travel in time and change
Jun. 11th, 2012 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliWhat happens when you go back in time and do something. . . .
In time travel stories -- leaving aside those in which you spawn alternate words -- there are worlds where you can't change the past, because whatever you did when you traveled in time is what happened then, and there are worlds where you can change the past, and so the universe.
The first, in my general experience, produces cheerful, even comic works, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Technicolor Time-Machine . The second produces, often, such tragic works as most of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories.
Perhaps a world in which we are safe from doing damage is like a great big playpen, designed to protect us.
Or perhaps I have read too few works, or have a biased sample, or am misremembering the trends. . . .0:)
In time travel stories -- leaving aside those in which you spawn alternate words -- there are worlds where you can't change the past, because whatever you did when you traveled in time is what happened then, and there are worlds where you can change the past, and so the universe.
The first, in my general experience, produces cheerful, even comic works, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Technicolor Time-Machine . The second produces, often, such tragic works as most of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories.
Perhaps a world in which we are safe from doing damage is like a great big playpen, designed to protect us.
Or perhaps I have read too few works, or have a biased sample, or am misremembering the trends. . . .0:)
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-12 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-13 12:17 am (UTC)To Say Nothing of the Dog managed it by more subtle means. I think it's better than her Blackout and All Clear because that sort of historian protection is more fun when it's not wrapped up in death.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-12 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-13 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 06:42 am (UTC)leaving aside those in which you spawn alternate worlds
- is, I submit, leaving aside the answer to your question! Does a cosmic force prevent you from going to the A&P, forcing you towards Kresge's instead? No, you just go! Events have consequences; different events have other consequences. One of the best examples I’ve read recently is Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 stories:
Unlike McKinley Kantor or even Ward Moore, Mr Turtledove thinks it through. “Ask the Next Question.” The result is mesmerizing for quite a while up until it dissolves into heavy-handed parody but oh well. The point being that “for want of a nail a battle was lost” - and the consequences reverberate through America and the world for the next hundred years, just as did our own consequences. They do that.
The reason why this perspective is downplayed or disallowed is because H G Wells liked to preach, and he created his Time Machine as a philosophical vehicle, not a piece of practical engineering. We’re not given so much as an idea of its power source – it doesn’t matter. It’s intended to take the protagonist to the realm of If This Goes On, and it might as well have been pedaled like a bicycle. (“J Rotation” was a science fiction short story which involved exactly that. The scientist pedaled his velocipede, “traveling without moving” but zipping forward in time…)
As a result, for all his talk of the Fourth Dimension he doesn’t consider that one may steer, changing x, y AND z coordinates. It’s irrelevant to his purpose – but it’s true! A lever pulled forward or back? Try a yoke, with rudder pedals! Microsoft Time-Flight Simulator™!
So the stories you speak of – which are after all stories, meant to entertain – establish much the same limitations for much the same reason: Dramatic license.
- Keith Laumer’s “Imperium” stories do the same thing from the other direction – his cross-time traveling is a flat disc of 360 ° at right angles to the flow of time. One travels outwards across this “Net” of probability lines without leaving the present moment:
But being able to travel backward or forward would, again, throw the established story right out.
p.s. Hi! It’s nice to meet you: Our profile pages overlap everywhere! May we be friends?
no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 01:15 pm (UTC)“Here Comes the FX Bill”
Date: 2012-06-25 12:29 pm (UTC)or, “Is This Trip Necessary?”
In speaking of the original 1960 George Pal version, the review I link to below says in part,
“[The] Time Machine itself is perfect; it looks exactly like something a Victorian gentleman with way too much time and money on his hands would come up with…”
Whereas this behemoth required an entire year for a crew of experienced cinema-FX professionals to build, and the result weighed six tons. It then didn't, couldn't spin any faster than what we first see - when those rotors are blurring, that's CGI. Are we to believe that this eccentric inventor built this Soviet can-opener by himself? And no one ever noticed?
Plus, if that's steam we're hearing, where's the boiler? Shouldn't he have taken on fuel and water before launching?
Don't ask awkward questions.
Wells the Good Socialist
Re: “Here Comes the FX Bill”
Date: 2012-06-25 10:37 pm (UTC)