City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright
Cover art by Kirk DouPonce
Published by Castalia House
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I originally encountered the fascinating city of Metachronopolis in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3, which published the first of the six stories in this slender volume. However, I only later discovered that the author had written additional stories of the beautiful and terrifying golden city rising out of the mists of time, in which there is no ground beneath and the buildings themselves are made out of time congealed into physical substance (reminiscent of the Jophur attack on the g'Kek city in David Brin's Infinity's Shore. Yet there are also echoes of Gallifrey and the Citadel of the Time Lords in Doctor Who, especially the newer serials with better special effects.
"Murder in Metachronopolis" is a murder mystery, but with an extraordinary twist. The detective is the victim of the murder, or at least will be if he doesn't solve the mystery before he's killed, perhaps by the mysterious and unseen Time Wardens or by some rival mortal who has also become a plaything of these beings who will change history for their amusement, then undo those changes or introduce entirely new changes when they become bored with the new history they've created.
It's also extraordinary in being presented out of sequence, as befits a story about time travel. Right from the beginning we are confronted with a section numbered "16" and labeled "Third beginning," so we know we're dealing with a story that's being presented non-sequentially.
And then we're thrown into a story that's simultaneously a hardboiled mystery with elements of police procedural (assuming that the protagonist does have some kind of official standing, and isn't in fact the agent and plaything of a rogue Time Warden) and a gosh-wow story of mind-bending sf wonder. The protagonist's sidearm is semi-sentient and leaps into his hand at need. He is given a deck of time cards, also made out of time itself, which contains a single black card among the bright shining ones, which may represent doom or the various temptations to which humanity is prone.
Apparently if you reassemble the various scenes in numerical order, you get a very different perspective on the story. Whatever order you read them in, you will come to the same ending, which strongly suggests that it is well done to destroy Metachronopolis in all its terrible magnificence and beauty, that the power of time travel is too dangerous for any mere mortal to control.
The second story, "Choosers of the Slain," draws upon the tradition of the Valkyries, who in the old Norse religion gathered up those happy warriors who died fighting and took them to Valhalla, to spend the afterlife in joyous combat, training to be Odin's ultimate army in Ragnarok. So it's quite appropriate that the story should begin on a battlefield, albeit a modern one reminiscent of Vietnam or the more recent ones in the Global War on Terrorism. The weapon the protagonist carries is in advance of those available to soldiers in the present, but not so much so that it's inconceivable that it could be developed in the next decade or two.
More futuristic is the vision of flying battleships, which takes us into the realm of space opera and mil-sf. Our protagonist is fighting a determined but likely futile last stand against an enemy we never see, which may be another human polity or an alien invader, but who clearly will not accept any form of honorable surrender.
And then a mysterious beautiful woman appears to him, telling him that she is from the future and she can take him to her own time, to the Museum of Man at the End of Time. But to take this offer, he must abandon his sworn duty to stand fast against the Enemy. It's a story reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity, but it can also be read as a metaphor for temptation.
"Bride of the Time Warden" is apparently a riff on the highly popular novel The Time Traveler's Wife. It begins with a young couple who are contemplating marriage, and the man suddenly announces that he is a Time Warden. He can step into another time with a thought, speed through the aeons as easily as other men might get on an airplane and fly to another continent. It's an inherent talent, and any child they might have together runs a strong risk of inheriting this talent. Worse, it's addictive, and the continual temptation to meddle rather than merely observing can take one across the brink and into the abyss.
An older woman appears, claiming to be her future self, warning her not to marry this man. She shows the protagonist a vision of her future husband as an old man, burning books in a desperate effort to give up time travel.
Just as she's having second thoughts, the protagonist receives a second visitation, this time of a youngster who pleads with her to go ahead and wed her beloved. The lad then tells her that he is her son, that he likes being a part of their family, and if she doesn't marry his father, either he'll be born out of wedlock or he'll be someone else's child. And by the way, it's Mother's Day. Talk about pressure tactics.
The ending avoids cheap moralistic endings, and ends up transcending the "time travel as metaphor for human failing x" pattern -- and opens the doors to boundlessness instead of suggesting we need to live closed-in lives to be good people.
The fourth story, "Father's Monument," is about a man whose father is dying, and keeps talking about time travelers and the monument he must build in order to send a message to the distant future. It's an act of faith, that it will last long enough that the Time Wardens from Metachronopolis at the end of time will send a destiny crystal backwards for him, to rescue him after his time travels left him stranded in the twenty-first century.
