Great Work of Time
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Great Work of Time is a novella by John Crowley. A science fiction story involving time travel, it concerns a secret society created by the will of Cecil Rhodes to preserve and expand the British Empire.
Originally published in Crowley's 1989 collection Novelty, Great Work of Time was also published on its own in a Bantam paperback edition in 1991. It is now available as part of the omnibus volume Novelties and Souvenirs.
It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 1990.
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The title comes from Andrew Marvell's poem about Oliver Cromwell, who, Marvell said,
- Could by industrious valour climb
- To ruin the great work of Time,
- And cast the kingdoms old
- Into another mould. [1]
[edit] Plot summary
The story opens in a timeline in which the British Empire has survived as a dominant world power throughout the Twentieth Century. The main character, Denys Winterset - a promising young official in the Colonial Service at Africa, is invited by an enigmatic civil servant named Sir Geoffrey Davenant to join a secret society that has the ability to alter time. This society, which calls itself the Otherhood (because it is not quite a brotherhood), was endowed by Cecil Rhodes in 1893 with the goal of preserving and expanding the British empire.
The secret society is modeled on a Roman Catholic organization called the Jesuits (interestingly, one early version of Rhodes' will did indeed call for the creation of a pan-English-speaking secret society based on the Jesuits; although this never came into existence, this is where the author got his idea).
Invited to the Otherhood's secret headquarters, located out of normal time and space, Winterset is told that there had been "An Original Situation". There, what Winterset had learned of as the brief "War of 1914" had degenerated into a mass four-year long bloodletting . It was followed by the rise of various dictatorships and tyrannies, more terrible wars and unimaginable mass murders, and finally the development of terrible destructive weapons capable of utterly destroying the world. The calamity also involved the complete dissolution of the British Empire, to which Winterset is staunchly loyal and which he regards as the main guarantor of the world's peace and stability.
All this was averted only due to the ability of the Otherhood's agents go back in time, change the past, and create the peaceful, British-dominated world which Winterset had hitherto taken for granted. However, in the Otherhood's timeless headquarters, all this is still to be done.
Then, Winterset is told that there is a vital role which he is predestined to play (or that he has, in this universe of non-linear time, already played) and nobody else could fulfill: he must travel back to the beginning of the group in 1893 and assassinate Rhodes. Otherwise, in the late 1890s Rhodes would change his will and dissipate much of his fortune, the Otherhood would never come into being and the terrible nightmare of "The Original Situation" Twentieth Century would be restored...
"Great Work of Time" has the same basic outline as Issac Asimov's The End of Eternity - i.e. a secret society of well-meaning time travelers bent on remodeling history, and a young man recruited into the society in order to make a specific change that would bring this society itself into being. However, the details what the time travelers do and where in time they operate are incomparably different from those in Asimov's book.
