“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” (1974)

This story by Philip K. Dick is the last story in The Dark Descent. So I finished it, huzzah! Editor David G. Hartwell often reached beyond horror in the oversize anthology—sometimes to a fault, e.g., Faulkner, Turgenev—so ending on Dick is not a big surprise. He argues for science fiction horror writing: “Bodies of work from such writers as Dick and [Gene] Wolfe and [Thomas] Disch ... demand the broadening of the older definitions of horror literature, and require discarding criteria based on content in favor of the effect itself.” I think a Dick story from the ‘50s, “The Hanging Stranger,” makes an even stronger case for him as a horror writer, but there’s no reason this can’t be a “both/and” situation, at least in principle. “Tempunauts” is a time travel story that takes the Apollo moon mission as a model. A crew of three “tempunauts” has been hurled 100 years into the future in a launch attended by media frenzy. But, in fact, something went wrong and they traveled into the future only a few days. They soon learn they perished on their return from the future. These various paradoxes somehow mean they have thrown themselves and possibly the world or even universe into a closed time loop that is eternal. A successful reentry would break the loop. I’m not sure I understand how they know these things, even that they are in a loop at all. The reentry has failed and we come to learn it’s the result of sabotage by one of the tempunauts in order to (per Wikipedia) “find resolution in death and close the time-loop, freezing all of humanity, and possibly the whole universe, in endless repetition of a single week.” At one time, when I was a kid, time travel was my favorite SF idiom, but these days honestly the paradoxes can just put me on overload. I like Dick’s storytelling skills but the ambiguities here are a bit arch for science fiction, let alone horror. It seems to be an irrational act on the part of the tempunaut. He learns they die because of the reentry and that it’s because of sabotage and he even speculates a closed time loop may exist. But he has a choice not to sabotage the return and does so anyway. The problem I had was that it wasn’t entirely clear while I was reading. I thought that’s what was going on, but it seemed perverse and unmotivated. It’s a chilling enough idea, like horror should be, but it’s also at way too many removes for me. So the anthology ends on a curiosity, but there’s still another edited by Hartwell and nearly as big, Foundations of Fear. Look forward to getting into that.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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