#155 Fork in the road: The Two-Timers (1968) by Bob Shaw

A personal struggle with cosmic consequences

Some people are their own worst enemy - that's particularly true for John Breton. One night, he finds himself confronted with an identical, rival version of himself - who has crossed over from another timeline.

Originally published in 1968, The Two-Timers is the second novel by Bob Shaw, a follow-up to his debut Night Walk which was covered in episode 129. Both a painful exploration of a collapsing marriage, and an SF story about a threat to the integrity of the universe, this book combines the domestic and the cosmic with powerful effect.

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Transcript

A personal struggle with cosmic consequences 

For John Breton, it is an ordinary evening - he is drinking heavily, bickering with his wife Kate, and being bored by her friends who are over for a visit. Then, he gets a disconcerting phone call which puts him on edge. Later, he receives a disturbing and seemingly impossible visitor at the house - an exact duplicate of himself, an intruder from another timeline with dark plans on his mind.

The Two-Timers (1968) is the second novel by Northern Irish writer Bob Shaw. It was originally published in the US as part of the first series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, edited by Terry Carr. A year later, it was published as a UK hardcover by Gollancz. In contrast with Shaw’s first novel Night Walk (1967), his second effort has a much more grounded setting in 1981 Montana, and a focus on a fragmenting marriage. But what begins as a domestic drama gradually morphs into a threat to the integrity of the universe itself. 

Centred believably on a decaying relationship, The Two-Timers also deals intriguing with time travel, human frailty, and loss.

Double trouble

The novel is set in the near future from the time of writing, in 1981. Humans are colonising the moon, and there have been some advances in technology, but otherwise this is a familiar world. The story takes place in Montana, but this setting is thin and unconvincing. Rightly or wrongly, it feels as if it could have been a concession to the demands of Shaw’s American publishers. 

John Breton is an affluent partner in a successful engineering firm. Nine years earlier, his wife Kate was almost killed by a prowling psychopath when she was walking alone in a park, abandoned by John following an argument. Since then, their relationship has gradually deteriorated. When another version of John appears - one who calls himself Jack, as John used to do - he is confronted with a bizarre story.

Jack explains that he is in fact the true original. In his timeline (A), Kate was murdered in the park. Crushed by grief, Jack largely abandoned his life and career and became obsessed with his occasional migraines, which had always given him short periods of total recall of past events. He spent nine years developing a device which allowed him to harness this strange ability - in effect, a personal time machine. 

Jack travelled back to the night of Kate’s murder, violently prevented it, and returned to his own time. But he had misunderstood causality - rather than changing his timeline, he had merely created another one (B), complete with alternate versions of himself and Kate. John’s life, his entire world, is merely a fork in time created by Jack. What is worse, Jack wants his life and wife back - and since he has killed once, he can surely do it again…

Longer and longer knives

While Night Walk (1967) is a broadly breezy interstellar adventure, The Two-Timers is darker, more grounded, and more character-focused. Its single largest strength may be Shaw’s depiction of the triangular relationship between John, Jack, and Kate. The fractious dialogue and sometimes cruel exchanges have an unsettling ring of truth about them. At times, Shaw has a wonderful turn of phrase - he writes of John and Kate, “the only way they could reach each other now was by wielding longer and longer knives.”

The rawness and believability of the domestic scenario offsets the wild implausibility of the time travel conceit. Jack’s solo development of a time machine is deeply fanciful and Shaw perhaps devotes more time to it than is wise. However, he does not need to sell the reader on the scientific aspect, provided that the emotional impact is real - and it is. The interactions of the characters become increasingly fraught, and build up to a quite moving ending.

To lose everything

The Two-Timers is, as much as anything, about the need to confront and deal with loss - however painful that may be. The inciting incident of the story - Jack’s decision to travel in time - is rooted in his failure to accept the loss of Kate. Perhaps surprisingly, Shaw’s work anticipates a major novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. In her fantasy The Farthest Shore (1972), the third book of the Earthsea series, the villain’s bid to defeat death threatens the existence of all life. This is quite similar to The Two-Timers, in which Jack’s intrusion into timeline B violates the energy equilibrium laid out by the “Kirchhoff equations” - named for the 19th century German mathematician and physicist - and risks triggering a cosmic catastrophe.

In this way, then, both Le Guin and Shaw are exploring a similar idea in different ways. Le Guin’s fantasy approach is rooted in daoism, and Shaw’s SF is based (albeit in a rather wooly way) on science, specifically the laws of thermodynamics. Both emphasise that meddling with the order of things is an act of deadly hubris. The Two-Timers also has some resonances with Robert Silverberg’s later novel The Second Trip (1971); in that story, two minds struggle over one body. Here, two versions of the same man struggle over one life. However only Shaw’s novel adds in vast cosmic stakes, which fits with his usual approach.

While The Two-Timers is not Shaw operating at his formidable best, it is an interesting experiment. It is also a good showcase for his skill at writing believable characters and domestic relationships, and for his ability to extract emotional impact from science fiction. He would follow this novel with The Palace of Eternity (1969), a twisty tale of interstellar war, environmental destruction, and the source of artistic inspiration.