CCCCFF: Siblings through the cornfield to uhoria: 05/23/19

The next destination for sibling travelers is uhoria — or no time. These are typically time travel stories, although they don't have to be, as our exemplar, The Million by Karl Schroeder, shows.

Siblings are people raised together by the same parents. In the case of Gavin and his brother, they aren't blood relations. Gavin is an adopted sibling. He's also for reasons the book goes into in finite detail, an undocumented immigrant hiding in plain sight. But from Gavin's point of view, and that of his father and brother (who is a blood relation to the father), they are siblings.

The destination is no-time. While most of my exemplars are actual time travel stories, there are other ways time can assert itself: haunted houses, places isolated from modern trends, or in this case, hibernation. The Millions are the caretakers of the Earth while the majority of its people sleep for a generation to get time on the surface for short, fixed periods. To the Millions, these visitors are a regular annoyance. To the Visitors, those who mostly hibernate, time flies between those periods of enforced sleep.

For Gavin, a visitor who woke too soon and has been living his life among the Millions, he is now out of synch with his original family. When his brother is sentenced to become one of the visitors for killing their father, Gavin and his brother are also put out of synch. It is this artificial asynchronous time flow between the two populations that makes this destination uhoric.

Finally there is the route taken. In this narrative, the route taken is through the cornfield or through the tkaronto — or trees at the water. The visitors hibernate in special underground caverns and the one that criminals are sentenced to is below the school the Millions attend as children. This school happens to be located at Venice — a city built on water. While it's not quite trees and water, it serves as a boundary to the other way of living just as a more conventional cornfield or tkaronto would.

Other versions of this narrative construction could involve siblings running through a cornfield and being thrust forwards or backwards in time. Siblings could be trapped in a cornfield or on a mangrove island that is out of the normal flow of time. Visitors from out of time could arrive on a sibling run farm through the cornfield. Siblings could stop a flood of ghosts from haunting a town that is near a wooded lake.

Know of other books, films, or television episodes that would fit here? Recommend them in the comments below.

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