Changing Probabilities

SM Stirling's Shadowspawn have the psychic "Power" to change probabilities by directly affecting quantum events. Thus, their antagonists become more likely to suffer heart attacks, gun misfires or other mishaps.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, quantum probability-waves can change their rhythm, thus altering the timeline.

Now imagine a Shadowspawn personal causal nexus able to make probability-waves change their rhythm. Would he initiate a divergent timeline while remaining in his original timeline or find himself transported with unchanged memories into an alternative timeline?

One Shadowspawn, Adrian Breze, seems to share the ability of the psychic, Yasmini, to detect alternative futures.

Each of us exists because of probabilities. If a different sperm and egg had met, then our parents would have had offspring with a different genetic combination. Imagine a being with a level of consciousness and power able to affect that. S/he would be able to choose between innumerable alternative world populations.

The Receding Past

Too tired at 11:26 PM to cope with a new text, I am rereading Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol," which I first read in 1960;

it was published in 1955 and is set in 1954;

Manse Everard, born in 1924, reads about the Addleton case first in a collection of Victorian and Edwardian stories, then in the London Times, June 25, 1894;

the Kentish village of Addleton has a Jacobean estate with a barrow of unknown age.

Notice how Anderson takes us back in time, generating a real sense of history:

the Victorian and Edwardian periods;
1894;
the Jacobean period;
a British barrow of unknown age...

Everard will travel first to 1894, then to that post-Roman British period, but first the scene is carefully set with Everard merely reading a short story collection, then an old newspaper, before embarking on his first mission for the Time Patrol.

And which story is it that refers to the "...tragedy at Addleton and the singular contents of an ancient British barrow"? (Time Patrol, p. 18)

Men In Black

After graduating from the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene period, Manse Everard returns to the same hour in 1954 from which he had left, is congratulated by the man who had recruited him less than an hour before and is given a list of contemporary Patrol agents, several in military intelligence. The Patrol can divert any investigators who may be on their trail.

The powerful protect their secrets, whether those powerful are the ultra-rich, the CIA, Anderson's Time Patrol or SM Stirling's Shadowspawn etc. To answer my earlier question here, two Homeland Security suits tell two police detectives to bury their investigation into people whom we the readers know to be Shadowspawn.

I knew a guy who said that, as an RAF pilot, he saw a classic "flying saucer," then had "men in black" telling him that he had not seen it but he told tall tales and I do not believe him.

Morally, should the two police detectives bury the case? Will they? In the real world, what secrets are concealed by the rich and powerful? Conspiracy theorists assume the worst. Those assumptions fantastically reflect realities that are sometimes uncovered by investigative journalists, political biographers, modern historians etc. The truth is out there and can be found. Meanwhile, we enjoy the fiction and know the difference.

Emergent Themes

Since 21 January this year, I have mostly posted about Poul Anderson's Technic History and his Time Patrol series. For me this time round, the emergent themes have been, in the Technic History, an appreciation of freedom on Avalon and, in the Time Patrol series, a growing understanding of quantum time.

On Avalon, there is:

the freedom of flight;

the freedom to colonize new islands in a long archipelago and to found new choths;

the freedom to preserve a way of life that would have been ended by incorporation into the Terran Empire;

the elbow room sought by the Founder;

a human democratic institution, the Parliament of Man;

the individualism and participative democracy of Ythrian institutions, choth and Khruath;

the freedom for individuals of either species to choose between two life-styles.

There is much more than this in the Technic History. The People Of The Wind is just one of forty three installments in this future history series. However, this particular novel provides the background material for The Earth Book Of Stormgate which incorporates twelve other installments of the series. The Earth Book is spread across Volumes I-III (of VII) of The Technic Civilization Saga and The People Of The Wind is the conclusion, or culmination, of Vol III. Thus, Avalon, like certain individual characters, is a major part of the series.

Two Observations

Two early observations on The Council Of Shadows:

there is a powerful, effective and horrific "she wasn't really dead; she only looked it" scenario;

all this drinking of blood really turns me off - I read the novel despite that aspect of the characters and their activities, not because of it.

I am interested in learning how the Shadowspawn control the world and in seeing them overthrown, the sooner the better. There are other details that might be developed further, like how they go "postcorporeal" or "Carry" other minds within theirs, also how "the Power" works.

I will read to the end of the Trilogy but it might be a series that I reread less. Stirling is the master of pure evil villains.

Resurrected Reality

In several works by Poul Anderson, human beings enter AI-generated virtual realities that are indistinguishable from external physical reality. In Anderson's speculative novel, Genesis, these virtual realities include "emulations" in which the AI generates subsidiary consciousnesses who think that they inhabit, e.g., eighteenth century England.

Some mentally powerful fictional characters are able to generate shared virtual realities without computer assistance, e.g., in Adrian Breze's "memory palace," Ellen Breze, commenting that the experience is real for them both, taps the tile floor, feels heat from the fire and mountain air in her lungs and smells burning conifer wood.

"You couldn't tell this from reality..."
-SM Stirling, The Council Of Shadows (New York, 2012), CHAPTER TWO, p. 36.

This prompts yet another comparison of Anderson and Stirling with CS Lewis because, in Letters To Malcolm (London, 1966), Chapter XXII, (see here) Lewis conceptualizes the hereafter as an immaterial shared virtual reality. He argues:

the idea of the soul reassuming the corpse is absurd;
it is not what St. Paul's words imply;
the corpse could have been utterly destroyed or dissipated;
matter is important only as the source of sensations;
waves and atoms are unimportant;
memories of past sensations might prefigure a power to resurrect those sensations permanently and no longer privately;
Lewis might take Malcolm for a walk through the vanished fields of his childhood which now are building-estates.

