Cloche vaine

Literal: Vain bell English release: Empty ring

by Francine Pelletier

Release: Spring 1994
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

At the end of her long successful writing career, a woman is still haunted by her sister’s death four decades earlier.

— Michael Main

We had talked about SF literature, books on the theme of going back in time. This was related to the activities of the day. During the convention, one of the guest scientists had stated that time travel was impossible.

DEBUT

[ex=bare]“Cloche vaine” | Vain bell[/ex], in Solaris 109, Spring 1994.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TRANSLATIONS: No translations.

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

Circa AD 1970 to 1999: 7 August 1983
Circa AD 2000 to 2099: June 2024

Timeline Models

Remembering Different Timelines: “According to Lanoix, this was enough to protect the measurement instruments from the ‘ripple effect.’”
Resilient Timeline: Even though the narrator saves her sister initially, the timeline is resilent and her sister dies shortly after. Also: “Like the waves created by a pebble in water, the effects of the change would spread out slowly from the ‘centre’ of the event towards of the outer edges, the extremities of the temporal matrix, gradually dissipating.”

Time Travel Methods

Emotional Outcries through Time: “following a very specific line in the temporal matrix, the emotional line”
Hypnosis, Potions, and Drug-Induced Travel: Even though there is a big machine, hypnosis is also involved.
Time Tethers: It seems to be a time tether in a huge concrete hanger, connected to a nearby nuclear power plant. Sometimes it is only the mind that travels, but sometimes, as in this story, it is followed by the body. And although the return trip is not described, the narrator does snap back to 2024 after seemingly saving her sister (hence, a tether rather than a catapult.

Themes

Groupings

Solaris (periodical): Spring 1994

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)

From a bunker in Paris, 17 June 2024 ⋙ to Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, 7 Aug 1983. Round trip. Note: At first, the narrator believes she might only mind travel into her 24-year-old body, but in fact, her entire 65-year-old body is catapulted into the past. In the English version, I could not tell whether the trip was to Notre Dame in Paris or the Notre-Dame Bascilica in Montreal, but I presume Paris because although the narrator is from Montreal, she says that she and her sister were travelling at the time her sister was killed.