Intersecting Timelines

Yesterday at Andrea's place above the Old Pier Bookshop, we watched a superheroes time travel film. Genuinely new ideas in time travel fiction are rare. One such idea was the random quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy in Poul Anderson's The Shield of Time. Thus, history changed without any intervention, whether accidental or deliberate, by a time traveller. How does the following idea, from the film, grab us? If a time traveller enters an earlier moment, then not only a divergent future but also a divergent past emerge from that moment. Thus, a derivative alternative timeline intersects the original timeline at that single moment. Further, such transitional moments are somehow immune to any further extratemporal interference. (Search me.)

Amusingly (maybe), two actors who had played the Batman in earlier films return to that role in this film because the viewpoint character visits those alternative timelines. A guest appearance by a character from a previous film has become a regular feature in such series.

When I see a time travel travesty, I thank the Muses for Anderson's solid body of time travel fiction which overlaps, as it should do, both with historical fiction and with one of Anderson's several future histories. I want to retreat from a bad time travel film to rereading part of Anderson's Time Patrol series. However, one good time travel film is 12 Monkeys.