Comments
(i) Far too "idealistic," in the philosophical sense. (But then Lewis was a Platonist.)
(ii) St. Paul differentiated the spiritual body from the physical body but the Gospels show us a reanimated corpse.
(iii) Waves and atoms are not unimportant but are the matter/being/energy that becomes conscious of itself in and through psychophysical organisms.
(iv) To dismiss the discoveries of empirical science as unimportant is obscurantist.

"Matter enters our experience only by becoming sensation (when we perceive it) or conception (when we understand it). That is by becoming soul." (p. 123)

An assumption of the existence of immaterial souls. I suggest that matter/being/energy, organized as psychophysical organisms, experiences, perceives and understands itself.

1985 A.D. x 2

Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991).

In 1985 A.D., pp. 11-16, Russian Army Private Garshin wanders alone in Afghanistan after an ambush until a captain appears like "...an angel from his grandmother's heaven..." (p. 11) and gives him a box - which contains the Bactrian letter - with instructions about how to return to his base and to get the box conveyed to the appropriate authorities whereas, in 1985 A.D., p. 123, Garshin wanders alone.

The Time Patrol has planted false evidence, then removed it from the timeline. How did they do it? Maybe:

the Patrol agent who plays the role of the captain is from the far future;
first, he travels from the far future to the far past;
his instructions are - travel forward to 1985 to give the box to Garshin, then return home unless, just before setting off to 1985, you receive a countermanding order to skip past 1985 and proceed straight home;
when Shalten is informed that Everard has killed or captured the remaining Exaltationists, he transmits that countermanding order.

See also:

1985 AD;
The Fall And The Time-Stream.

Investigating The Secrets

In many works of fantasy and sf, powerful beings move among us, disguised as ordinary human beings. They may be:

aliens;
time travelers;
immortals;
vampires;
metamorphs;
magicians;
demons;
gods;
a secret world government;
something else?

SM Stirling's Shadowspawn are the source of legends about vampires and Hell. It seems that they are wealthy and powerful enough to do as they please. In fact, they frequently kill at will without any repercussions for themselves. But what will result when a team of detectives investigates an incident and interviews witnesses who provide descriptions of individual Shadowspawn? Will the detectives be neutralized or will the secrets of this world's clandestine rulers begin to unravel? I don't know. I am just beginning to read The Council Of Shadows.

Mystery And Anachronism

William Cowper coined the phrase, "God moves in a mysterious way...," which is quoted elsewhere in literature and in common speech. Poul Anderson has a priest's slave say:

"'The gods do move in mysterious ways.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 106 -

- two thousand years before Cowper.

Two further points:

CS Lewis refers to Cowper in The Great Divorce;

searching the blog for The Great Divorce shows in how many contexts I have referred to this Lewisian work.

It is Lewis' third great imaginative restatement of Christianity, after Ransom and Narnia. Each of these three narratives is connected to World War II and the Blitz, which links them to Anderson's very different work, "Time Patrol." Sherlock Holmes is a real person both in "Time Patrol" and in the chronologically first Narnia book, The Magician's Nephew.

Intellectuals

(A ruined temple of Poseidon in Greece.)

"Shuffling bent, almost toothless, squinting and blinking, he could be as old as sixty or as young as forty. Before scientific medicine, unless you were upper class you needed a lot of luck to reach middle age still in good health, if you reached it at all. Twentieth-century intellectuals call technofixes dehumanizing, Everard recollected."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 104.

Do we (those of us who have survived into the twenty first century)? Why this hostility to "intellectuals"? In a University town, I am surrounded by people who are only too aware that they would have been crippled in their sixties if not for free National Health Service knee or hip replacement operations. One of my fellow pensioners, commenting on his parents' generation when they reached retirement age, said, "If you'd worked, you were done!"

The modern period is a mixture of good and bad but scientific medicine is one of the goods - for those who can access it.

Tacitus Two

Manse Everard is first informed of causality violations that have no human cause in The Shield Of Time, Part Five. Despite this, he had referred to probability-waves changing their rhythm in "The Year of the Ransom" and to a reality that can at any instant cease to be in "Star of the Sea." This second story was written after The Shield Of Time but is set earlier than it in terms of Everard's duration sense.

How can we account for the Tacitus Two text in "Star of the Sea"? This text exists in the Time Patrol timeline but reads as if it had been written in an alternative timeline. I have proposed an explanation (see here) (scroll down) but what does Anderson's text imply?

"'An object uncaused, formed out of nothing for no reason.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 20, p. 631.

In quantum mechanics, pairs of matter and anti-matter particles appear in, or emerge from, the energy-filled vacuum. Temporal anomalies are like quantum events scaled up to the human level. So did Tacitus Two just appear on a shelf in a second century A.D. Roman library? This account is logically possible and also avoids reference to a time journey in and out of a potential timeline so which account do you prefer?

1137alpha

Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1137 A.D., pp. 311-316.

In 1137, Manse Everard tells a locally based Time Patrol agent, Otto Koch, that a temporal divergence will start later that same year but also that Everard and his colleagues hope to prevent it. Hopefully, at the turning-point moment, an agent will come to inform Koch that the timeline protected by the Patrol has been restored.

Everard: "'You won't remember anything you did thenceforth, because "now" you won't do those things.'" (p. 316)

Koch: "'You mean that while I am in the wrong world, I must know that everything I do and see and think will become nothing?'"
Everard (in reply): "'If we succeed. I know the prospect for you isn't quite pleasant, but it's not really like death. We count on your sense of duty.'" (ibid.)

I have a lot of difficulties with this dialogue. Whatever their ontological status, we must contemplate at least two timelines:

in 1137alpha, which Koch calls "the wrong world," Koch exists until he dies and does not at any stage "become nothing";

in the restored 1137, without the alpha divergence, Koch lives until the turning-point moment, is then informed that everything is okay and again continues to live until he dies.

Koch in 1137alpha may hope that there is a restored 1137 but he himself, this version of Koch, will have to live out his life in 1137alpha and will no more "become nothing" than does anyone else.

