Time And Consciousness

My two philosophical preoccupations are the natures of time and consciousness. Time as the measure of motion is independent of consciousness but it is consciousness that defines the present and therefore divides time into past and future.

My two sf preoccupations are future histories and time travel. Both are related to time. All prose fiction involves narrative points of view and therefore raises the philosophical question of consciousness.

One of my blog refrains is that Poul Anderson alone among sf writers excels both in future histories and in time travel - both in quantity and in quality. Not just one future history but several, both series and single volumes. Not just one time travel classic - like maybe an equivalent of The Time Machine - but several short stories and novels and a series, all different. Time travellers either can or cannot "change the past" so, of course, Anderson presents both versions and in considerable detail.

Jack Havig, mutant time traveller, cannot alter the course of known events. Logically, this makes him no different from anyone else. If we now learn for the first time that a British agent had departed for Germany on a mission to assassinate Hitler in 1944, then we already know that any such mission failed even if we never learn how or why it failed. This remains true even if that agent turns out to have been a time traveller from our future. However, statistically, Havig is not like anyone else. He always falls and breaks a leg or suffers some other such mishap whenever he sets out to travel into the past in order to change it. Learning this, he soon stops trying and that alone is sufficient to explain why many past events are not changed.

Audrey Niffenegger does a good job with this issue in The Time Traveller's Wife. Events always remain consistent. At one point, Henry, trying to prevent a past event, is paralyzed by the knowledge that he is attempting the impossible. Also, he cannot control his departures or arrivals. Thus, unlike Havig, he is never able to set out in order to try to change the past. If you like Anderson, read Niffenegger.