I can't help it. I do prefer time travel that is into a single immutable past. Anything else is not travel into our past, is it?
Three pure examples of this kind of narrative are:
Of course, in a single immutable timeline, a time traveller can cause past events but there are greater subtleties than that. He can change the significance of past events. He can seem to have changed the course of events, then turn out not to have done. He can learn about an event, then experience it.
In There Will Be Time, the Eyrie recruits a handful of mutant time travellers, including Jack Havig and Boris, in Jerusalem on the Day of the Crucifixion. Much later along his own world-line, Havig, now organizing an anti-Eyrie group, sends Boris to infiltrate the Eyrie by being recruited into it on the same day as his younger self. Neither the younger Havig nor his recruiters suspect the significance of Boris, sent to that time and place by the older Havig.
Niffenegger's Henry DeTamble knows that his ex killed herself on a particular date. Then he learns that it was his involuntary extratemporal arrival in her apartment that triggered her suicide. He asks her the date. He knows what she will do with the gun that she is wielding. He knows that she will not kill him. He avoids saying anything that will motivate her to shoot herself but she does that anyway - on the date on which she had done it.
Similar things happen in The Anubis Gates. Read them all!
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I am glad to read time traveling stories by De Camp, Anderson, Powers, and
Stirling--even tho I don't believe in the time traveling premise. I consider alternate universe stories far more convincing, such as Anderson's THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS or Stirling's BLACK CHAMBER books.
Unless "time traveling" a la TO TURN THE TIDE merely results in splitting off an alternate world from the "original."
Ad astra! Sean
History is -accidental-.
Frex, German unification in the 19th century proceeded as it did because a 52-year-old woman died in the mid-eighteenth century.
Since it's accidental, -if- time travel was possible then history would be mutable and/or new timelines would split off easily.
But, in a single immutable timeline, the accidents happen only once. An accident happens at time t1 and a time traveller from further in the future, e.g., from t100, observes the accident while it is happening. The accident does not have to happen twice, the first time unobserved and a second time observed.
Yeah, but what -prevents- a time traveller from modifying the past? Some intelligent agency would be necessary.
That is a very good question, of course. My answer has to come in at least two parts:
(i) Nothing prevents the time traveller from acting in the past and nothing prevents his actions from having consequences. In some cases, he might have caused past events. In other cases, he might have tried to prevent known events and failed. The same logic applies whether the past actor is a time traveller or not. If the British government releases documents which inform us that one of their agents had set off to travel to Germany to assassinate Hitler in 1942, then we already know that any such attempt failed even if we never learn why it failed. This would also apply if a time traveller departed now from 2026 to try to kill Hitler in 1942.
(ii) Of course, if time travel became common and if a large number of time travellers set out intending to alter specific past events, then the number of events that would have to happen to thwart them (like Jack Havig breaking his leg) would become statistically unacceptable! I think that this proves that IF time time travel happens, THEN it does not become common.
But I think that an immutable timeline with some limited time travel in it is logically possible. We seem to inhabit a timeline where time travel either does not happen or is limited. Time travellers are not showing up after all.
Tipler said (something like) time travel would require both a transmitter and a receiver. So, if time travel is invented in our future, then it will remain in our future. No one receives a telephone call on an island where there are no telephones. No one encounters a time traveller in a period before time travel receivers.
If time travel requires a lot of energy and vast structures like T-machines, then it is likely to be limited. It is a big stretch from the general concept of time travel to Time Patrol timecycles or mutants like Jack Havig. A lot depends on the means of time travel used.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! Our history would have been drastically different if Empress Elizabeth had lived even six months longer--because her hated enemy, Frederick II of Prussia, was at his last gasp due to her determination to destroy him.
I think alternate universes make more sense than time traveling.
Ad astra! Sean
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