Through Space And Time, Between Worlds

Occasionally in fantasy and science fiction (sf), someone makes a random series of "jumps" through space and time or between worlds without any idea of what they will encounter after each "jump." The author's imagination must be up to the task. Whatever is encountered, it must be something new, not an implication or consequence of anything that had occurred earlier in the narrative. It is like writing, or reading, a mini-series.

The hero of James Blish's Jack Of Eagles made such a journey near the end of that novel. In "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time, Blish invented what was effectively a variation on this theme. A small group of characters in our future sits comfortably in an office while receiving audiovisual messages from various periods of their future. Thus, like the reader, they go nowhere physically and remain perfectly safe while learning about problems that will concern their successors but not them. In some cases, tantalizingly, they do not fully understand the problems yet.

Poul Anderson, I now suspect, did everything that there was to be done in sf. He certainly contributed to the  "through space and time, between worlds" theme. In "Flight To Forever," he had to imagine a new future scenario every time his characters halted their headlong rush into the future. A timeline for this story is very impressive.

In Chapter XXVI of The Avatar, a spaceship is forced to make a random jump through a T machine field. In Chapter XXVII, it is in an unknown planetary system where there is another T machine so that, after some exploration, it will be able to make another jump. Thereafter, nine chapters begin with the single word "Jump."

Spoiler alert: my next task will be to reread the remainder of the novel and to summarize what is found after each of these jumps.

The Holont: Second Potentiality

A common human-Holont language is established swiftly and surely because the contemporary Holont have received a message from the future Holont telling them that human beings would arrive and how they would try to communicate: trans-temporal communication and circular causality paradox. Unfortunately, we are told this but are not otherwise told very much about what passes between the two kinds of beings.

It is suggested that thousands or millions of years must pass before galactic civilisation flowers as a result of interactions between organic and holontic cultures. Meanwhile, human beings, exploring, colonising and trading in interstellar space, hope to build holontic time communicators which, like James Blish's Dirac transmitters, will not only receive messages from the future but will also operate instantaneously in the present, making the universe one.

A sequel to Starfarers could have shown a utopia like that in Blish's "Beep" and The Quincunx Of Time, where starfarers, receiving messages describing themselves preventing disasters and presiding over a peaceful, expanding culture, then did prevent disasters and preside over a peaceful, expanding culture: cosmic circular causality.

Starfarers and Time Travelers

Is it time travel if only information is transmitted to the past? Once, in conversation with James Blish, I referred to what I called "the limited time travel" of his story, "Beep," to which he replied that there was no time travel in "Beep." What happens is that Dirac transmissions are instantaneous. It follows that, in a four dimensional continuum, each Dirac device simultaneously receives all transmissions from past, present and future in a single beep from which individual messages can be filtered and slowed down so that information can be received from the future.

It might be said that information at least has traveled through time but, in any case, this situation does generate the causality paradoxes that are familiar from speculations about time travel.

In Poul Anderson's Starfarers, intelligent quantum states near a black hole can form giant spinning nuclei causing space-time warps through which they send information. Again, a causality paradox results. The quantum states can immediately communicate with newly arrived human explorers because they have been told how to do so by their later selves who know how to communicate with human beings because they have already done so.

Earlier in Starfarers, another situation, while not time travel, was also relevant to time travel paradoxes. The quantum jump that formed the universe was not to the lowest but to a higher energy level. The starfarers' "zero-zero drive" spaceships instantly boost to near light speeds by borrowing energy from the lowest level. It is feared that this exchange of energy between levels destabilizes the universe so that it might collapse to the lowest level. It is stated later in the novel that this fear is unfounded and that instead the energy exchanges strengthen cosmic stability.

However, while the fear was entertained, it was thought that a sphere of nothingness expanding at light speed could engulf the universe. This is comprehensible. However, a character then adds:

"- the past itself annulled, and we not only cease to be, we never were." (1)

And, in the Time Patrol series:

"...brightness that at any instance might not only cease to be but cease ever having been." (2)

This is incoherent. We can exist until time t, can cease to exist at t and can no longer exist after t but we cannot exist until t, than at t cease having existed until t.

The speaker's companion replies that it has not happened yet to which she responds:

"It may already have happened somewhere. It may be on its way to us. We'll never know." (1)

If a sphere of nothingness is on its way to us now, then we exist now so that we have not been prevented from existing until now. We can fear for the future but not in the same way for the past. These few lines could be deleted without affecting the rest of the novel.

(1) Anderson, Poul, Starfarers, New York, 1999, p. 290.
(2) Anderson, Poul, The Time Patrol, New York, 1991, p. 301.