Flyover Country

Dystopian futures, like the utopias that originally inspired the genre, descend from the tradition of satire, often exaggerating a contemporary trend or vice as a comment or cautionary tale.  Usually, the object of satire is clear enough to a contemporary reader without any need for a fictional stand-in.  Time travel becomes much more valuable as a device if the satire is focused on the present day. In that case, bringing someone from our past to their future (i.e., our present) provides endless opportunity for defamiliarization, wry commentary, and metaphysical speculation. 

Bellamy's Looking Backward provides the structural model for these sorts of tales,  even as it differs from them in two important respects: 1) though the book functions as a satire of Bellamy's present, it is deadly earnest about the world in which his hero arrives, and 2) Bellamy's hero ends up in the reader's future, while the works that borrow from it deposit the traveler in the present day. 

The classic Soviet example of this kind of story exists in two versions that tell basically the same story.  In Mikhail Bulgakov's 1935-1936 play Ivan Vasilievich , a faulty time machine swaps a Soviet building superintendent with Ivan the Terrible (both men are named "Ivan Vasilievich).  After the legendary Russian tyrant gets over his initial shock,  it turns out that he is perfectly equipped for navigating Stalinist reality.  In 1973, Director Leonid Gaidai adapted the play into a film called Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession (sometimes called Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future in English), performing an additional feat of time travel by moving the action from the 30s to the 1970s. 

The visitor from the past forces us to look at the present with new eyes: our time turns out to truly be a "brave new world," in both the original Shakespearean sense and Huxley's ironic, dystopian spin on the phrase.  The present is both magical and horrible,  in a manner that rarely fails to be instructive. 

The Rip van Winkle scenario is the point of departure for one of the most celebrated Russian novels of the early twenty-first century:  Eugene Vodolazkin's The Aviator (2015).  The novel's premise is simple:  born in 1900, Innokenty Petrovich Platonov is frozen as part of a life-extension experiment in the gulag in the 1930s, only to be defrosted and revived in 1999.  After suffering from amnesia, he slowly acclimates himself to his new environment, with the help of his physician, Dr. Geiger, and, eventually, his young wife, Nastya, the granddaughter of the now-nonagenarian love of his life, Anastasia. By the end of the novel, he is beset by the symptoms of a terminal post-thaw mental decline, and when last we see him, he may be facing death in a plane crash. 

A powerful novel in its own right, The Aviator  looks even better in comparison to the works it superficially resembles.  Not just the Time Crasher genre, though we will certainly get to that, but also its older utopian and dystopian precursors. Bellamy's Looking Backward, for example, not only shares the same basic premise, but even involves a similar jump in time. It also features an incredibly simplistic trope that is developed, if not entirely redeemed, by The Aviator. When Julian West awakens in the year 2000, he is forever separated from his fiancée, Edith Bartlett, but finds solace in the arms of her great-granddaughter, Edith Leete.  Where Bellamy seems perfectly happy to render the two Ediths entirely fungible (as if they were just another commodity to be found in the socialist CostCos Julian so admires), Vodolazkin (and Innokenty) is careful to recognize them as distinct individuals.  In its depiction of the slow return of Innokenty's memories followed by his cognitive decline, The Aviator also resembles Daniel Keyes' 1958/1966 Flowers for Algernon (with which it shares its diary format).  

The diary (which also includes notes by Nastya and Geiger) is the formal manifestation of the primary distinction between The Aviator and the other works we have looked at in this chapter.  Time Crasher stories privilege the big events, the turning points in history, subsuming everyday life into the project of righting historical wrongs.  The Aviator, too, is concerned with history (history being one of the primary preoccupations of nearly all of Vodolazkin's work),  and the choice of the gulag as the site of Innokenty's cryogenic suspension firmly roots the story in one of the most important, and shameful, moments in the Soviet era.  But the gulag does not make up the majority of Innokenty's reminiscences (which tend to about the years prior to his arrest).  Even more important, Innokenty firmly and consistently rejects any attempt to frame his life within the grand narratives of history.  When people ask him to describe the past, he argues that they already know about the big events; what he can describe is how it felt to live during that time.  He focuses on the sounds, the smells, and all the things that words on paper could not have preserved.  His interested in  reproducing the sheer dailyness of the past is perfectly mirrored in his descriptions of everything novel he finds in the dailiness of 1999.  

The Aviator, unlike the Time Crasher stories, paints a picture of sudden, involuntary time travel as disruptive rather than restorative.  As Innokenty writes early in the novel:  "A person is not a cat and cannot land on four paws wherever thrown. A person is placed in a certain historical time for some reason. What happens when someone loses that?”  Time Crashers are heroic, but Innokenty, once he has had time to brush up on the last seven decades of history, causes a small stir at a public event when he rejects the Russian president's comparison of his travel in time to Gagarin's orbit in space: “I’m afraid I do not deserve the comparison with Gagarin...‘because my courage was forced. It is probably more akin to the courage of Belka and Strelka, who also had no other choice."

In rejecting the heroic paradigm, Vodolazkin (via Innokenty) puts the maximum distance between his own work and the historical wish-fulfillment fantasies that have come to prominence in the first decades of the twenty-first century.  Innokenty is no Mary Sue, and The Aviator is not historical fan fiction.  When it comes to twentieth-century history, neither Innokenty nor Vodolazkin could be called a fan.