Up the Line by Robert Silverberg

“A ribald, Byzantine tale of time-tourism” from the multiple Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author (Tor.com). It’s 2059, and former law clerk Jud Elliott finds himself at loose ends—until a chance meeting with a Time Courier gives him the inspiration to become one himself. The job—as a time-traveling guide—gives him the opportunity to indulge his love of Byzantine history, in between shuttling tourists to such monumental events as the crucifixion and the assassination of JFK. But there are strict rules to follow as a Time Courier, put in place to guard against paradoxes and preserve the sanctity of “now-time.” Jud isn’t used to following the rules—especially when faced with temptation. All it takes is one tiny slip here, one misplaced step there, and Jud could destroy his own timeline and cease to exist in the blink of an eye . . . a practicality that’s hard for Jud to grasp when he crosses paths with an eleventh-century Byzantium beauty he can’t resist. “A hugely ambitious, enormously fun, sly, paradox-peppered piece that chronicles the time-tourist trade and all its perils—specializing in Byzantine history.” —Strange Horizons “This novel is a comedy, and it is funny, but it is one of those black comedies where things go wrong, and then the more the protagonist tries to fix things, the more wrong they become, until the ending is at one and the same time an O. Henry punchline and a deep existential truth, neat as a pin and just as sharp.” —Kim Stanley Robinson

An interesting conceit bogged down by excessive mentions of the protagonist's sexual prowess. It turns out that the number of times I will put up with an author describing how a character wants to boink his ultimate grandmother while time traveling in Byzantium is actually quite small. The history aspect of the novel was cool though!

This is the story of a time courier, a young man who takes tourists from the year 2059 up the line into the past, to see the sights of Byzantine history, a period that he's studied.

It's a fluent and accomplished story that dates surprisingly little, being written with an imagination that transcends the years.

The main jarring note is that it's exhaustingly full of sex. In the late 1960s, writers were taking advantage of a relaxation in what had previously been the rules, and so the hero couples like there was no tomorrow, finding the past strewn with willing and able women. Fantasy, from that point of view.

Stylistically, I feel I detect the influence of Samuel R. Delany, who was also writing in the late 1960s, though not about time travel.

But the important part of the story describes the past and the problems experienced by our hero in the way of time loops and paradoxes, some of his own making, some not. Here the book is persuasive and has a claim to classic status.

I noted with amusement a small failure of imagination, although with a book like this written in 1969 one might expect to find more. At the end of Chapter 33, “When I got next month's account statement I found he had thumbed a cool thousand into my credit.”

It didn't occur to the author that by 2059 online banking would enable customers to check their bank accounts at any time; and he may not have anticipated what inflation would do to a thousand dollars by 2059. Authorizing financial transactions by thumbprint is rather cool, though, and it's not something I've done yet.

There's another more serious problem that I didn't notice immediately. Each time traveller is fitted with a miniaturized time machine worn as an item of clothing. The tourists have no control of their time machines, which are slaved to the courier's. However, one tourist is an ex-engineer who manages to hack his time machine and gain control of it.

He's not described as having smuggled any equipment into the past with him, so how does he break into mid-21st-century microcircuitry that's supplied without any user interface? Using his fingers? This I would like to see.