in Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine, a company filming the Scandinavian expedition to North America causes the expedition;
attempts by Stanislaw Lem's Temporal Institute to improve the past make the past exactly what it was.
Whereas Anderson and Harrison carefully present circular causality paradoxes in minute detail, Lem goes for a slapstick approach that makes it inappropriate to criticize logical inconsistencies. None of this is meant to make sense in any case. Robert Heinlein's Leonard Vincent and Lem's Lenny D. Vinch both become Leonardo da Vinci.
2 comments:
Paul:
Robert Adams, in his Castaways in Time series, had a passage concerning a U.S. time-travel project which is implied to have accidentally sent the title characters into an alternate universe's 17th Century (among other things, Islam seems to have somehow merged into the Roman Catholic Church!!!). The person describing this was lost from the project, has prospered stranded in the alternate past, and becomes a mentor to the castaways' leader.
Earlier, this mentor states, the project lost another of its agents ... a particularly clever young fellow named Lenny Vincent. He doesn't explicitly point out the possibilities at which that name hints.
Kaor, Paul!
I remember reading Harrison's THE TECHNICOLOR TIME MACHINE as a boy. But I don't think it made a very deep impression on me. Perhaps I was too young to properly appreciate it.
And we see Leonardo Da Vinci in Anderson's "House Rule" and more indirectly in "The Light," where American astronauts were stunned to discover that Leonardo had SOMEHOW reached the Moon by means of both his genius and what was available to him during his lifetime.
Sean
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