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that the Egyptians apparently carried out the slaughter as a means of
controlling the Hebrews' population growth; the Jewish slaves were
out-populating the native Egyptians. To my mind, the Egyptians were intelligent
enough to realize that killing male children would not alter the Jewish
birthrate; killing female children would. Thus the slaughter of the baby girls.
I assume that later generations of Jewish scribes were so thoroughly
male-oriented that they changed the story to agree with their concepts of male
importance and dominance.
These speculations are perfectly in accord with the traditional science-fiction
axiom that the author is free to invent anything, so long as no one can prove
him wrong. The Egyptians slaughtered baby girls, and Troy and Jericho were both
toppled by Hittite engineers.
The most fantastic elements in the novel are, of course, Orion himself and the
pantheon of advanced human time-travelers who present themselves as gods and
goddesses to the ancients.
Does this mean that the novel is fantasy, rather than science fiction? To be
science fiction, a story must deal fairly with the known laws of science, and
reasonable extrapolations thereof.
Time travel is clearly impossible, almost. Physicists have speculated that black
holes representing collapsed stars or even collapsed galaxies must have
gravitational fields about them that are so intense they warp space-time. Space
and time are bent so drastically that modern physics cannot predict what happens
under such circumstances. Such black holes may represent, then, natural time
machines. What nature can do, the human mind can eventually duplicate or even
improve upon. Time machines are clearly impossible today, but they may not
always be so, especially if you allow plenty of millennia for them to be
developed.
Thus the novel is, to my way of thinking, science fiction. Again, the axiom is
that an author can use anything that cannot be proven to be wrong. Time travel
is reasonable material for a science fiction novelist to use in his
speculations. Even more fascinating are the consequences of time travel.
If one grants the possibility of time travel, then the need for a supernatural
being, a god, as the cause of the universe and of humankind goes out the window.
Consider a very advanced human civilization, thousands of years in our future.
Their knowledge is so great that they discover the means to travel through time;
past and future are like different currents in a vast ocean, to them. They could
go back to an earlier eon on Earth and create the human race, their own
ancestors. In fact, they would have to.
To those earlier people the creators would seem like gods. It is clear that the
ancient gods were not the beneficent moralists that we believe our modern gods
to be. In fact, to any rational mind, the concept of a god who is perfectly just
and perfectly merciful is not only illogical, it is decidedly out of tune with
the observable facts of the world around us.
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Now then if the "gods" are as human as you and I but possess enormously greater
powers than we do, and if power truly does corrupt the human spirit, imagine how
wildly malevolent an all-powerful god must be!
The result of such ratiocinations is the novel you have just finished reading,
and its predecessor, Orion. There will be more.
Ben Bova
West Hartford, Connecticut
Copyright © 1988 by Ben Bova
Cover art by Boris Vallejo
ISBN: 0-812-53161-2
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