Death And Non-Existence

From a time before the divergence point, Everard travels forward into the divergent beta timeline in order to gather enough intelligence to enable him to come back out of that timeline, then to prevent it from ever having existed. Thus, while he is in the beta timeline, he hopes that he is experiencing events that do not happen and performing actions that he does not perform. This is my best attempt to restate Everard's account. I prefer a successive timelines theory according to which the beta timeline does exist but, hopefully, recedes into the past of a second temporal dimension. (Thus, the alternative medieval history never occurred in the current timeline but does/did occur in a previous timeline.)

In the beta timeline, Everard and his colleague, Novak, are attacked. Novak offers to occupy their attackers while Everard escapes. Everard protests first that Novak will be killed and secondly that he won't exist anymore when the beta timeline is annulled. Novak reasonably asks how such nonexistence differs from the usual death. My point exactly. See here. Novak, like everyone, will die sometime - although not this time because Everard will return through time to rescue him - but he is alive and conscious while he and Everard are conversing on this date in 1245beta A.D. Therefore, it is not true that he is not alive on this date in 1245beta A.D. (Logical non-contradiction.)

The Big Change Happens

"...no time traveler, no human blunder or madness or vaunting ambition brought this about. The fluctuation was in space-time-energy itself, a quantum leap, a senseless randomness."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1137 A.D., p. 344.

At last, the big change happens. When I first read this passage, I thought that a whole new time travel concept was appearing on the page before my eyes. However, recent posts, starting from The Growth Of An Idea, clearly demonstrate that this idea had been laboriously built up to, first in "The Year of the Ransom," then in two earlier Parts of The Shield Of Time.

After the fluctuation in space-time-energy, there is one more new idea. Having fought time criminals, Everard must now fight a personal causal nexus, a medieval knight whose world line interacts with so many others that small changes in his personal life cause big historical changes for everyone else.

On this basement, as Nicholas van Rijn would say, The Shield Of Time concludes by presenting a completely different understanding of the role of the Patrol. Even if there were no civilian time travel and no time criminals, the Patrol would still be necessary as:

"'...the stabilizing element, holding time to a single course.'"
-op. cit., 1990 A.D., p. 435.

With the shorter Time Patrol works collected in a single volume as Time Patrol, The Shield Of Time becomes Volume II  (of II) of the series. If Anderson had written a third volume, what might we have learned about:

the Danellians;
Everard's later career;
other Patrol agents;
further original contributions to the time travel concept?

A Scroll By Ma Yuan

(Ma Yuan.)

In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part Five, Guion begins to brief Everard on some:

"'...anomalous variations in reality.'" (1990 A.D., p. 261)

Before Guion has disclosed any details, Everard yet again reflects first that negative feedback damps out the effects of most changes made by time travelers and secondly that nevertheless there are also nexuses where a single incident does determine the large-scale future.

However, Guion chillingly continues that these variations "'...have no known cause...,'" (p. 262) no identifiable "'...chronokinetic sources.'" (ibid.)

Let us consider just one of Guion's examples: the exact objects depicted on a scroll by Ma Yuan do not agree with what future scholars have recorded. But does this not show just that the scholars have got it wrong? The assumption seems to be that:

Ma Yuan depicted certain objects;
later scholars correctly recorded which objects he had depicted;
reality changed so that now different objects were depicted;
but the reality change affected only which objects were depicted, not also the scholars' accounts of which objects had been depicted.

That would be alarming. Imagine if, e.g., a violent incident had been filmed but investigative time travelers found that the incident as observed by them unaccountably differed from the incident as filmed.

These variations:

"'...indicate instability in those sections of history.'" (ibid.)

If small uncaused changes can occur, then so can a bigger one - and it will in Part Six.

Some Benefits Of Time Travel II

The Logos enlightens everyone. (John 1:9)

Historians study what was. The Time Patrol guards it. With time travel, we would be able to find out what did happen but some people would want to change what happened or to conceal the historical truth if it did not accord with their beliefs.

"'Patrol units are concentrated on guarding Palestine. You can well imagine what emotions are engaged, through how many centuries. Fanatics or freebooters who want to change what took place in Jerusalem, researchers crowding in and multiplying the chances of a fatal blunder, and the situation itself, the near-infinity of causes radiating into that episode and effects radiating out from it....'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 2, p. 492.

Everard refers to fanatics and freebooters - two kinds of time criminals - before he even mentions researchers. With the Patrol units, the researchers and others, how many time travelers are present in the first century and how can the Patrol prevent their mere presence from affecting what happens? The "episode" to which Everard refers is not the Crucifixion and Resurrection in about 33 A.D. but the Jewish War in 69-70. But the entire century is a single "situation." The bloody suppression of the Jewish uprising and the destruction of the Third Temple have enormous consequences:

"...for the future, Judaism, Christianity, the Empire, Europe, the world." (ibid.)

Judaism and Christianity are still being differentiated. Paul, who had allowed baptism without circumcision, had also been arrested while making an offering in the Temple.

The Patrol and its Specialists must know what did happen both then and earlier but Anderson's text is ambiguous. Koch and Farness are two Time Patrolmen.

"The habits of disguise took over. Koch crossed himself, again and again. Or maybe he was a sincere Catholic."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1137 A.D., p. 313.

- whereas Farness reflects:

"...how could I in honesty have argued for Christ?"
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT p. 404.

With time travel, we would be able to find out but here lies a paradox:

if there was no resurrection, then faith in the resurrection ceases;

if it becomes known that there was a resurrection, then it ceases to be a matter of faith.

Some Benefits Of Time Travel

(Portofino, Italy.)

(i) "'...let's go eat. We'll need a change of clothes, but it'll be worth the trouble. I know a local saloon, back in the eighteen-nineties, that sets out a magnificent free lunch.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT p. 362.

