A Special Post

Fiction reflects life. Futuristic sf reflects the period when it was written and sometimes explicitly comments on contemporary society. Time travel fiction set in the past can comment also although perhaps not as often. Manse Everard meets Chaim and Yael Zorach, an Israeli couple who run the Time Patrol base in Tyre in 950 B.C., during the reigns of Hiram and Solomon. Chaim explains:

"'...this post is special for us. We don't just maintain a base and its cover business, we manage to help local people now and then. Or we try to, as much as we can without causing anybody to suspect that there's anything peculiar about us. That makes up, somehow, a little bit, for...for what our countrymen will do hereabouts, far uptime.'

"Everard nodded."

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 246.

The trouble with that is that the Patrol exists to preserve every atrocity that was ever committed in history. This brings us back to the paradoxes. It seems to me that, if an event is known to occur/have occurred at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates - and there can be more than one temporal coordinate - then it is not the case that that event also does not occur at that set of coordinates. If we change the temporal coordinate, i.e., move to an alternative or parallel timeline, then of course, in that timeline, there might be a different or altered sequence of events. Thus, the Danellians and the Patrol could leave behind them their original timeline in which there is both a Holocaust and a Nakba and bring about a completely different sequence of events although they would then be unable to return to their original sequence of events.