Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

it? Neither had I, until I met the Dr.
    What is time? Whither time? Whence? Thither or hence? Who knows? And whom? And why does Whom know?
    What?
    Hold up: go back a mo. Start again.
    Let us define time. Time is the difference between a hot cup of coffee and a cold cup of coffee. It is the difference between a cold beer on a hot day, and a warm beer on a hot day. It turns young to old, and via the mystery of parturition it turns old into young. It’s what makes yesterday different to today: it’s the difference, in other words, between yester and to. Since to is the opposite of fro, it follows that yester and fro are the same thing. Yesterfro. What am I talking about?
    Time will tell.
    Time began at the beginning . This is why, strictly speaking, we should call it the beganning .
    Time is a dimension.
    But (and pay close attention, for this bit is really really important) - even though it is a dimension, Time is not space. This is because one day in time you will die. That’s coming closer and closer, I’m sorry to say. You can’t avoid it by moving around in space. You can’t take three steps to the left and watch your death slide past you, shaking its fist in impotent rage like a bobsleigh-man who’s lost control of the steering. It doesn’t work like that. Time is a two -dimensional, not a three-dimensional, thing. You can move along it from before to after , and if you’re clever enough you can move from after to before . But you can’t go sideways in time.
    On the other hand, you can go sideways in space. I’ll prove it
    There!
    What do we deduce from this? That spacetime , the theory advanced by Albert Einstein, is erroneously mistaken. You see, time is a different sort of thing from space. This is a really important point in the story I’m about to tell. I’d like you to bear it in mind, if you can.
    Who am I?
    My name is Prose Tailor. I tailor prose, I cut it to shape, fit it together. This prose you’re reading now is my work. I was a companion of the Dr. The Dr - that’s right. Him. I was there when he uncovered the essential mystery at the heart of the cosmos, the answer to the big question. I saw with my own eyes the solution.
    You are about to read my story.
     
The Dr belonged to that ancient race of beings called the Time Gentlemen. Alone of all the myriad races of the galaxy these austere and wise beings possessed a degree of mastery over time. Not a master’s degree, neither, but a PhD, and sometimes even postdoctoral qualifications. The most important time of my life was spent in the company of one of these Time Gentlemen, known as The Dr.
    It is the duty of the Time Gentlemen to protect the grammar of time.
    You didn’t realise that time has a grammar ? Ah, you deluded and ignorant fool. To master time, you need to understand the difference between a time noun and a time verb, a time subject and a time object. You need to understand tense and mood without getting tense or moody. Time is things happening in a particular order, according to a particular system of rules. Start breaking those rules and soon the whole fabric of time would unravel. The morrow would not longer follow the day; the day would not longer follow the yester. The yes. I mean yesterday. With the result that yesterday might come after tomorrow, and everybody would get very confused. The processes of life would break down; thought itself would become meandering and untenable.
    ‘Time is story ,’ the Dr said to me once. ‘It’s a narrative. If the narrative gets all tangled up, then the story becomes impossible to follow. That’s why the Time Gentlemen are so important. Because we preserve the proper line of the story.’
    Here is a story. A child is born on Earth of the twenty-third century. And who is this child?
    It’s me, of course.
    I grew to adulthood in You-’K? , a small country that is part of the continent of You-Rapper ! , itself merely a component of the World Wide Federation of Hip Humanity, our glorious