Creating Universes

I am reading about Mike Carey's characters creating universes in his graphic fiction series, Lucifer, and therefore also remembering how certain prose sf writers address the creation of the universe.

Keith Denison of the Time Patrol, when captured in ancient Persia, kicks his timecycle into time-drive:

"'It was only a few hours in this century, then 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 6, p. 83.

 

Reading this sentence, we might imagine that Time Patrol temporal vehicles "travel through time" by enduring either futureward or pastward time dilation. This is the kind of time travel undergone by Wells's Time Machine, by the mutant time travelers in Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time and by the "time projector" in Anderson's "Flight to Forever." However, Time Patrol vehicles jump directly from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates to another in zero subjective time. Therefore, if Denison's vehicle did go to the Beginning, then it did so without traversing all the intervening time. It follows that the Danellians and their Patrol can have instant access to the Beginning when they can directly observe the earliest events, provided that they are adequately protected from that hostile environment. But we are told nothing else about the Beginning. (In an episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor glanced into a book about the creation of the universe and said something like: "Wrong on the first page! They should have asked someone who was there!" That should have been "...someone who was then!")

 

In other works by Anderson:

 

both the time projector and a relativistic spaceship pass from the end to the beginning of the universe;

 

the Elder Race not only travels between universes but is present at the formation of a monobloc with the possibility of influencing and entering the subsequent universe;

 

time travel experiments confirm the otherwise empty philosophical speculation that the universe, complete with false memories, records, geology etc, began to exist relatively recently.

In SM Stirling's Emberverse series, consciousness, manifesting as either deities or as demons, passed from an old to a new universe.

 

In works by James Blish:

 

energy beings called "Angels" came into existence in the first twenty minutes of the universe and will last as long as it does;

New Earthmen and Hevians survive a cosmic collision long enough to become new monoblocs.