"...striding in the van of an army which followed the Merseian Christ."
-Poul Anderson, A Circus Of Hells IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 193-365 AT CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, p. 331.
Of course, Djana's vision does not come to pass but could it have been a possible although prevented future like the jihad that is (only just) headed off in The Day Of Their Return? The psychic powers exercised in the Technic History do not include prescience although they might have done. In fact, there could have been speculative instalments about alternative outcomes of Chunderban Desai's analyses. Desai tells Flandry:
"'There is no absolute inevitability.'"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT III, p. 389.
With no absolute inevitability, there is scope for mutually incompatible previsions.
In James Blish's works, the planet Lithia explodes in 2050 in one future timeline but still exists millennia later in another. We study futures, not the future.
6 comments:
As von Molkte the Elder said, planning is everything -- but the plan is nothing.
Because contingency crops up and you can't force events to a predetermined pattern. So you have to plan, but have lots of -alternative- plans and be able to mix and match as circumstances demand.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: But "we" can only live in "this" universe, this timeline. Alternate worlds might be theoretically possible, but as of now we have no empirical evidence of that being the case, never mind accessing or traveling to them!
Mr. Stirling: And strategists also need not to be too rigidly attached to any plan.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That's why it's good to read about fictional characters who can only live in their universe. In a British TV drama in which Germany had won WWII, a TV script writer was writing a historical drama about the 1944 Invasion of Britain. Asked how he would handle it, he replied, "Well, I can't rewrite history..."
Paul.
Kaor, Pau!
I agree, and that is what Stirling has been doing in most of his books, trying out alternate scenarios. And I have an SF collection called HITLER VICTORIOUS in which varied writers examine what might have happened if the Fuhrer had won his war. Meaning both SF writers and TV script writers can, indeed should, imaginatively rewrite history.
Anderson did try his hand at writing stories where characters can travel from our timeline to another, as in THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS. And linked that up via the Old Phoenix inn to the OPERATION books and A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST.
And it was daring of him to show Nicholas van Rijn also being a guest at the Old Phoenix!
Ad astra! Sean
Huck Finn and Jim were there too... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! I remembered that just now!
I've even been wondering if the young JRR Tolkien survived the German Annihilation Gas attack on the UK on 10/6/1916 of your Black Chamber timeline? He was hospitalized there at the time.
Ad astra! Sean
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