Jack Havig:
"'I do know a traveller cannot generate contradictions. I've tried. So have others...'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), X, p. 113.
Henry DeTamble:
"...things happen the way they happened, once and only once. I'm not a proponent of splitting universes."
-Aydrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller's Wife (London, 2005), p. 48.
Both characters have tried and failed to prevent a death.
No one can generate a contradiction. That would be a single event both happening and not happening at a single set of spatiotemporal coordinates in a single timeline or in a single state of a mutable timeline.
If a time traveller prevents a remembered event, then he:
has initiated a divergent timeline or
inhabits a single discontinuous timeline or
inhabits a mutable timeline, i.e., a spatiotemporal continuum that changes in a second temporal dimension.
That third case might be better described as different timelines succeeding each other in the second temporal dimension. Everyone experiences Timeline A or Timeline B, not A changing into B, although, the time traveller, arriving in B, remembers A.
8 comments:
There's a basic problem if you grant time travel but try to retain an immutable sequence of events; you need some sort of 'hidden hand', intelligently directed, preserving things.
I just don't buy it. If you travel in time, then you're uncontrolled, because the moment you're in -is- the present. The future is conditional.
The premise of the Time Patrol.
Kaor, to Both!
I don't claim to understand how you can time travel to both immutable or mutable timelines. THERE WILL BE TIME shows Jack Havig trying to prevent his father's death--and failing. And "Brave To Be A King" shows both a real and false Cyrus the Great existing in different timelines.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: what I find dubious about the Time Patrol setup is the 'stickiness' of history.
See the comment in the pep-talk to new arrivals at the Academy about how if you prevented Lincoln's assassination, unless you were very careful someone else would kill him and Booth would get the blame.
That also requires a 'hidden hand'.
I find the -later- Time Patrol stories more credible -- where time is much more chaotic and may 'just change, just because'.
My own conviction is that if you could run time backwards, even -without- time-traveler meddling outcomes would be wildly different.
Next time Franz Ferdinand's driver wouldn't take a wrong turn!
All my study of history (and my own family's history) convinces me that events are very, very contingent -- small happenstances have huge consequences.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The "hidden hand" problem is a real weakness in the earlier Time Patrol stories, once pointed out. And we see Anderson moving in the direction of chaos theory as a corrective as early as "Delenda Est." That pep talk also mentioned how killing one of FDR's Dutch ancestors wouldn't prevent him from existing, which also requires a hidden hand.
And killing one of their common ancestors would also prevent FDR's cousin (and uncle by marriage) Theodore Roosevelt from existing!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I only wish Francis Ferdinand's driver hadn't made that wrong turn! No Sarajevo Assassination means no WW I, no Lenin, no Stalin, no Hitler, etc. You gave us some intriguing looks at an alternate Austria-Hungary in "A Slip in Time."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: my faith in the ability of human beings to screw up is infinite... 8-). OTOH, I would be just as happy if there hadn't been a WW1 in 1914.
Except that then I wouldn't exist, of course, and neither would my mother or father.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, what you said about the infinite capability of human beings to muck up anything--which is a huge reason why I don't believe in Utopian dreams!
A nice question: should we prefer a world without a WW I in 1914 even if tho that means "we" would never have existed? My father was born in 1903, so he could have lived into a world with no Sarajevo. Not so sure about my mother, who was born in April 1915.
Ad astra! Sean
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