The Quincunx of Time is a short science fiction novel by American writer James Blish. It is an extended version of a short story entitled "Beep", published by Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1954. The novel form was first published in 1973.
Setting[edit]
Late in the 21st century, a device called the Dirac communicator[1] promises instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. This would allow Earth security, headed by one Robin Weinbaum, to keep the peace. Before one of the devices can even reach a far-away system, someone starts producing predictions that suggest they have advance knowledge of Dirac communications.
Eventually it is realized that the new technology incorporates a way of learning about future events. The result is a lengthy discussion of free will versus determinism.
Characters[edit]
- Robin Weinbaum is Head of Security on Earth.
- Thor Wald is a physicist, mathematician, and inventor of the Dirac communicator.
- Dana Lje is a journalist and media star of Dutch and Indonesian ancestry, who recently exposed a major lapse of Security in the so-called "Erskine affair". She contacts Earth Security after receiving information from Interstellar Information Ltd..
- "J. Shelby Stevens" is a mysterious figure, owner and sole proprietor of Interstellar Information, Ltd.. He has access to information that he could only have received via the top-secret Dirac device, but not only is this device supposed to be a secret, his communications using it cannot be picked up by the authorities, an apparent impossibility. When he makes his first and last appearance in the plot, he seems to be an old man. But is he?
Major themes[edit]
Blish, in a foreword to the novel, discusses the need he felt to expand the original short story. It arose because Larry Shaw, who had encouraged him to expand the novella A Case of Conscience into an award-winning novel, recognized that the story raised issues that Blish himself could and should write about at length.
Once it becomes clear to all the characters that the beep contains information from the future, each interprets the information in his or her own way. Dana Lje expresses the opinion that cause and effect are simply a construct of the mind, that events are fixed and the human consciousness is simply an observer. As far as she is concerned, she was forewarned of the events of the story and chose to follow the path that made them happen. Thor Wald takes the scientific point of view, noting that as newer theories replace older ones it is merely because they are more convenient or more accurate. Their relationship to reality is a matter of conjecture. He believes that, once enough dimensions of space-time are invoked, free will becomes inevitable.
Weinbaum has more immediate concerns. As one of his successors points out in the story which frames the novel, the problem with any message is context. The further removed from the current situation, the worse the problem is. The narrative even quotes the then-fashionable theory of paradigms of Thomas Kuhn, in order to show how shifting viewpoints can lead to different interpretations of a message. Weinbaum's conclusion was the only one which avoided the paradigm problem, in that it simply required the Security Service to act to make sure events happened as described, rather than trying to prescribe new events based on a potentially faulty understanding of a message.