#175 Collision with the future: The Masks of Time (1968) by Robert Silverberg

The definitive time travel story, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895), focuses on a protagonist who visits the extremely far future. Across over a century of time travel tales, in most cases it is the people of our own time who visit either the past or the future. Rather less commonly, the contemporary world plays host to a visitor from another era.

The Masks of Time (1968) is one of those exceptions. This Robert Silverberg novel is set in the year 1999. A mysterious visitor, apparently a time traveler from the year 2999, arrives in Rome and brings chaos with him. This is the beginning of an unusual kind of time travel story, in which the contemporary characters try to make sense of this enigmatic figure and what his hints about his own time imply about the future of humankind.

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Transcript

The 20th century is coming to an end, and a new millennium is about to begin. A millenarian cult, the “apocalyptists”, believe that the world is about to end and indulge in dionysan orgies of careless pleasure and general mayhem. Others, including the world’s governments, are searching for signs of future stability and order. Into this perilous moment arrives the enigmatic Vornan-19. He claims to be from the future, the year 2999, and quickly becomes the centre of a whirlwind of speculation, suspicion, and awe. Has Vornan really travelled back a thousand years, and if so are his intentions benign, or dangerous? Does humanity have a future at all?

The Masks of Time (1968) is a novel of Robert Silverberg’s prolific and acclaimed peak period, generally said to have lasted from 1967 to 1975. With this story, Silverberg uses the mysterious figure of Vornan as a lens to examine a troubled near-future society. The novel is also an exploration of our fixation on both scenarios of the future, and visions of the end of the world. It also dwells on the potentially frightening power of the charismatic individual, who becomes a focus of a society’s diverse hopes and fears.

A visit from the future?

The novel is presented as a first-person narrative from the perspective of jaded, listless physicist Leo Garfield. Frustrated with his work which centres on attempting to send high-energy particles back in time - a project similar to one in Gregory Benford’s later novel Timescape (1980) - Garfield seeks solace with a former student, Jack Bryant, and his wife Shirley. Staying with them at their house in the Arizona desert, Garfield is inducted into a new life of relaxation, isolation, and - rather oddly - nudism. 

Garfield and his friends are so cut off from the world in their sun-kissed idyll that they miss the news about Vornan-19, who descends from the sky on to the Spanish Steps in Rome on Christmas Eve, 1998. Vornan travels extensively in Europe, causing social and political tremors across the continent. A concerned U.S. government recruits Garfield to join several other scientists who will act as a welcoming committee for the stranger’s inevitable arrival in the United States. Vornan is intrigued by the country, as he believes it to be the crumbling, leading edge of a dying world order.

Garfield becomes part of a kind of travelling circus, escorting Vornan around the U.S. and later, the world. The visitor’s blunt comments, sheer charisma, sexual magnetism, and strange cultural views cause chaos wherever he goes. Garfield tries desperately to prise information about the future out of Vornan, to only to learn if he is for real, but also to establish whether Jack Bryant’s concept for converting mass into near-limitless energy can ever be made real. 

Looking for clues

The Masks of Time is a time travel novel with a difference, in that Silverberg’s protagonist does not travel in time. Instead, the characters are eyewitnesses to what seems to be a collision with the future, as Vornan claims to have arrived in the contemporary world from a thousand years hence. This uncertainty about whether time travel is possible, and whether Vornan’s arrival is one giant hoax, is another distinctive element and the novel’s main source of tension. 

Vornan is very much at the centre of the story, and becomes the focus for all of its events. Reluctant to talk in any detail about his own time, he is a kind of cipher, a blank slate on which the people of 1999 project their hopes, fears, and prejudices. This makes sense, as Vornan represents the future - unknowable, unpredictable, and variously a source of anticipation and despair. As Leo Garfield spends more time with Vornan, it becomes clear that he is trying to understand and justify his own life, even more than he is struggling to learn some clues about the course of future history.

The few scraps of information that Garfield and his colleagues acquire are intriguing. For example, Vornan explains that in his time, virtually all animals will be extinct except for a few agricultural species. This unnerves his hosts, but nowhere near as much as his revelation during a visit to the New York Stock Exchange that capitalism and money will not last forever.

Relationships with the future

There is often a strong focus on sexuality in Silverberg’s novels of this period, and so it is with The Masks of Time. Vornan is particularly interested in the sexual practices of the late 20th century, and at one point visits an “automated brothel” with Leo Garfield. Vornan’s sexual rapaciousness is disruptive to the lives of those around him. It disturbs the harmony of the group of scientists tasked with escorting and studying him, and Garfield fears its effect on the relationship between Jack and Shirley. 

Fortunately, Silverberg’s emphasis on sexuality does not overwhelm the novel, as it would do with his later time travel work Up the Line (1969). That rather crass and prurient effort wallows in sex, without which critic Algis Budrys wrote “it would be a short story or novelette.” 

The Masks of Time may not be as formidable as The World Inside or even The Second Trip (both 1971), but it is a well-crafted novel which prods interestingly at our troubled and troubling relationship with the future.