Wednesday 3 August 2022

Multi-Diversity

This is becoming clearer. If the Exaltationists had stolen Atahualpa's ransom in 1533, then that would have changed history in ways that would have prevented them from leaving the thirty-first millennium with the intention of stealing the ransom in that year but it would not have prevented them from arriving in 1533 and committing the theft. Nor (I now think) would it have prevented them from establishing a base in 1610 before proceeding to 1533. Time Patrol agents must be able to gauge the exact consequences of temporal alterations before they perform such alterations in "Brave To Be A King," "The Year of the Ransom" and The Shield Of Time.

We admire diversity but there are different kinds of it.

Poul Anderson: diversity of genres within a single medium, prose fiction;

Neil Gaiman: diversity of media - graphic, prose and screen.

Anderson's fantasies and sf could be appropriately adapted into visual media although he himself never created in those media. His fantasies include the prose novel, A Midsummer Tempest. Gaiman's fantasies include:

The Sandman, with "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" instalments (graphic fiction);

American Gods (prose novel);

Neverwhere (TV drama series);

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (an illustrated prose story).

Each of these works by Gaiman has been adapted into other media, whether by Gaiman or by another creator, and the same can be done with Anderson's works.

6 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

It wouldn't have prevented them from establishing the base in 1610 -in their own worldline- but it would no longer be -present- (or example, they couldn't hop there on their timecycles and find it) after they made the alteration in 1533.

Only things -before- the alteration point would continue to exist from the p.o.v. of the people making the alteration (provided they did it in person).

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

I basically agree and that has been my understanding of the way that timeline deletions work in the Time Patrol timeline(s). However, I am now thinking that the alteration involved in stealing the ransom would have consequences that would not affect Machu Picchu as early as 1610 and thus that there is no reason why the base and personnel located there should not still exist in the altered timeline...? We don't really know, of course. Varagan is clearly assuming that they would still exist.

S.M. Stirling said...

If he did assume that, he's wrong, I think.

Even if things "are the same" in one place after the alteration, they don't have or lead to the same -future-. If there's a significant divergence, the universe-taken-as-a-whole is no longer the same universe.

Eg, in THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, if the Chinese/Mongol expedition succeeds, events in Europe wouldn't be affected for a long time.

But Patrol agents and bases there in Europe after the change would no longer exist for, say, Everard or Sandoval to appeal to or escape to.

Unless they were there -previous- to the change-point, in which case they'd continue to exist as they passed it but they'd no longer receive communications from the future -- that's spelled out in a passage in THE SHIELD OF TIME, where an agent is informed that they'll be told if the correction to the quantum-fluctuation change is successful.

IIRC, in that story such an agent is told, before the correction is made and -after-the change-point, which they 'lived through' having been put in place before it, that such a messenger -will have- come to tell them, and they won't have any memory of the conversation then taking place. They're a bit frightened because because it means that their consciousness of what "occurred" after the arrival of the messenger will no longer have taken place -- "not quite like dying", is the phrase used.

That's clearly implied in the text I think -- and not by statements by a character, but by the omniscient narrator in both stories, since it's told in third-person.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Whether rightly or wrongly, Varagan clearly does expect his Machu Picchu base still to exist in Timeline B. I agree that this does not fit with what is said elsewhere.

At some stage, of course, I part company with Anderson's account of the paradoxes. I think that for a character to say," I who am speaking here and now might turn out after all not to exist, and therefore not to be speaking, here and now" is incoherent whereas a second temporal dimension easily accommodates the possibility that the character exists at the present moment of the second temporal dimension but will not exist (Temporal tense needed) at a later moment of that dimension but that need not concern him here and now because his entire four-dimensional space-time continuum including its single temporal dimension exists entirely within a single moment of the second temporal dimension.

S.M. Stirling said...

If you're using third-person narrative, the -characters- can be mistaken, but the the third-person narrator cannot be.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

But we can think that the omniscient narrator has got it wrong, though.