Sometimes Time Patrol agents try to prevent a deleted timeline. At other times, they are inside such a timeline and trying to get back out of it. Do they know the difference? Is there a hard and fast difference?
Patrol agents monitor history. Simon Bolivar is behaving in a way at odds with his biographies. He has a new friend, Blasco Lopez, who gives brilliant advice but who might be an evil genius and was never mentioned by the biographers. Investigation reveals that Lopez must be from the future. He and his co-conspirators have made the time stream unstable. The Patrol must do "'...a lot of tricky restoration work...'" (p. 279) But, when the bad advice stops, Bolivar returns to his normal ways.
Can Bolivar's unrecorded evil genius and his temporarily uncharacteristic behavior be incorporated into the Danellian timeline or did the temporal instability enable agents to move between timelines? Such inter-temporal movements would not fit into my usual way of conceptualizing Time Patrol time travel paradoxes but might nevertheless be consistent with the slightly different temporal metaphysics as presented in "Star of the Sea." Sometimes the allusive texts of the Time Patrol series are not fully susceptible to rational analysis. But we should never merely negate reason or analysis and Anderson does not.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
That's a new idea, what you said about "Blasco Lopez" and Simom Bolivar. While I'm not entirely convinced or sure, the notion of a "temporary instability" allowing Patrol agents to travel between "deleted" timelines and the Danellian universe is worth thinking about.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It is what happens in "Star of the Sea." Someone acquires a copy of Tacitus from a divergent timeline.
Paul.
The Time Patrol stories incorporate a tendency of the timeline to return to its original track (or something very close to it) unless stressed beyond a certain point -- "network of rubber bands" as the Academy introduction puts it≥
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Anderson added as well the idea in THE SHIELD OF TIME that the Patrol was a necessary stabilizing factor for keeping the "proper" timeline more or less on its "correct" path.
Another thought I've had was wondering, assuming time travel is possible, if the immutable time lines seen in THE CORRIDORS OF TIME, THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS, and THERE WILL BE TIME are more plausible and less of a complex strain to keep coherent.
Ad astra! Sean
They may be more convenient from a plot point of view, but the invariant time-travel stories have their own problems — most notably, what -causes- the corrective actions? That implies that information is being transmitted to “the universe”, somehow, so that something always “happens” to keep you from changing the past. You stumble and break your neck before assassinating Hitler, or whatever.
That’s a pure dues ex machina, without some very elaborate fancy-dancing.
My own take is that if time travel is possible at all, then time is mutable — but then, I favor the “many worlds” hypothesis too.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Trying to make sense of time traveling hurts my head! You've raised a very disturbing point, WHAT or how are "corrective" actions somehow always prevented in immutable timelines?
Truthfully, I think alternate universes to be far more plausible than time traveling.
Ad astra! Sean
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