Individuals And Organizations II And Some Other Stuff

A Time Patrol instructor says that, even if a time traveller married her former father, she would not become her own mother because any children would have only half her chromosomes. But surely her chromosomes come from her mother (herself) and her father (the same man as if she hadn't time travelled) so her daughter could be her? In any case, thanks to a combo of time travel and complete sex change, the narrator of Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies" is both of her own parents and winds up as a solipsist, believing that only she exists. Since she is also an agent of the Temporal Bureau, this is the ultimate time travel individual-organizational antithesis.

Some strange parallels emerge. Wells wrote both The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. Wells argues that the Time Traveller is present, although invisible and intangible, while time travelling - although this proposition is nonsensical. Christopher Eccleston played both the time travelling Doctor in Doctor Who and an invisible man in Heroes. To benefit from his invisibility, the Invisible Man must remain naked. Audrey Niffenegger's time travellers arrive naked. The power of time travel or invisibility contrasts with the vulnerability of nakedness. Poul Anderson's mutant time traveller, Jack Havig, carries his clothes and a few hand-held small objects through time but nothing else. He must have a chronokinetic aura. One theory of Superman was that an aura of invulnerability protects his skin-tight costume but nothing else so that, in that version, his cape was always being shredded. Havig's chronokinesis is a mutant superpower so the comparison with Superman, the original superhero, is appropriate.