed to every reader of his book, and to every viewer of John Frankenheimer’s subsequent film, the logical consequences of turning innocent prisoners into chemically-altered robo-assassins. 

The American public still knows almost nothing about Cold War programs contrived to disperse secret armies of Raymond Shaws and Jason Bournes. But we’ve learned about them, in a context more captivating and memorable than a reportorial exposé, from storytellers gifted with the ability to turn muddled information, obfuscation and official secrecy into a well-lit drama with a beginning, a middle, an end and a moral.

Of course, not all storytelling is so benign and beneficial, as we’ve learned from an Oval Office that exists in a fictional world of fear and fabrication. This is why it’s vital that a wise reader and responsible citizen appreciates the two-edged power of storytelling. The well-tailored tale can be a vehicle that turns complexity to clarity, or it can mesmerize the gullible with shiny disks of propaganda. 

Fortunately, most creators of fiction care more about entertainment than political persuasion. Even Condon, in The Manchurian Candidate, was more driven to spin a good yarn than to trigger reform in the dark world of international spycraft. He had no expectation that his haunting tale would thwart the spooks. He was just having fun.

To spin our yarns, storytellers, all the way back to Homer and Chaucer, have had our fun by treating time, reality and history like Silly Putty. In our hands, time — for example — stretches out or packs into a tight ball. It takes on weird shapes and even bounces, backward, forward, this way and that. It can be laid onto the funnies, lifting Dilbert off his cozy panel, to be twisted into someone else entirely and transferred to a place, a time, a surface completely different and yet, no more or less fanciful than where he started out — in the imagination of slightly warped mind whose hard-to-fathom purpose is to illuminate not just what’s there, out in the open, but what lies in the shadows, what hides beneath.

And, if the writer is good, what it’s all about.