We can all imagine our own agenda here.

When Sheila and I moved to this district in 1973, the most expensive restaurant in Lancaster was the Portofino. We never ate there although we did eat in other restaurants that later occupied the same building. With time travel, we would be able to eat in the Portofino.

In the 1980s, we bought very tasty baked potatoes with grated cheese and egg mayonnaise from a takeaway placed called Plato's, since closed. We would be able to eat from there again.

A Bank Holiday Charity Car Boot Sale has taken place in Ryelands Park every May for decades. A time traveler would be able to attend more than once each year in disguise, occasionally glimpsing his other selves.

(ii) "You will have the capability of going back and visiting again your beloved dead, but you shall not, for you might feel temptation to fend off death from them, and you would surely feel your heart torn asunder."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1988 A.D., p. 99.

We attended the funeral of a local guy called Kevin. On a timecycle, it would be possible to hover above Lancaster, see Kevin strolling through town on a weekend, then meet him for a casual conversation without divulging that we were from the future after his death.

The Light Of Day

(Today, we were at Ryelands again - in the sun.)

How is this Heracitean quotation relevant to Poul Anderson? It reminds me of three things:

(i) a passage in CS Lewis' The Great Divorce (London, 1982), where a man who leaves the grey town and approaches the mountains thinks that he must turn back because the lizard on his shoulder, whispering in his ear, gives him dreams that "'...up here...'" are "'...so damned embarrassing.'" (p. 90);

(ii) aspects of my own experience that I will not discuss here;

(iii) Poul Anderson's "Journeys End, " where telepaths are repelled by each other's private thoughts.

"'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.'"
-The Great Divorce, p. 117.

Beginnings And Gods

When Time Patrol Specialist Keith Denison was captured in ancient Persia, he kicked his timecycle into time-drive and:

"'...it probably went clear back to the Beginning.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT p. 83.

Unlike Heraclitus, we know of a cosmic Beginning but what, if anything, was before it?

Time Patrolmen know of "gods" because they continually visit periods where divine powers and presences are taken for granted. Thinking in these terms, Manse Everard has learned that the gods "...were a miserly lot." (p. 74) However, human history is guarded by the Time Patrol and, beyond them, the Danellians. One Danellian comments:

"'In a reality forever liable to chaos, the Patrol is the stabilizing element, holding time to a single course. Perhaps it is not the best course, but we are no gods to impose anything different...'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1990 A.D., p. 435.

Similarly, James Blish's Service agents could try to change the foreknown future but decide instead to implement the policy:

"'To Whom it may concern: Thy will, not mine.'"
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), CHAPTER TEN, p. 104.

Gods are active in Anderson's heroic fantasies but not in his Time Patrol series.

Lost Texts And Change

In Poul Anderson's "Star of the Sea," time travelers have recovered the entire text of Herodotus' Histories. They would also restore the fragmentary works of the pre-Socratic philosophers, including Heraclitus.

In The Growth Of An Idea III and The Growth Of An Idea IV, I argued that a "time traveler" who prevents the future in which he would have originated has not really traveled from anywhen and therefore is not really a time traveler. However, in "All Is Flux," I reverted to describing such apparent time travelers merely as "time travelers." It is difficult to think consistently about Anderson's "variable reality."

Like all philosophers, Heraclitus valued consistent thought. Like many philosophers, he understood reality as change. But there are kinds of change: cyclical or historical; evolutionary or revolutionary; quantitative or qualitative. A Taoist sage, asked how he would survive under Maoism, replied, "Would it not be laughable if a life-long follower of Lord Lao were to fear change?" But Lao Tzu's change was seasonal, not political. However, the Time Patrol perspective is that all of human history:

"'...does at last take us beyond what our animal selves could have imagined.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1990 A.D., p. 435.

Flux And Logos

The flux is rational, can be apprehended by reason. This is part of the origin of science. We can see why the Fourth Evangelist identified Logos, the hidden harmony behind all change, with the Biblical Creator. The interaction of opposites is the principle of Taoism which interacted with Buddhism as Ch'an/Zen.

Poul Anderson's Benegal Dass/Chandrakumar says that Heraclitus and the Buddha are approximate contemporaries with some closely parallel thoughts.

As I understand it, there was an "axial period." The Wiki article makes the period a bit longer than I had realized, thus able to incorporate Zarathustra, Homer and the pre-Socratics, including Heraclitus.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrollers move through this period but can show us only a small part of it.

Logos And World Lines

Get this. Heraclitean philosophy was a precursor not only of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics but also of John's Gospel.

World lines are the opposite of flux. They are conceived as static. I forgot to mention that, in the first conversation between Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly in The Shield Of Time, Part Two, it is Wanda who compares world lines to a mesh of tough rubber bands which spring back to their proper configuration if they are pulled on but is this accurate? I thought that world lines merely existed in four dimensions, not that they were subjected to any pulling or springing back. She also calls them "'...our tracks through space-time.'" (p. 31) If this suggests that we are entities that move along a track or that move through space-time leaving a track behind us, then it is wrong. Each of us is his world line extending from his birth to his death. It is a mistake to think that each individual is an immaterial consciousness moving along his world line. We have discussed this concept as it appears in HG Wells' The Time Machine and in James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time - and we are running out of time for blogging here and now!

"All Is Flux"

Heraclitus is the philosopher of the Time Patrol. We will find more of his aphorisms to display as images.

Meanwhile, we are still in Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part Two, where Everard, in another italicized passage, reflects:

"All is flux. Reality eddies changeful upon ultimate quantum chaos. Not only is your life forever in danger, the fact of your ever having lived is, with the whole world and its history that you know." (1988 A.D., p. 99)

This is a very clear statement that the ultimate enemy of the Patrol is not time criminals but temporal chaos. However, we have not yet seen that chaos manifested in a quantum fluctuation of space-time-energy. Such an event will not occur until Part Six. As yet, time criminals like Stane, the Neldorians and the Exaltationists have been the only evident agents of variable reality. How are such human agents connected to chaos?

