Jack Finney: Science Fiction for People who Don't Like Science Fiction

Last night, I got up in the middle of the night -- about 3:15am or so -- and heard a woman with high-heeled shoes walking outside. To my mostly-asleep mind, the "clop clop clop" of her shoes on the pavement sounded less like a human and more like a horse. And as a result of this train of thought, I had an intriguing, vivid, Jack Finneyesque vision. What if the window I heard the clopping footsteps through was actually, at that moment, a window into another time? What if I opened the curtain and saw not cars parked in a lot, but horse-drawn carriages bundling down the street? I'm not talking about time travel, you understand; in the scenario I was imagining, if I had gone outside, I'd still be in the year 2017. But if I had looked out the window, I'd see the year 1900.

Now, don't start calling for the guys in white coats, because even in my half-asleep state, I knew all this to be imagination. So now that "he's gone crazy!" isn't the foremost thought in your mind, you may be thinking, "wait, 'Jack Finneyesque'?"

To the general public, Finney is best known as the author of the book later filmed multiple times as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To fans of science fiction, Finney is best known as the writer of several novels and short stories involving time travel.

Now, that may cause some of you to roll your eyes. Those of you who "aren't into sci-fi." But I'm going to posit that even a lot of people who aren't into sci fi actually are, to some extent. My wife, for example, isn't into sci fi, but one of her favorite movies is Somewhere in Time, written by sci fi great Richard Matheson, in which Christopher Reeve plays a man who falls so deeply in love with a picture of a woman, that he finds himself traveling back in time out of sheer will power, just to meet her. If you think this is an exception, I'd say that you yourself, Mr. or Mrs. "I'm not into sci fi" probably are, at least just a little. Ask most people who were kids or young adults in the 80s to list their favorite movies, and they're probably going to mention Back to the Future, about a time-travelling teenager, Ghostbusters, about nuclear-powered "proton packs" that shoot specialized lasers intended to catch ghosts -- a concept that is predicated on the idea that ghosts are interdimensional beings -- and maybe, just maybe, Weird Science, a John Hughes teen comedy about two high school kids who create a woman out of a computer program. And speaking of Ghostbusters, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis would later team up again, to bring us Groundhog Day, a hilarious and almost universally loved comedy about a guy stuck in a time warp. You don't get more sci fi than those four concepts.

So yeah, as self-contradictory as it sounds, you don't have to be into sci fi to enjoy sci fi. The secret to the above cited examples is that they're all, to varying degrees, less about the science fictiony gimmicks that launch the story, and more about the relationships involved. Reeve falls in love, Marty gets to know the adults in his life from viewpoints he never would have otherwise had, Bill Murray's hellish time loop forces him to become a better man, etc.

The time travel stories of Jack Finney are like that. They're less about the intricacies of time travel, and more about how the characters feel about the science fictiony events. Finney often depicts the past as a more desirable, simpler time (an idea Rod Serling had mixed feelings about, more or less agreeing, but seeing the view as a problematic oversimplification), and his protagonists' opportunities to travel in time is often a reflection of the characters' inner anxieties and desires. An important clue that this emotional content, rather than the sci fi ideas themselves, is Finney's priority, is illustrated by the fact that Finney rarely dwells on or even establishes the reason why time travel is possible in his stories. The "reasons" are often simply depicted as explanation-less miracles. My favorite is the short story "The Third Level," about a guy who stumbles upon a time warp in Grand Central Station, of all places. The ending is kinda Twilight Zoney in its way, but in order to get to that ending, you get to know the protagonist, and he's a character worth knowing.

Oh, and incidentally, that movie I mentioned earlier, Somewhere in Time -- it may have been written by Matheson, but it uses a time travel method established by Jack Finney; you can spot the homage to the other author through the character Professor Finney.