Time travel and the problem of dates in science fiction

"But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near". So said Andrew Marvell, trying to hit on a girl. But he'd also hit on a point that novelists, along with the rest of us, have struggled with and embraced over the years: the problem of time. Time, that is, in terms of dates and years, and all the difficulties they create for an author, their ideas and their posterity.

In this inaccurately counted year of 2001, the thorniest thorn on the thorn-covered stem of time is prickly old prediction. Yes, the year 2001 is finally upon us, and the magazines and newspapers are full of articles about how not-entirely-right Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's vision of the future was (see 2001: A Space Odyssey). Though space in 2001 seems like a jolly exciting place, we also breathe a sigh of relief that we are not at the mercy of monolith wielding aliens and monomaniacal computers, just as in 1984 we breathed a sigh of relief that we weren't all living under the rule of a tyrannical Party and its all-powerful leader whilst being brainwashed by images pumped at us by ever-present telescreens. We hardly even noticed: we were too busy living under rule of a tyrannical Party and its all-powerful leader whilst being brainwashed by images pumped at us by ever-present telescreens.

George Orwell and Arthur C. Clarke's mistake (or their guarantee of immortality, whichever way you choose to look at it) was to make the year something as prominent as the title of their books. The twentieth century has been full of science-fiction and allegorical novels set in some dim and distant point in the future. But most of the authors - H.G. Wells, John Wyndham, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess to name but a few - had the foresight (or perhaps just the timidity) to hide a date in the most inconspicuous of places: in the actual prose, only to be found by people who could be bothered to read the books. Poor old Orwell and Clarke have found themselves at the mercy of the scoffing of people who can't even be bothered to do that, (or, in the case of 2001, just sit through a movie).

It might slightly embarrass authors to find themselves still alive in the year they have predicted. (Although the temptation to predict a year that could fall within one's lifestyle is probably considerable - if nothing else just to see what reality has in store.) Whilst, at 84, Clarke appears to be going strong, Stanley Kubrick has gone to find out the secret of the universe (or not, as the case may be). Then again, perhaps he is just in hiding to save himself from being revisited by his prediction that in 2001, "Certainly buttons will be gone. Even now there are fabrics that stick shut by themselves." H.G. Wells clearly saw the problem of one's fiction being overtaken by the inevitable progression of the years, and set his seminal piece of future-fiction The Time Machine (1895) in the year 802701. Quite sensibly, he didn't even have his time traveller make refreshment stops in the nearer reaches of the future - unlike the celluloid rendering of the tale. For his part, Orwell was dealing firmly in allegory when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he had the sense to quit while he was ahead - or at least die whilst he was ahead - and not produce a string of sequels. Clarke, on the other hand, as well as being part of what for many was a genuine manifesto of how the 1960s saw the future, didn't feel like stopping at 2001. Spurred by Voyager's flyby of Jupiter, he went on to write 2010: Odyssey Two (1982). And no, unmanned probes aside, we do not now appear to be nine years away from Jupiter and sentient computers any more than we were thirty three years away from them in 1968. After 2010 Clarke seems to have got carried away, and delivered 2061: Odyssey Three (1987) in which they remake Gone With the Wind and land on Haley's Comet; and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), which features a world in which everyone wears wigs and people have their gardening done by genetically engineered velociraptors (yes, really). This sort of thing is a temptation for one to agree with Kubrick who, before meeting Clarke, believed him to be "a nut who lives in a tree in India someplace."

But visionaries are forever being mistaken for lunatics, and the man who predicted a global network of communications satellites back in 1945 is at least aware of the problems inherent in writing predictive fiction. As Clarke wrote in 1986: "Obviously there is no way in which a series of four science-fiction novels, written over a period of more than thirty years of the most breathtaking development in technology... could be mutually consistent... They must be considered as variations on the same theme... not necessarily happening in the same universe. If you want a good analogy... listen to what Rachmaninoff and Andrew