As I said before, two favourite kinds of sf: time travel and future histories. However, time travel divides into circular causality and causality violation which are fundamentally different and need to be treated separately. On this basis and in my opinion, of course, the ultimate causality violation omnibus collection is
Time Patrol and the ultimate future history omnibus collection is
The Earth Book of Stormgate. These
two volumes address past and future history respectively although in alternative timelines.
Time Patrol collects ten instalments, including one short novel, whereas the
Earth Book collects twelve instalments, including one novel, with fictional introductions. However, in terms of the time travellers' personal chronologies, the events of the concluding short story in
Time Patrol, "Of Death And The Knight," occur after the events of the long novel,
The Shield of Time, which in turn occur immediately after the events of "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," which should therefore conclude
Time Patrol with "Of Death And The Knight" moved to the end of
The Shield of Time.A circular causality story is complete when the circle is closed and therefore tends to preclude sequels or series although the Time Patrollers fit some causal circles into their variable reality scenario. There is more than one candidate for the ultimate work on circular causality. Among Poul Anderson's works: There Will Be Time. Outside Anderson's works: The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. And when will its sequel be published?
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Excellent as it is, THE EARTH BOOK OF STORMGATE is not enough by itself. I would urge readers to get all seven volumes of Hank Davis' edition of the SAGA OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION, collecting all of Anderson's Technic stories in internal chronological order.
I agree it makes sense to collect THE SHIELD OF TIME and "Of Death and the Knight" in one volume.
Ad astra! Sean
My own take is that the future doesn't exist -- so if you travel in time, the future that produced you no longer 'exists' except as a possibility, a hypothesis.
The problem is this. Before I depart into the past, I know that my immediate past and my present are real. When I arrive in what I remember regarding as the past, that "immediate past and present" are merely possible. Before departing into the past, a Time Patroller thinks, "It might turn out to be the case that the immediate past and present which I now know to be real are not in fact real." I think that that thought is incoherent.
Paul: no, it's not incoherent -if- time travel is possible.
That's what Poul meant by "infinite discontinuities in the world lines" in the first Time Patrol story.
Essentially, that means cause and effect function differently if time travel (to the past) is possible at all.
It's my own belief that if you could 'rewind' history to any given point, it would be highly likely that things would turn out differently most of the 'time', because events are contingent, ultimately on a quantum level.
So Cause A is not -inevitably- going to produce the same result if you 'play it over'.
It may still exist -if- there are multiple separate timelines.
If not, then it doesn't, and nothing logically -requires- that.
So the Time Patrol history is one that makes people who know about time travel highly nervous! Justly so, because a quantum fluctuation can negate everything.
BTW, friends who really know physics tell me that time travel is mathematically identical to faster-than-light travel.
We might just possibly be saying the same thing in different words when I say that, just as different states of the 3D spatial universe succeed each other along the first temporal dimension, so, in the same way, different states of the 4D spatiotemporal continuum succeed each other along a second temporal dimension. Within the current timeline, it is true to say that the events of a deleted timeline never happened but, within the five-dimensional framework, it is true to say that the entire deleted timeline did exist in an earlier moment of the second temporal dimension. The Temporal language will have appropriate tenses.
Kaor, to Both!
All this ultimately goes back to the speculations we have all seen about alternate worlds and universes. With Anderson specifically citing the work of Hugh Everett in one of his letters to me.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, it's all unfalsifiable, so no definitive understanding can be reached here in the 'real world'.
Accordingly, I think we should just accept the interpretation that the author of any book dealing with time travel uses.
Poul used both variable and invariable time, and single-timeline and alternate-timeline backgrounds for different books.
PA is to be commended for invariable timeline, variable timeline and multiple timeline narratives all handled equally well and in detail.
I think that:
for a Time Patroller, or indeed for anyone, to say, "I am experiencing this now but I might not be experiencing this now," is contradictory;
it is unnecessary to say such things because the conceptual scheme of a second temporal dimension enables us to say, e.g., "In the current timeline, Keith Denison was never Cyrus the Great but, in an earlier timeline ("earlier" in the second temporal dimension), Denison WAS Cyrus (but, in what I have just written, the "was" and the "WAS" have to be in different tenses in Temporal);
if (as does happen, e.g., in UP THE LINE by Robert Silverberg) a time travel narrative contains contradictions, the the author is relating something that cannot happen even assuming the premises of the narrative.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I agree, as of now nobody can either prove or disprove the alternate worlds hypothesis empirically. All we can do is read, and enjoy, the stories set in alternate universes by yourself, Anderson, De Camp, Turtledove, etc.
Anderson did wonder, in a letter to me, if it might be possible to go from our universe to another cosmos via a black hole. Not likely, I agree!
Paul: I sure as heck don't claim to understand time travel stories--I just read them!
This one might interest you: 11/22/63, by Stephen King. Which I'm reading. It's about time travelers trying to prevent the assassination of Pres. Kennedy in 1963.
Ad astra! Sean
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