Transtemporal Resorts?

(Another cover image appropriate for the previous post.)

"Flight to Forever."

"I like this future,' said Hull. 'It's peaceful. Think I'll retire here - or now - in my old age.'

"The thought of transtemporal resorts made Saunders grin. But - who knew? Maybe!" (pp. 213-214)

 

This is currently appropriate because I am reading it in a resort.

 

"They had not moved in space at all, of course, relative to the surface of the earth. 'Absolute space' was an obsolete fiction, and as far as the projector was concerned Earth was the immobile center of the universe." (ibid.)

 

Just like the Wellsian Time Machine. This will be important later. Even when Earth no longer exists, Saunders will resort to traveling into the future in order to return to his starting point. When, around the circle of time, Earth forms and solidifies, the projector is still on it.

 

Regarding obsolete absolute space, in the 1960s, I read The ABC Of Relativity by Bertrand Russell and was impressed by the argument that we have a concept of "place" only because we are surrounded by large natural and artificial objects, mountains, buildings etc, that, during our lifetimes, do not move in relation to each other. Two people can agree to meet outside the Town Hall or the Public Library only because these buildings and the houses from which they walk remain the same distance and direction from each other. If, instead, all these objects visibly moved in relation to each other, then there would be no concept of a "place" in front of the Town Hall or the Library. But everything is in fact moving all the time.