On the historical level, there are nexuses where a small event can make a big difference: prevent the birth of Hitler, Lenin etc. On the quantum level, there are moments when the probability-waves can suddenly change their rhythm or converge powerfully on a single point. Do these historical nexuses and quantum moments correspond? Sometimes a time traveler changes events and sometimes events change without human agency. In Part Six, one human being, although not a time traveler, interacts with so many other world lines that small changes in his life, insignificant if they had happened to anyone else, do totally disrupt the course of medieval history and consequently also of modern history. I get the point that small changes are constant but usually inconsequential.

Ages

When Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly meet, he is sixty-three plus time travel but biologically in his thirties because of antisenescence whereas she is twenty-one, then she joins the Patrol and accesses antisenescence. They are effectively the same age.

Despite both time travel and antisenescence, a Patrolman hurries to complete his work because he wants it done and because the Old Man catches up with everyone. Both Everard and Flandry think of death as the Old Man whereas Neil Gaiman fans know Death as a young (looking) woman. Gaiman has several parallels with Anderson but here they differ.

The Growth Of An Idea V

Continuing from the end of the previous post, I suggest that, if there is a single timeline, then any arriving "time traveler" is either a genuine traveler from an earlier or later time in this single timeline or a quantum event but not both whereas, if there are successive timelines, then an arriving "time traveler" may be a genuine traveler from an earlier or later time in the current timeline or a genuine traveler from a later time in the previous timeline, also that this last kind of traveler might be regarded as a quantum event in the current timeline.

Occam's razor bids us to accept the single timeline if possible but, when Everard says:

"'It could turn out that you and I never had this talk today, that we and our whole world never were, not even a dream in somebody's sleep. It's harder to imagine and harder to take than the idea of personal annihilation when we die.'" (p. 31)

- then I think that there is something wrong with his single timeline point of view. I would reply to Everard:

"I am alive now and expect to be annihilated when I die. Also, another time traveler might come to perceive me as never having existed. However, neither annihilation after death nor never having existed from some other time traveler's point of view changes the fact that I am alive now."

The Growth Of An Idea IV

In The Growth Of An Idea, we set out to discuss:

"The Year of the Ransom";
The Shield Of Time, Parts Two, Five and Six;
"Star of the Sea."

So far, we have discussed only "The Year of the Ransom." Next, we consider Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1987 A.D., pp. 26-33. (This is just one chapter in Part Two.)

Everard lists twentieth century glimmerings of time travel:

non-inertial reference frames;
quantum gravity;
energy from the vacuum;
laboratory violation of Bell's theorem;
wormholes in the continuum;
Kerr metrics;
Tipler machines.

I decided against googling all these items but blog readers might like to.

Everard tells Wanda Tamberly that, if she prevented her parents from meeting, then she would have come ftom nowhere and nothing:

"'It's sort of like quantum mechanics, scaled up from the subatomic to the human level.'" (p. 30)

So she is not really a time traveler. There are:

time travelers;
quantum events;
quantum events that look like and think that they are time travelers.

The Growth Of An Idea III

We continue to analyze a long italicized passage in Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 641-735 AT pp. 671-673.

To summarize the line of thought after the tough rubber bands analogy:

usually a time traveler is part of the past;

he was "always" there (sure, if someone is going to depart into the past, then he was in the past);

any anachronistic behavior might be noticed but will be forgotten.

Then the text reads:

"It's a philosophical question whether or not reality keeps flickering through such insignificant changes." (p. 672)

I do not think that it needs to "flicker." A time traveler spends a period of time in an earlier century, e.g., six months in 1533. Everything happens just once:

his six-month visit;
any anachronistic behavior on his part;
any comments made on his behavior;
the fading of memories of that behavior.

All of this is a one-shot affair, not a "flickering."

Next, the passage cites two actions that would make a difference:

arming Attila with machine guns;
preventing Lenin's parents from meeting.

The time traveler who had changed history so drastically that he prevented his own birth would effectively not be a time traveler who had changed history. Instead, he would be:

"...an effect without a cause, thrown up into existence by that anarchy which is at its foundation." (ibid.)

That way of putting it changes everything. The Time Patrol universe contains two distinct phenomena:

time travelers, who depart from one time and arrive at another;
quantum changes to the timeline -

- and the quantum changes are of two kinds:

merely a different course of history, e.g., King Roger dying, instead of surviving, at the Battle of Rignano;
the appearance of what looks like a time traveler in or on what looks like a time machine.

I say "...looks like..." because, in this case, the apparent time traveler will not depart from the future but instead initiates a future in which he will not be born. There are two possible explanations of the appearance of an apparent time traveler. The first is the same quantum randomness that generates a different course of history. The second is proposed in The Logic of Time Travel: Part I but, to summarize here:

an earlier event, A, occurred and would have been a remote cause of B, the birth and life of a time traveler and his departure into the past;
B would in turn have caused C, the arrival of the time traveler later than A but earlier than B;
however, C occurs and prevents B;
thus, the sequence AC looks like a discontinuity but is in fact a consequence of the logic of time travel with causality violation.

Now there is one unresolved issue. I do not think that it makes sense for a time traveler who is about to depart into the past to think that he might turn out to be an apparent time traveler as described here. SM Stirling has commented that I am assuming an absolute time and that infinite discontinuities in a time traveler's world line can incorporate what I regard as a logical contradiction. I welcome further comments from Mr Stirling or from anyone to make this idea clearer. However I try to clarify the Time Patrol, I am left with, to me, an unresolved paradox.

Commenting And Communicating

I mentioned this in the combox but maybe I should also post about it. Because of new European Union Data Protection legislation, I have at least temporarily ceased to receive email/gmail notifications of blog comments.

