The Time Patrol opposes the Neldorians not because they commit murder but because they change the past. They would equally be time criminals if they saved lives - if that changed the past.
The Nantucketers oppose Walker because he is a threat and because:
"'When he spreads death, suffering, slavery, among the peoples here in our exile home, we bear part of the responsibility.'" (Against The Tide Of Years, p. 99)
They cannot object to Walker changing the past because they are already doing that merely by existing then. The only way not to change anything would have been to commit mass suicide immediately on arrival in 1250 BC - and there was one sect mad enough to try to kill everyone. Also, they realize that they are not preventing their remembered twentieth century from existing but are initiating a divergent timeline which hopefully will be better than the one from which they came.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
All this makes me wonder what might might have happened if Walker had been more patient, and spent a few years after the Event amassing the wealth he would have needed to BUY a couple of ships like the "Yare" and recruit enough of the more restless Nantucketers to crew them. Then they could have simply left quietly and travel a long way to territory they could have taken over.
My point being, the Nantucketers would have been a lot less BITTER against Walker both for not killing some of their people, stealing two ships, and then ruling all too much like a Draka.
Sean
Paul:
I have to quibble with your statement: "...they realize they are not preventing their remembered twentieth century...." Unless they've acquired information I hadn't heard about, they THEORIZE and HOPE they aren't wiping out the version of reality they remember. Of course, they really have no choice in any case but to go on as if those theories and hopes are true.
Hi, David!
Good points. After all, the Nantucketers don't KNOW for certain a new timeline/alternate universe indeed diverged from the one they came from, in 1998. I would argue, however, that the mere fact they did arrive in the ancient past indicates they did start a new timeline. Because, if not, I don't see how they could have existed at all in their 1998.
Sean
Sean,
The single discontinuous timeline scenario would allow Nantucketers to appear in 1250 BC with spurious memories of having lived in a 20th century AD.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And this hypothesis is simply mind boggling and really messes with my head! (Smiles)
How on TERRA could the Nantucketers have spurious memories of living in a 20th century AD which never existed? How could the existence of the more advanced they had be EXPLAINED if their history was spurious? From how or where did their ideas and beliefs come from if their memories were false? Mind boggling!
Sean
Sean,
The discontinuous timeline scenario is summarized in the post, "Like A Match in The Wind," dated Saturday, 10 September 2016.
It is counter-intuitive but not logically contradictory to propose that a time traveler arrives from a prevented future, thus that the traveler has what seem to be him to be memories but which correspond to no actual events.
The circular causality paradox can also involve knowledge-from-nowhere. The hero of Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" finds a hand-written dictionary of future words with their English meanings and explanatory notes. He uses the book until it starts to wear out, then copies its contents into a blank notebook. His younger self finds that newer notebook. Thus, who composed the explanatory notes?
In THE ANUBIS GATES by Tim Powers, a scholar knows that a poet wrote a published poem in a coffee house on a particular date. On that date, the time traveling scholar waits for the poet who doesn't show. Meanwhile, the scholar writes the entire poem from memory...
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I will reread your "Like A Match In The Wind" blog piece. Altho I do continue to find it difficult how one can have complex, detailed memories of "real" events NOT corresponding to actual events.
And the bits about Heinlein's short story and Tim Powers' ANUBIS GATES does help to "clarify" (if I can use that word) the idea of how knowledge can somehow emerge from NOWHERE.
Sean
Sean,
We have to be very clear about the difference between a causal law and a logical law. The former are empirical and therefore we can imagine them happening otherwise. A logical law is tautologous and cannot be otherwise.
A friend once said, "No, an event can't happen without a cause. That's completely non-logical!" Well, maybe there can be uncaused events in quantum mechanics. But, in any case, the causal law is a generalization from a large but finite number of instances in past experience and therefore does not necessarily apply to future experience. On the other hand, if future experience were to become completely disorderly, then it would cease to be any sort of experience. Random sensations would not form coherent perceptions. But what I replied to my friend was, "Logic says only that an event cannot both happen and not happen, not that every event has a cause."
Paul.
Paul and Sean:
Someone named Anne Lear wrote a humorous time travel story, collected in Isaac Asimov's *Laughing Space*, which touches on this.
Briefly, H.G. Wells' Time Traveler was also Professor Moriarty, and rather than die at Reichenbach Falls, he was stranded in the past when his time machine broke down.
Specifically, he materialized onstage at the Globe Theatre during one of the first performances of *Macbeth*, and played along with the actors, becoming the "Third Murderer." Shakespeare liked the lines Moriarty supposedly ad libbed, and inserted them into the official text.
But as the Professor put it in a manuscript he hoped would someday, more than a hundred fifty years later, come to the attention of Sherlock Holmes:
"The first time the Third Murderer's lines were ever spoken, THEY WERE DELIVERED FROM MEMORY.
"Pray, Mr. Holmes, who wrote them?"
David,
This is another of those stories that I have read without remembering either title or author. Sf is like that.
Paul.
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