While traveling, I remembered a few other kinds of enemies:
pre-human life;
Chaos (see also here and here);
temporal chaos;
bureaucrats or AIs regarding freedom as chaos. See here.
"Chaos" can mean either freedom, uncontrollable and unpredictable, or its antithesis, the kind of disorder that would prevent any life or freedom.
However, of these four additional "enemies," hypothetical temporal chaos need not concern us. We are born, live and die within one single timeline. Even if many such timelines chaotically succeed each other along a second temporal dimension, the inhabitants of each of the timelines remain unaffected by the chaotic relationship between their timelines. Such temporal chaos is of concern only to any time travelers who have ventured into their past and who want to ensure that they return to their remembered version of the present.
2 comments:
Paul:
In the 3rd chapter of Norman Spinrad's Agent of Chaos, there's a delightfully paradoxical statement:
"'In the name of Chaos,' he said, in a surprisingly powerful voice, 'I, Robert Ching, First Agent, call this meeting of the Prime Agents of the Brotherhood of Assassins to order.'"
In the name of Chaos ... order.
The "Chaos" the Brotherhood of Assassins seeks is the liberation of humanity from the Hegemony which rules the Solar System. The Assassins' ultimate weapon ... well, that would be a spoiler.
Coincidentally, one of the characters in the book, published in 1967, has the same name as an extant British politician, born in 1964: Boris Johnson.
"The axis of the universe is irony," as Alan Dean Foster portrayed a somewhat Merseian-like alien saying, when he learned circumstances might force the Humanx Commonwealth to request that the aliens bombard a Humanx-settled world (to contain an infestation).
David,
There is order in chaos. Clocks are clouds.
Paul.
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