In the first three stories, Metachronopolis and its time travelers were portrayed as destructive forces, as temptations to abandon one's sworn duty, to hubristic acts. In this story, they become a metaphor for the omniscience of God and the salvific power of grace.
However, the fifth story, "Slayer of Souls," returns to the darker themes of time travel as dangerous, destructive, even profoundly immoral, at least for mere mortals. The protagonist comes to a bookstore and is offered a book that teaches the power of telepathy. From the beginning there's something profoundly menacing about the entire transaction -- and soon he is being pursued by the eater of souls, an unseen Menace that seems to come straight out of a certain genre of nightmare.
The more the protagonist delves into the mysterious book, the more obsessed he becomes with the Soul Slayer and its powers. Suddenly he's fleeing through the city, riding on conveyances for which he lacks the funds to pay the fare, trying to barter his possessions and accused of having stolen them.
The story really feels like a homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W Chambers, complete with the trope of books full of knowledge that is too dangerous to know, that has the power to drive the reader mad. Yet even with the slow descent into madness, to the point the boundaries of waking consciousness and nightmare become uncertain, Mr. Wright gives us a happy ending of astonishing redemption which edges close to "it was only a dream" without the dissatisfaction that such an ending leaves in a reader who's encountered that particular twist before.
The final story, "The Plural of Helen of Troy," brings us full circle and reintroduces the protagonist of "Murder in Metachronopolis." Interestingly enough, this story is also told out of chronological sequence; however, while "Murder in Metachronopolis" was a story with its scenes shuffled like a deck of cards and presented in seemingly random order (albeit with enough information that the reader can restore the original order with a fair degree of certainty), "The Plural of Helen of Troy" is told in reverse chronological order. We are given the ending, and walk backward through the story to the beginning. So we know the protagonist will survive, and that he will end up in a world where humanity has become a truly spacefaring species and built cities on the Moon which are visible from Earth.
Then he tells of his life in Metachronopolis, a city filled with people both historical and fictional who've been brought to its golden towers by the mysterious beings who created it out of pure time. The Time Wardens are given several other titles, and there is a great deal of question about their numbers and ranks, of whether they rule time or guard it against the abuse of time travel.
As the title suggests, this is the story of his encounter with the multiple versions of Helen of Troy that the Time Wardens have plucked from history and myth and legend to ornament their city. The first one we encounter is an actress, Other versions of her are rescued by Little John of the Robin Hood cycle and by Big Bill Dwyer, a stevedore who turned boxer and rumrunner in the Roaring Twenties, which appears to be the era from which the protagonist comes. The unnamed first-person hero certainly seems like the sort of guy that would be at home in the Art Deco world of a noir detective movie, perhaps played by Humphrey Bogart. He considers his principles pretty shabby as principles go, but he stands by them, protecting girls because it's the right thing to do, even if it means putting a man's own knife through his eye for attacking yet another version of Helen of Troy.
As the protagonist proudly explains in a later scene that comes earlier in the internal chronology of events, he's a man with a hardened memory. No matter what happens, he will continue to remember previous versions of events. This makes him particularly useful to the Time Wardens because he knows when time has been meddled with.
At last we come to the beginning, complete with JFK and the peculiarities of his ethics, in which he won't commit suicide but is unconcerned about his habit of straying like a tomcat, although he firmly disapproves of hired murder. And the destiny cards from "Murder in Metachronopolis" reappear, complete with the menacing black card.
The ending is in fact a "Prologue to a New Beginning," complete with an astonishing revelation about the protagonist, whom we took to be a typical noir film protagonist, but is in fact something very different.
After reading all these stories, I think of how many writers' workshop teachers tell beginning writers that the time travel story is pretty well played out, but they should write a time travel story to get it out of their system -- and then say that there is no trope or theme so tired that a master cannot breathe new life into it. And I see this slender tome as evidence that future generations will remember John C. Wright as one of the great masters of twenty-first century speculative fiction. He's provided us with not one but six proofs of that adage.
Table of Contents
- Murder in Metachronopolis
- Choosers of the Slain
- Bride of the Time Warden
- Father's Monument
- Slayer of Souls
- The Plural of Helen of Troy
Buy City Beyond Time from Amazon.com
Review posted February 6, 2021