Therefore:

I have to scroll down the blog to look for new comments on recent posts;
I might miss some;
I will definitely miss any recent comments on old posts.

A couple of times, I have been asked to add links, e.g., see:

the Addendum to Bygds, Umiaks, Kayaks And An Angakok;
Van Gogh.

I am happy to respond to such requests. If I do not respond to a combox comment, it will only be because I have missed it. I can be emailed at paulshackley2017@gmail.com

The Growth Of An Idea II

(The attached image is an internal illustration of Poul Anderson's "The Year of the Ransom," which I first used on the blog in 2014 here.)

I continue to quote from the long italicized passage in "The Year of the Ransom." For full reference, see here.

"Already in the twentieth century, physicists had a dim glimmering of this. But not until time travel came to be did the fact of it stab into human lives." (p. 671)

There is an ambiguity here. "...this..." refers to the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos changing their rhythm and thus also changing conditional reality. This happens later in The Shield Of Time when a Time Patrolman based in 1137 learns that King Roger of Sicily has died in battle that year instead of living longer. Of course, only a time traveler from the future could have known that Roger "should have" lived longer. Everyone else just accepts their "reality." In the reality protected by the Time Patrol, Roger survived the Battle of Rignano whereas, in the changed reality, he did not.

However, the italicized passage goes on to discuss not time travelers finding that reality has changed but time travelers themselves changing reality. This we already know about. In fact, the passage, when explaining that ordinarily time travelers' effects on events are slight, repeats the earlier comparison of the space-time continuum to:

"...a mesh of tough rubber bands, restoring its configuration after it's felt some disturbing force." (p. 672)

So reality is compared both to a changeable wave pattern on a sea and to a change-resisting mesh of rubber bands. But the latter comparison is the one that "ordinarily" applies.

There is more but first I ought to gym and swim.

The Growth Of An Idea

(SM Stirling's The Council Of Shadows has arrived, a fertile source for more blog posts.)

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series comprises thirteen installments if we count the tripartite novel, The Shield Of Time, as three. The shorter Parts One, Three and Five are introductions to the longer Parts Two, Four and Six, respectively.

In the first seven published installments, the only way for the past to be changed/causality to be violated is by the actions of time travelers. A different idea grew in (I think):

"The Year of the Ransom";
The Shield Of Time, Parts Two, Five and Six;
"Star of the Sea."

There is a big revelation in Shield..., Part Six, but it had been led up to. "Star of the Sea," published after Shield..., is set earlier. Thus, it shows Everard reflecting on the instability of space-time before he had experienced this instability catastrophically in Shield...

In "The Year of the Ransom":

"For reality is conditional. It is like a wave pattern on a sea. Let the waves - the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos - change their rhythm, and abruptly that tracery of ripples and foam-swirls will be gone, transformed into another."
-Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 641-737 AT 3 November 1885, p. 671.

Observations On This Passage So Far
(i) This is the earliest indication that reality can be changed by anything other than the action of a time traveler - in fact that reality can change itself, chaotically, randomly, acausally. But that indication is not developed any further in this story.
(ii) Certain words and phrases: "change," "abruptly," "will be gone" and "transformed into another" imply a second temporal sequence. Change involves a state changed from and a state changed to. Thus, just as, in our twentieth century, Germany changed from a single state to a divided state to a reunified state, that entire history might change into one in which, e.g., Germany remained a single state throughout those same decades. The divided state and the reunified state are related to each other as before and after along our familiar temporal dimension. The history with Germany divided and reunified and the history with Germany remaining a single state throughout must be related to each other as before and after along a second temporal dimension - I think.
(iii) In this passage, Everard has just traveled by hansom cab from the London office of the Time Patrol in 1885. In "Time Patrol," Everard as a new recruit starting his first job for the Patrol visited that office in 1894. If Mainwethering of the London office remembered in 1894 that a considerably older and more experienced Everard had visited the office just nine years earlier, he rightly did not say so.
(iv) It is taking longer than expected to discuss these passages adequately so this topic will become a serial.

Reality Wars

I have just watched cinema superheroes fighting to prevent their antagonist from gaining control of reality. I am bound to say that I prefer the Time Patrol versus the Exaltationists in Bactra in 209 B.C. If only the Time Patrol could be adapted faithfully to screen... When Everard asks Raor what the Exaltationists would have done with the universe, she replies:

"'We would have made it what we chose, and unmade and remade it, and stormed the stars as we warred for possession, with an entire reality the funeral pyre for each who fell and entire histories the funeral games, until the last god reigned alone.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 118.

Play-within-the-play time: on screen, as Raor speaks, a short sequence shows the last four Exaltationists changing history, leading an interstellar invasion fleet and fighting each other, then one of them seated on a throne.

I probably misunderstood Andrea when I thought he said that this superheroes film involved a Warped Reality but the misunderstanding generated a relevant post.

Military Intelligence In 209 B.C.

Euthydemus, King of Bactria, besieged in his capital city, Bactra;

Zoilus, minister of the Bactrian treasury, client of Theonis;

Raor, Exaltationist, posing as Theonis, courtesan, in Bactra;

Draganizu, Exaltationist, posing as Nichomachus, kinsman of Theonis and priest of the temple of Poseidon that she has endowed just outside Bactra;

Buleni, Exaltationist, posing as Polydorus, aide to Antiochus and devotee of Poseidon;

Antiochus, King of Syria, besieging Bactra.

This is the torturous route by which military intelligence can pass from Euthydemus to his enemy, Antiochus. The Exaltationists do not use radio because the Time Patrol would detect it.

Gandarian Street And The Milky Way

Bactra has a Gandarian Street. I take "Gandarian" to be the adjective derived from the noun, "Gandhara," and, on the attached map of Gandhara, we find Peshawar, of interest to readers of SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers.

