I am rereading Heinlein's
The Door Into Summer for comparison purposes. It is a solid novel about how a talented inventor, Dan Davis, responds to being swindled by his business partner and fiancee. Davis invents neither the suspended animation technique nor the time machine but another sf prop, domestic robots. The two future dates in the novel are 1970 and 2000-'01! Davis' cat plays a big part in the narrative. James and Judy Blish, who had two cats when I visited them, said that Heinlein's account of feline behaviour is all wrong, even canine. That is what my Aesthetics lecturer called an "aesthetic interference condition." Of course, the comparison with Anderson will focus on the time travel and the circular causality paradox when we get to them. In Chapter
Four, our villain and villainess argue about which of them had left a door unlocked. Dan Davis, time traveller, had unlocked/will unlock it.
Next Music Festival event: jazz in The Castle Chapel.
3 comments:
If time travel is possible, unless there's a God, changing history is possible.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I believe there is a God, so we might not be allowed to change history. In that case time traveling will have to deal with immutable time lines, as in Anderson's THE CORRIDORS OF TIME, THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS, and THERE WILL BE TIME.
Alternately, of course, the parallel universes hypothesis allows for the possibility of history taking different courses, as in Anderson's THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, the OPERATION books, and books of yours like THE PESHAWAR LANCERS, CONQUISTADOR, or your Antonine stories.
Ad astra! Sean
Experience does not show us divine interventions preventing anyone from doing what they shouldn't.
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