Monday 27 February 2023

Concepts In Fictional Narratives

Is it legitimate to take a concept for granted in order to get on with the story? See Science In SF. In the case of faster than light (FTL) interstellar travel, I think not. Hyperspace became both too convenient and too common a cliche. Poul Anderson addressed this issue by contriving a different rationale for FTL in every discrete story or series but he was able to do this because of his degree in physics. Even his Technic History version of "hyperspace," a rapid succession of quantum jumps, transcends cliche.

I like stories that accept relativistic limitations but nevertheless show interstellar travel happening just as I like stories that accept a single continuous timeline but nevertheless show time travel happening.

I think that it is legitimate to take time travel for granted for the sake of a story. See a 2023 novel by SM Stirling. Anderson wrote that his own Time Patrol series was "loose" because it omitted any real study of the consequences of causality violation. But that was before he had written The Shield of Time which surely is a real study?

The simplest way to take time travel for granted is just to show someone who thinks that he is a time traveller appearing at a time which he regards as the past. Some passages in the Time Patrol series imply not successive timelines but a single discontinuous timeline but it is difficult to describe that second scenario consistently: 

"...history could in fact be diverted by someone who went back and affected a key point." (p. 311) (Refence in the above link.)

In a single discontinuous timeline, history is diverted only from the course that it took in the "time traveller's" spurious memories and he has not gone "back" but has simply appeared like a quantum particle. In fact, this is not really time travel but is something that we arrive at if we start with the concept of time travel, then turn it inside out.

5 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

They're not suprious memories; they just no longer (in terms of his own duration-sense) correspond to anything outside his own head.

Or in the case of DELENDA EST, to Manse and Piet's heads!

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I am not quite so sure FTL can be so easily dismissed. Not after reading up a bit about Alcubierre's theoretical work. But making it a practical, nuts and bolts reality is going to be harder, alas!

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

But "no longer" implies successive timelines. I am talking about a single discontinuous timeline. Anderson does more than once say that "deleted" wvents never happened.

S.M. Stirling said...

Paul: only if proceed from the assumption you're trying to prove. In the Time Patrol setting, it's stated that events don't have to have 'causes' in the usual sense and that duration is not uniform.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

There is a sense of liberation here. On the one hand, I have expressed my understanding as clearly as I can. On the other hand, I realize that I do not understand what is going on!

(We are preparing to move house - although staying within Lancaster - so blogging will probably become even more sporadic than it has been recently.)