We often find the Milky Way (see also Across The Milky Way) in Poul Anderson's Technic History so we appreciate its appearance in his Time Patrol series:

"Coolness descended from stars and Milky Way."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 81.

And that reference to stars is my cue to call it a night.

In 209 B.C.

How many time travelers were on Earth in 209 B.C.?

Hundreds:

historical investigators, like Chandrakumar in Bactra;
other scientists;
entrepreneurs;
esthetes;
other esoterics;
Time Patrol agents at their bases in -

 - Rome;
Egyptian Alexandria;
Syrian Antioch;
Hecatompylos;
Patalipushtra;
Hien-yang;
Cuicuilco;
etc;
regional posts.

Those hundreds could all get together some time. I would like to know what the entrepreneurs are doing. We are told very little about civilian time travelers. One expedition went from a future millennium to Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty in search of cultural inspiration, got lost and had to be investigated by the Patrol but we do not know any more of that story. We need a whole novel set in such a future millennium.

Life In Bactra

Despite the approach of invaders:

"...everyday life went on."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 23 -

wagons;
beasts of burden;
porters;
jugs or baskets on women's heads;
artisans;
laborers;
slaves;
a rich man in a litter;
a mounted officer;
a war elephant with its mahout;
sounds of flute and drum;
odors of sweat, dung, smoke, cooking and incense.

Along the Sacred Way, there are:

a library;
an odeon;
a marble gymnasium with pillars and friezes;
herms.

Elsewhere, there are:

buildings, either blank or vividly painted;
schools;
public baths;
a stadium;
a hippodrome;
a palace;
sidewalks and stepping stones above the manure and garbage;
a temple;
a marketplace where booths sell -

silk;
linens;
woolens;
wine;
spices;
sweetmeats;
drugs;
gems;
brasswork;
silverwork;
goldwork;
ironwork;
talismans -

and there are:

shouting sellers;
haggling shoppers;
dancers;
musicians;
soothsayers;
wizards;
prostitutes;
beggars;
idlers;
faces and garments from China, India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Anatolia, Europe, the highlands and the plains.

We are immersed in the past. However, it is not strange to an experienced time traveler:

"To Everard the scene was eerily half-familiar. He had witnessed its like in a score of different lands, in as many different centuries. Each was unique, but a prehistorically ancient kinship vibrated in them all."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 24.

In this same novel, Guion says that:

countless world lines are intermeshed throughout the continuum like a spiderweb;

"'A touch on one strand trembles through many.'" (31,275,389 B.C., p. 135);

sometimes the Patrol does not know the source of a disturbance in the web because "'...that source perhaps does not exist in our yet, our reality.'" (ibid.);

the Patrol can only try to trace the disturbance back up the threads...

They might trace the disturbance to:

the arrival of a temporal vehicle that did not/will not depart from any earlier or subsequent time in this reality;

a quantum event that has diverted history from the course guarded by the Patrol.

Anderson uniquely combines such metaphysical speculations with the sights, sounds, smells and solidities of many past periods.

Religious Buildings In Bactra

There is a vihara on Ion's Lane in Bactra but:

"The topes and stupas whose ruins Everard saw in twentieth-century Afghanistan would not be built for generations."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 2018), 209 B.C., p. 47.

The Patrol agent in place in the vihara is Chandrakumar of Paliputra.

The Bactrian Greeks identify the Asian goddess, Anaitis, with Aphrodite Ourania and have built a fane to her beside the Stoa of Nicanor. There are ithyphallic herms along the Sacred Way. Theonis, reputed to be an avatar of Anaitis, has endowed a temple of Poseidon outside the town.

Chandrakumar gathers intelligence not because he is among enemies - far from it - but because the Patrol must know the history of Bactra in order to protect it against threats like the Exaltationists. That Theonis has endowed a temple just outside a city that is about to be besieged is a crucial link in the Exaltationist plan to alter the history of the siege.

Discontinuity

I might stop mentally reprocessing the basic paradox of the Time Patrol series. On the other hand, it is a basic paradox which means that some minds continually reprocess it.

The only meaning that I can think of for "discontinuity" is as follows -

There is a single timeline in which some time travelers (i) arrive from the actual future with memories of that future whereas others (ii) merely appear with memories of prevented futures but (I think that) there is no third category of time travelers who (iii) both arrive from an actual future and find on arrival that that future has been prevented.

(i) is logically possible;
(ii) is counter-intuitive but nevertheless logically possible;
(iii) seems to me to be logically impossible.

If one future is both actual and prevented, then two timelines are necessary and they are in a before-and-after relationship along a second temporal dimension. This is staircase thinking. I walk or swim and the problem reformulates itself but it can't (?) go on forever.

Time Criminals

"Time Patrol" introduces an individual villain, Stane.

"Delenda Est" introduces a collective villain, the Neldorians.

"Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" introduces the individual villain, Merau Varagan, who is also the leader of a more sophisticated collective villain, the Exaltationists.

"The Year of the Ransom" further develops Varagan and the Exaltationists.

The Shield Of Time, "Women and Horses and Power and War," cameos Varagan and completes the story of the Exaltationists.

Side-bar villains:

Charlie Whitcomb, having recovered the Ing time shuttle stolen by Stane, uses it to commit a time crime and is helped by Everard;

the Conquistador, Castelar, seizes an Exaltationist timecycle and uses it to commit time crimes.

Castelar is put back when he belongs. Whitcomb leaves the Patrol. Everard becomes Unattached and deals with the Neldorians and Exaltationists.

Everard first meets Varagan in a flashback in "Ivory..." and catches him at the end of "Ivory..." "The Year of the Ransom" is intermediate and mentions a spear-carrying Exaltationist called Raor. In 209 B.C., Everard learns that a Bactrian courtesan, Theonis, answers the description of an Exaltationist. In 976 B.C, Varagan, just captured, had told Everard that his clone-mate, Raor, was still at large. Theonis turns out to be Raor.

