"Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time by James Blish
The Time Patrol series by Poul Anderson
There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson
These four works convey a sense of a human being as a "world-line" extending from the point of birth to the point of death in a four-dimensional space-time continuum. They are works of science fiction reflecting the world-view of modern physics.
The Time Machine explicitly states the absurdity that a dimensionless immaterial mental existence moves along this world-line at a uniform velocity from birth to death, thus unnecessarily introducing a second temporal dimension. Blish in conversation at an sf con even suggested that such minds might move at different rates so that none of us would have any way of knowing whether another person was mentally present when we were speaking to him. We might be addressing an unconscious automaton!
Clearly an ancient mind-body dualism has intruded into a modern world-view. Each of us is a spatially extended, temporally enduring, psychophysical organism conscious in every waking moment. We move around in space but nothing moves through time. Motion through space takes time.
Poul Anderson gets it right but introduces further complexities with the Time Patrol.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Wells was a pioneer, so we should not expect him to get everything right or even self consistent when it came to him working out the implications of time traveling. That had to be done by later writers such as de Camp, Heinlein, and Anderson.
Ad astra! Sean
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