The Society of Time – John Brunner
A trilogy of stories originally published in consecutive issues of the British periodical Science Fiction Adventures from March to July of 1962, Spoil of Yesterday, The Word Not Written and The Fullness of Time present the irregular operations of The Society of Time, now collected in a single volume bearing that name as part of the British Library’s Science Fiction Classics series alongside two further stories written by John Brunner in same period, Father of Lies and The Analysts.
A body of adventurers who observe the past while ensuring that no changes are made, at the time of publication the concept of a paradox might have been novel to most readers, so the idea is laid out clearly and politely by having it explained by Don Miguel Navarro to the hostess of the grand assemblage of intellectuals to which he has been invited, the Marquesa a progressive and open-minded woman but not one who could be expected to understand the flexibility of time nor the rules which safeguard the present by protecting the past.
And yet, only moments later, he finds himself questioning the Marquesa about an apparent infraction when she proudly shows off an artefact obtained through an individual whom she believed to be a legitimate trader, a gold and feathered Aztec mask, newly made in techniques centuries lost, a temporal aberration and a transgression of the laws of the Society of Time, one which Don Navarro is obliged to report and investigate regardless of the standing of the violator, an unforgiving woman of some standing.
Originally published as self-contained though linked novellas, the pace is of course swift whether moving forwards or backwards, and the ideas are both practical and philosophical, not only in the possibility of a change in the past shifting the present into a new form, unrecognised as different by those who have been transformed along with it, but the whole meaning of all that underlies morality losing cohesion, for how can good and evil be absolutes if the basis of the world and all who exist upon it is malleable?
It is not by accident that Don Navarro is not only a licentiate in ordinary of the Society of Time but also a loyal subject of His Most Catholic Majesty Philip IX, nor that Brunner conceived his stories about how history is shifted by single events in an alternate timeline where the dominant western culture sprang from the conquest of the Spanish Armada four hundred years previously, the action of Spoil of Yesterday flitting between Londres and Jorque, a market city of the north.
The first story a mystery, The Word Not Written is a thriller where the celebrations of the quadricentennial are attacked, an act of monstrous treason which sets the streets of Londres ablaze, displaced cause having an effect far beyond that of the initial, foolish, drunken action which precipitates it, Don Navarro forced to intervene to restore order, deflecting the timeline before it comes into being, while The Fullness of Time uncovers deeper treachery and a long game of conspiracy and subterfuge, pushing the technology of the Society to the limits in order to undermine it.
Completing the collection, Father of Lies and The Analysts are both standalones, bold collisions of apparently incompatible approaches to reality and being, the idea that thought can shape and change the world when directed and harnessed in unusual ways, deliberately or accidentally, the first seeing a strange impingement on the known world, a spreading area of land within which things are different, the scientists who monitor it and venture inside finding superstitious peasants who cower from trolls and dragons, tragic twisted fantasies of an Arthurian scholar.
Conversely, The Analysts look to the future, Joel Sackstone the “visualiser” on retainer to a prestigious firm of architects asked to perform a mental walk-through of an as-yet unconstructed building of specifications so consistently contrary they can only be deliberate, the halls, stairwells and rooms arranged so as to be confound the occupants, conceived by minds which do not conform to human norms or expectations, Sackstone like Brunner a man who looks to the obscure and irrational endpoint and step by step makes his way there in defiance of the conventional or ordinary.
The Society of Time is available now from the British Library
