time traveling war

[marycatelli]

How could you, in any sense, win a time-traveling war?

After you won, you would have to go places and do things.  But even if you captured or killed every opposing time traveler, you could always run into your opponents again.  It just has to be earlier in their time line than in yours.

if you could exhaustively search out their personal time lines, you could avoid them, but it's hardly winning to have to avoid active war zones.

Comments

[ext-1641287.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

If you haven't already, you might want to read the Change War stories of Fritz Leiber, including the short novel The Big Time. The two sides to this time war are the Spiders and the Snakes. Those are the names the human combatants use. The War spans all spacetime and is so vast, none of the characters knows what the issues are or their complete chain of command. It differs from most stories about changing history because Leiber introduces a second dimension of time, the Big Time, over which the contents of the Little Time (our history) can change. This prevents logical inconsistency.

[marycatelli]

Another one is Wearing the Cape by Marion G. Harmon. Where there is a real Now. The Past is fixed, the Future is only possible, real action can be performed only in Now -- and the Now progresses at the same rate as your subjective time. A year in the future? Now is now a year later than before.