Ian Peterson

Character Analysis

Ian Peterson is working for the Council. He ultimately helps Renfrew secure the funding needed to carry out the tachyon experiment and send messages to the past, warning the future of the ecological disasters to come. By that synopsis, you might think Peterson is a pretty up-and-up kind of guy, but hold on a minute—we're just getting started.

Foiled You

Peterson is Renfrew's foil in many respects. Whereas Renfrew throws himself into his work for the betterment of mankind, Peterson seems to only be interested in his job because it gets him access to the finer things in life—food, women, and an office that smells of rich mahogany. Also, Renfrew is a family man, but Peterson can't stand being around families. At the Kiefers' house, he thinks: "If he had to share the dinner table with a crew of American brats—" (11.82). We never find out what that if amounts to, but we're betting it wouldn't be good for anyone involved.

Peterson does seem to help secure the funding for Renfrew's experiments, but we soon learn both men are pursuing the goal for different reasons. Peterson is simply curious to find out whether it will work or not (37.15-17), whereas Renfrew is doing it to save the world from total ecological destruction. In a telling scene, Peterson suggests they create a condition that will result in a paradox (15.24). Sure, it'll doom the experiment and could put the entire world in jeopardy, but it'll satisfy Peterson's curiosity. In Peterson's mind, the latter is the more important matter.

Ultimately, Peterson represents the novel's impression of politics in the same way Renfrew represents science. And while Renfrew isn't perfect, the novel is clearly suggesting his values are the better choice compared to the self-serving Peterson.

This said, Peterson does seem enticed by scientific discovery. He finds there is "something he like[s] about the way scientists had of setting up problems as neat little thought experiments, making a clean and sure world" (9.162). Ultimately, though, the novel insists that science is a force that provides for the people of the world—and Peterson, on the other hand, only provides for himself.

All for One and All for One Again

In a word, Peterson is a hedonist. He provides only for his own self-pleasure, and this is particularly evident in his treatment of women. One might think of Peterson as a lover of women—Markham makes that assumption—but as Catharine Wickham points out, ''He loathes us, every one. And he can't stand rejection by an inferior being'' (24.46). In other words, Peterson doesn't view woman as equals, but as inferiors that are required to be conquered and claimed like enemies. Ugh.

One might assume that this trail of seduction is a way for Peterson to get back at his wife, who had a very messy, very public affair with a member of the British Royal Family. We think there's more to it, though. After seducing Mitsuoko, he flies back to England and reflects:

He felt relaxed and pleasantly dissipated, with the slack sensation one gets when he knows he has done quite as much as could be expected along the lines of self-indulgence. No regrets, that was the ticket […]. (11.128)

That's the ticket to understanding Peterson: He wants to live his life with no regrets, but as we see through his story, a life lived in fear of regret is also a life that lacks accomplishment.

The Fortress of Solitude

In the end, it seems like Peterson manages to get away scot-free. He abandons his job in the Council and heads to his country house, which he has been building into a makeshift fortress-o-doom complete with an apocalypse's worth of food. In short, Peterson can doomsday prep with the best of them. As he notes:

The government itself had, of course, followed much the same strategy. Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future. (43.49)

Ultimately, despite his position in politics tasking him to help the people of the world and their future, Peterson cuts and runs. By the novel's assessment, this isn't so much Peterson going rogue but more the typical response of the modern political system.

It might seem unfair that such a man would be the only character in the 1998 timeline to live happily ever after, but hold on a second, because there's more here going on. Remember earlier in the novel Peterson was considering the folly of futurologists and their predictions for the future? He thinks:

Soon there would be nothing bigger than a man on the planet that was not already a client, a housepet. Without the giants mankind would be alone with the rats and the cockroaches. Worse, perhaps, he would be alone with himself. (30.14)

Granted, Peterson is talking about mankind as a whole, but clearly there is something about the idea of loneliness that bothers Peterson deep down. At his self-constructed fortress of solitude, Peterson—the man who always needs to take from others in order to be happy—is now alone. He doesn't even have a Marlon Brando space dad to call his own.

Sure, he has family present, but we should recall that Peterson hates family, and the people he's surrounded himself with aren't exactly brimming with vitality. In short, he's constructed—and then run away to—his own personal hell.