Life In 209 B.C. III

For Poul Anderson's descriptions of life in Bactra in 209 B.C., see:

Life In 209 BC
Life In 209 BC II

Is a mingling of Classical simplicity with Oriental lavishness a plausible idea? Would the lavishness not overwhelm the simplicity? Is the lavishness represented by the fanciful frescoes and the simplicity by the Attic dining style? Does the word, "However..." (The Shield Of Time, 209 B.C., p. 34), signal the transition from the lavishness to the simplicity? Will Poul Anderson ever cease to amaze us with his descriptions of everyday life in ancient civilizations as if he had been there? Can I write an entire post consisting entirely of questions instead of of statements? Will I shortly retire for the night while beginning to wonder what to post about tomorrow? Will The Shield Of Time, which has already given us Shalten, Antiochus, a trap for Exaltationists and Bactria, continue to provide new blogging material? Who can possibly say?

Into Bactria

Everard travels with a caravan along a highway on the right bank of the River Bactrus. The camels are one-humped although the two-humped species will later be introduced and will come to be called "Bactrian." Harness bells do not yet exist.

Everard joined the caravan in Alexandria Eschates on the River Jaxartes. (An unmanned spacecraft had tracked the caravan and confirmed that it would reach Bactra on a day suitable for Everard.)

They have traveled south through Sogdiana. Crossing the Oxus brought them into Bactria. Hipponicus, leader of the caravan, is a Hellene, whose ancestors came from the Peloponnessus. The Anatolian strain is not yet prominent in Greece. Everard's persona is Meander the Illyrian from the Balkans north of Macedonia. Antiochus, king of Seleucid Syria, is attacking Bactria. King Euthydemus retreats.

The Achaemenid shahs deported troublesome Ionians to Bactra.

Everard remembers Turkic-Mongolian Uzbegs in Afghanistan in 1970 and reflects:

"A lot of change and chance would blow from the steppes in the millennia to come. Too damn much."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 22.

The people around Everard experience changes and chance events but have no conception of the meanings of those words for a time traveler in a variable reality.

The caravan enters Bactra through the Scythian Gate. The palace is modeled on the one in Seleucid Antioch.

There is more historical detail in this chapter but I hope that I have conveyed the flavor. We are far removed from the abstract arguments about the theoretical basis of causality violation.

Exaltationists And Other Evil Beings

The physical appearance and amoral actions of Poul Anderson's Exaltationists are such that, in an appropriate society, they would probably give rise to legends of vampires or of beings like SM Stirling's Shadowspawn. Being able to appear and disappear thanks to time travel would enhance any such legendary tales.

The Shadowspawn are so literally evil that it is a relief when some of them are killed at the end of A Taint In The Blood. The action is so fast that I became a bit unsure as to who was shooting at whom but I expect that everything will be clear in Volume II which has been ordered.

Aetheric bodies need oxygen and dissolve into entropy when killed. Might consciousness, originating in physical bodies, be able to exercise "Power" over other forms of energy? It would be tragic if such Power were to be possessed by individuals who used it for nothing but sadistic power over other human beings. But a Power that had evolved in prehistory probably would be used only for selfish gratification. Someone had to imagine the worst and SM Stirling has done. (I feared a really nasty ending this time but that did not happen, fortunately.)

The Before And After Paradox

I am trying to clarify what I now call the "before and after" paradox. This involves repeating some argumentation from The Logic Of Time Travel: Part I. However, I do not expect everyone either to read that article in its entirety or to remember all of its details. In any case, we might advance the argument. In the "Before" section, I will repeat the reasoning of Then And Now but will try to be more precise in the use of tenses.

Before
A time traveler who contemplates traveling into the past to prevent Hitler's birth, should (?) reason as follows:

either extra-temporal intervention can generate a divergent timeline or it cannot;

if it cannot, then there is just this one timeline;

in this one timeline, if anyone, whether or not they were a time traveler, had prevented Hitler's birth, then I would not exist now;

but I do exist now;

therefore, either no one tried to prevent Hitler's birth or someone tried and failed;

if extra-temporal intervention can generate a divergent timeline, then I might initiate a timeline in which Hitler was not born but that will leave this current timeline unchanged;

therefore, either way, it remains the case that Hitler was born in this timeline.

After
A time traveler arrives in 1888, intending to prevent Hitler's birth;

he remembers living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and departing from 2018;

he prevents Hitler's birth;

he believes that there is only one timeline;

he concludes, counter-intuitively, that his memories of living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are false.

Before And After
Before departing into the past, a time traveler knows that he remembers real events but, as soon as he arrives in the past, he does not know that. This is what the Time Patrollers say but can it be valid?

Trapping The Last Exaltationists

The siege of Bactra (see here) was not a world-changing event but Shalten fakes evidence that it could have been and ensures that this evidence is publicized during a year when there is reason to believe that some Exaltationists may have been lurking. If the Exaltationists heed Shalten's spurious evidence and try to change the course of history from 209 B.C., then Patrolmen will be waiting for them.

When the last Exaltationists have been apprehended, Shalten has the spurious evidence deleted from the timeline. This strikes to me as both unnecessary and dangerous. What other events, necessary to the Patrol's plan, might unintentionally be deleted in the process?

Shalten's and Everard's 1987 conversation about the Bactrian letter "now" never occurred. Nevertheless, Everard of course remembers it and it is unnecessary for Shalten to discuss the letter again with Everard in 1902 in order to ensure that he retains the memory. That part of the dialogue definitely makes no sense.

Patrol agents like Shalten have some nuanced way to manipulate events in order to ensure exactly the right combination of the preservation of the preferred timeline with deletion of potentially harmful happenings but we are told very little of how they do it.