Author Notes to

The Number of the Sand

and

Let Time Shape

 

Both of these stories belong to my “History Machine” series, which began with “The History Machine” (1972), and continued with “The Cliometricon” (1975).

In the early 1990s, Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg edited a series of alternate history anthologies. Benford, the writer-editor of the team, exerted an inescapable persuasion on me when he asked me to contribute to the series: as a true custodian of science fiction (since SF was created by its writer-editors and its best editors were writers), Benford simply let me write what I wanted. The secret of this ploy is that this kind of trust cannot be betrayed. It cannot be bought by any other kind of editor; the distance is too great. I had to do my best, and write what I most wanted to write. Of course, the story might still be rejected; but given the inner resolve I called forth by this kind of pressure, rejection would be unlikely.

The first story I wrote for the What Might Have Been? series was “Lenin In Odessa.” The other stories were these two. They are my efforts to deal with various philosophies of history, as well as with the romance of history, and so cannot avoid touching on virtual reality as a means of recapturing times lost.

My novel Brute Orbits (John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel of 1998) also touches on our sometimes hopeless love of the past.

It seems to me that if virtual reality becomes a reality, all the past will be resurrected for the sheer pleasure of it, as will every famous person of history and popular culture. We have done this in other ways, but VR would give us experiences as close as possible to actual time travel, including the ability to change the past to our desires. One might say that the study of history already does this by interpreting and using the past for today’s needs, but VR bestows total immersion and total control.

In the Locus review of “The Number of the Sand,” the reviewer called it

“intellectually engaging and most satisfactorily science-fictional.”