Let us focus on just one sf concept: time travel within a single immutable timeline. There is a clear line of descent from Wells through Heinlein to Anderson. (For this purpose, of course, we exclude Anderson's Time Patrol which is an entirely different proposition.) There are some other authors. However, the purpose of the present post is not to list names but to make a single comparison. I have two collections by John Wyndham:
Consider Her Ways and others (Penguin, 1979)
The Seeds Of Time (Penguin, 1981)
"If you can look into the seeds of time,
"And say which grain will grow and which will not..."
-Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3.
Some stories by Wyndham fall into this category:
"Consider Her Ways"
"Odd"
"Stich in Time" (excellent; classic)
"Chronoclasm"
"Pawley's Peepholes"
"Pillar to Post"
See also:
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Wyndham is mostly familiar to me from reading THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS.
Ad astra! Sean
I don't find time travel in a fixed timeline very credible, becauae history is a series of very improbable accidents. Hence, if you change anything, you change everything.
There would have to be some 'conscious' entity arranging things to keep them the same -- as in one of Poul's fixed-history time travel stories a series of accidents prevents the hero from preventing his father's death. But what causes the accidents?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You raised good points, but I still have difficulty grokking how an event we KNOW happened, like the Sarajevo assassination, being somehow prevented. Because that would inevitably change everything in the future--we ourselves would not exist "now." Was that entity God?
The book you had in mind was THERE WILL BE TIME.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah.
There's an unspoken "God" behind the immutability of history in that book -- nothing else or less would prevent time-travelers from changing history.
In fact, a few of the things in THERE WILL BE TIME would have changed history -- time-travelers accumulating fortunes, for example.
If events can come before causes, you're dealing with a chaotic system.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I think God acting to prevent what has already happened is the only thing that makes sense of what we see in THERE WILL BE TIME.
Interesting, what you said about "time-travelers accumulating fortunes." Referring to how Caleb Wallis gained the means needed for setting up the Eyrie. Anderson may have erred there, not devising a means for Wallis getting the capital he needed in a way that would not change history.
Events before their causes inevitably being chaotic? Ugh, no wonder trying to make sense of time travel hurts my noggin!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's even worse than that!
That any particular human being is born -- with the genes they have -- is dependent not only on the time of intercourse, but the random meeting of one sperm and one egg, and then the (random) exchange of genes involved in that.
So any change in history would result in a rapid 'ripple' spreading out that would ensure that no particular human being would be born as in the previous history.
So much depends on random chance -- the weather, for example -- that this would probably happen fairly quickly. Within a decade at most.
My friend, Andrea's, goddess, Fortuna.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ugh, I far prefer an immutable timeline. Or, alternatively, alternate worlds, as in your stories.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: well, there's some physics evidence for multiple timelines. Or at least multiple universes.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, I read about that in books like Frank Tipler's THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY and Sean Carroll's SOMETHING DEEPLY HIDDEN. I don't claim to have understood everything they wrote.
There's also the framing preface discussing such issues in THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS.
Ad astra! Sean
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