Continued from here.
The Time Patrol Universe
A series of horizontal parallel straight lines.
An arrow pointing from left to right at the foot of the page.
A second arrow pointing up at one side of the page.
The parallel straight lines are successive timelines which can be numbered 1, 2, 3 etc.
The arrow at the foot of the page represents the direction of time within the successive timelines.
The arrow at the side of the page represents the order in which the timelines succeed each other.
A time traveler usually remains within a single timeline but occasionally departs 1 and arrives in 2 etc.
From our perspective looking down on the page, we can see that, when a time traveler departs timeline 1, that timeline continues to exist although, to inhabitants of timeline 2, it "does not exist and has never existed."
The time traveler arriving in timeline 2 knows that timeline 1 is in the past of the second temporal dimension extending up the page.
He may also think in a confused way that now it has never existed.
To be continued.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I know you have argued, convincingly, that "deleted universes" were not simply snuffed out like candle flames, never existed at all (no matter what Patrol agents saw, did, or suffered in such universes). But in stories like "Brave To Be A King" and "Delenda Est," Manse Everard and his colleagues certainly seemed to believe the aberrant Persian and Carthaginian universes simply disappeared, never existed at all. And even more so the alpha and beta timelines in THE SHIELD OF TIME. In the later Time Patrol stories (such as SHIELD, we do see some characters fudging this a bit, probably because Anderson was influenced by chaos theory).
All the same, the flat assertion in the earlier stories about universes getting snuffed out and your arguments they merely became inaccessible to the Patrol still seems to leave an inconsistency. Not that it distracted from the pleasure of reading them, it did not, but it certainly leaves room for puzzlement and debate!
Sean
Sean,
I do not think that any one theory can encapsulate everything that is said about time in the Time Patrol series. The texts remain allusive and elusive.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
The Time Patrol stories are allusive and elusive? A good way of putting it!
Merry Christmas! Sean
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