In what I call a single discontinuous timeline, it is possible that someone with time travel capacity arrives/appears from nowhen, then prevents the potential future in which he would otherwise have originated. So far, this person is not a time traveller. He is an uncaused macroscopic quantum event. He becomes a time traveller only if he makes at least one temporal journey with both a departure moment and an arrival moment, not necessarily in that order. In a single continuous timeline, there are no uncaused events. Any arriving/appearing time traveller either has departed from an earlier time or will depart from a later time in that timeline.
The continuous timeline might be regarded as the only genuine time travel narrative. The time traveller always does arrive in the past or the future of the timeline in which he began his journey and the author has to ensure that the narrative remains internally consistent. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is set either in a single discontinuous timeline or in a mutable timeline. The texts are ambiguous.
Anderson presents continuous timelines in three novels. Audrey Niffenegger has presented a complex continuous timeline narrative in a single novel which we, editorially speaking, might reread. Henry DeTamble and Jack Havig are very different mutant time travellers and both are literary successors of HG Wells' Time Traveller but these three works demonstrate how completely dissimilar time travel narratives can be.
5 comments:
In a single discontinuous timeline, he prevents that future from coming into existence rather than makes it vanish. To him, the prevented future is his remembered past.
Kaor, Paul!
But that still makes it what Stirling argues it was: a single continuous timeline as that traveler remembered in his duration sense. But I think we agree on that.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I call that timeline "discontinuous" because someone remembers events that do not happen.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But however contradictory it seems that time still remembers events as happening even if they did not happen. Problems fit to drive us mad!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That case is not logically contradictory, just counter-intuitive. But I class it as "discontinuous" to differentiate from a "continuous" timeline in which every remembered event is also actual.
Paul.
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