Background of the Study
Introduction
René Barjavel is the author who may have been first to come up with the “grandfather paradox” in time-travel, and that’s pretty informative of what he wrote. We often recall France’s great science fiction leader, Jules Verne, while overlooking his waves of contemporaries, much less authors like Barjavel who penned SF novels in the 1940s into the 1980s. Many of his works remain untranslated, though several were printed in English in the late ’60s and early ’70s. One of his earliest novels, Ravage, was translated by Damon Knight as Ashes, Ashes; another, La nuit des temps, became The Ice People.
The grandfather paradox shows that traveling back in time is impossible. French journalist Rene Barjavel, the creator of the grandfather paradox, wrote the novel Le Voyageur Imprudent in 1944. In it, he writes of a man going back in time to kill his own grandfather at a date before his parents were born to illustrate his point.
According to Barjavel, it would be impossible for a man to go back in time and kill his own grandfather because then the man himself, the killer, would not exist to commit the crime. Once his grandfather is dead, he can never father the killer’s mom or dad, who then in turn can never create the killer himself. Thus, time travel is impossible because any change you make to history would have rippling consequences that would change the very fabric of your life as well as human history. In essence, the only way you or I exist right now is because everything in the past happened exactly the way it did. So by going back and changing something, you’re simultaneously preventing yourself from existing.
The grandfather paradox has become a mainstay in modern philosophy and physics. Some argue that time travel is indeed possible, because once a man goes back in time, he creates a parallel universe that operates separately from the one he left. Some also argue that even if Barjavel is correct, his point only leads to the conclusion that going back in time is impossible, but that time travel could still be possible into the futu
Will Time Travel ever be possible? Rene Barjavel was a French journalist and science fiction writer who spent a lot of his time thinking about time travel. In 1943, Barjavel asked what would happen if a man went back in time, to a date before his parents were born, and killed his own grandfather? With no grandfather, one of the man’s parents would never have been born – and therefore the man himself would never have existed. So there would be nobody to go back in time and kill the grandfather in the first place. Or the last place – depending on how you look at it. The Grandfather Paradox has been a mainstay of philosophy, physics and the entire Back to the Future Trilogy. Some people have tried to defend time travel, with arguments like the Parallel Universe Resolution – in which the changes made by the traveler create a new, separate history, branching off from the existing one. But the Grandfather Paradox prevails. Although the paradox only suggests that traveling backwards in time is impossible – it doesn’t say anything about going the other way…
Literature Review
A group of French explorers in Antarctica make a wondrous discovery—a large golden sphere buried deep under the ice. Joined by a multitude of foreigners to become international band of scientists and technicians, the expedition begins its delve into the ice and uncovers one miracle after another. The prize: two human beings, one male and one female, cryogenically frozen from some 900,000 years in the past. After thawing out the woman, Elea, she tells a pitiable story of a human utopia from before known history, of her love won and lost under the looming shroud of apocalyptic war, where great technologies have become humanity’s greatest asset (as well as its potential destruction). Meanwhile, agent provocateurs and spies have infiltrated the scientific base; steaming south are American carrier-groups and a Soviet sub-flotilla. As the story of the past’s final war is retold, the last war of the present may be playing out as well…
It’s pretty clear that the novel was intended as an anti-war novel, and while it doesn’t specify that theme in the “contemporary” timeline—the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans tend to grudgingly work together—the flashbacks to the time before are rife with metaphor. It takes Vietnam War-era turmoil and transplants it to the end times: as nuclear weapons sanitize the moon’s tropical jungles into ash and rubble, riot police and student protesters clash beneath giant monitors urging calm as it’s assured war will be averted. It’s epic scenery, pure sensawunda for me, and some of the book’s more effective scenes. Each side has their own weapon guaranteeing mutually assured destruction, and their petty politics and ideologies have led them astray. It’s firm-handed but poignant, definitely a product of its time.
The Ice People felt oddly old-fashioned to me, bringing to mind the ideological utopias, future histories, and suspended animation plots of the 1930s (Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come for one, his When the Sleeper Awakes for another, Stapledon’s Last and First Men for a third). Not surprisingly, Barjavel was influenced by H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, with which is shares the suspended-animation trope. In terms of writing and translation, it’s perfectly modern, with very serviceable prose and some decent (if cardboard) characters, though Barjavel does tend to ramble a bit and venture off on asides—such as visiting one particular French family, standing in as civilian everymen. The themes are all very contemporary for the 1970s, dominated by Cold War politics—nods to the Non-Aligned Movement and France’s tenuous “neutral” role between the greater powers. No, it’s mostly that the novel is a utopian future-history in reverse—the utopian far-past is now just a dream, televised live from the Antarctic as a warning to a world in the grips of Cold War.
The discovery of a signal, thousands of feet below the Antarctic ice, turns a small French expedition into a billion dollar investment broadcasted on live television worldwide. What they uncover will change the history of mankind forever. Encased within a golden orb amid a metropolis, a man and a woman lie in cryogenic stasis – preserved with temperatures that modern science cannot replicate. The ruins are dated to be over nine-hundred thousand years old. This book is a romantic science fiction, and focuses on mankind’s repeated mistakes through the course of history, hinting at our fate in the future through the downfall of a people that thrived nearly a million years ago.
The Ice People does contain eroticism. It is mild, yes, but still present, as it is an important part of the plot-line.