Time travel to fix the past
Ilya2
then either finds out upon his return that his own time has been
altered (usually for the worse), or simply disappears. In "Lady Slings
The Booze", Spider Robinson turns this trope on its head: Lady in
question travels into past (into 1986, IIRC) in order to *fix* history
-- to prevent US/USSR nuclear war and thus to make her own time and
her own existence possible.
Has anyone else done this plot: somebody with time travel capability
examines history and comes to conclusion that a certain event was so
improbable, it could only occur with outside interference, and
therefore it is THEIR responsibility to travel into past and to make
the event happen?
lal_truckee
You mean other than "The End of Eternity?"
Wayne Throop
: lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com>
: You mean other than "The End of Eternity?"
Or the various Poul Anderson stories about the Time Patrol, including
the bit about going back in time and impersonating Odin in order to set
up Iforgetjustwhat.
Or, consider All You Zombies. Or The Chronoliths. These two, there
isn't quite research into historical fact, the Chronolith-builders in
particular know exactly and all along what improbable events they need to
go back and cause. (Though I do have to wonder what they were thinking
about that last chronolith, and how they get conned into doing it...)
And even the case of the Time Patrol, they get their marching orders from
TimeCop Central (or whatever it was called), but in one of the stories,
it's made clear that it's being managed by some low-probability but
weakly-godlike beings to ensure they come about.
Hm. Or, say, Singularity Sky, and the Big E therein. If you try
to do something that *doesn't* lead to the Big E (or even alters the
Big E's historical record, improbable as it is), you get stomped on.
Although, by Iron Sunrise we find out there's a fly in the ointment.
Sadly, we'll never get to see the dread faceoff between the Big E
and the Space Nazis. No, not like the Trek episode...
The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying:
Valhalla, I am coming!
--- Led Zeppelin, "The Immigrant Song"
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Wayne Throop
: Or the various Poul Anderson stories about the Time Patrol, including
: the bit about going back in time and impersonating Odin in order to set
: up Iforgetjustwhat.
Oh, doy, there's also Time Squad, late of Cartoon Network, where
the protagonists live in a massive space station in the far future,
monitoring history for things going wrong, whereupon they go back and
put them right again. And, like Sherman and Peabody, the whole notion
is to teach history to the viewers, schoolhouse rock style. Sort of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2lrPc7c65I
Nice theme music. If you like that sort of thing.
Which many don't, I suppose.
Or, of course, Hannibal Fortune, agent of T.E.R.R.A.
with his coveted License to Tamper. And his sidekick Webley.
Dorothy J Heydt
There's a whole lot of that going on in _The Big Time_. Two
sides, each trying to change the past into what they prefer.
--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at hotmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the hotmail edress.
Kithrup is getting too damn much spam, even with the sysop's filters.
Quadibloc
> Oh, doy, there's also Time Squad, late of Cartoon Network, where
> the protagonists live in a massive space station in the far future,
> monitoring history for things going wrong, whereupon they go back and
> put them right again.
For a cartoon show, criticizing the accuracy of the "science" may not
be reasonable, but a lot of SF stories get this wrong too.
Shouldn't the headquarters of people whose goal is to change history
to set the future to a certain value, against interference, have their
headquarters in the *ancient past*, so that they're not going
disappear the first time anything changes?
John Savard
David M. Palmer
<09b27582-840f-463f...@p9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
Ilya2 <il...@rcn.com> wrote:
That ?Asimov? story where the scientist is historian is hired to write
a science textbook in ancient greek, with the goal of sending it back
to the appropriate time period to give the present day people 3000 more
years of advancement.
And the historian, realizing what a bad idea that would be, sends back
things like Democritus's atomic theory, Eratosthenes' spherical Earth,
and other things that he knew that they already knew, but that his
sponsor would think would be great scientific advances.
The point being that the Ancient Greeks were a bunch of numbskulls
(being both foreign and primitive) and so they would not have come up
with those theories otherwise, so the historian preserved and
instigated recorded history, even while his sponsor was trying to
change it.
--
David M. Palmer dmpa...@email.com (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)
Dan Goodman
> In article
> <09b27582-840f-463f...@p9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> Ilya2 <il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>
> > A SF trope done to death is time traveler does something in the
> > past, then either finds out upon his return that his own time has
> > been altered (usually for the worse), or simply disappears. In
> > "Lady Slings The Booze", Spider Robinson turns this trope on its
> > head: Lady in question travels into past (into 1986, IIRC) in order
> > to fix history -- to prevent US/USSR nuclear war and thus to make
> > her own time and her own existence possible.
> >
> > Has anyone else done this plot: somebody with time travel capability
> > examines history and comes to conclusion that a certain event was so
> > improbable, it could only occur with outside interference, and
> > therefore it is THEIR responsibility to travel into past and to make
> > the event happen?
>
> That ?Asimov? story where the scientist is historian is hired to write
> a science textbook in ancient greek, with the goal of sending it back
> to the appropriate time period to give the present day people 3000
> more years of advancement.
>
> And the historian, realizing what a bad idea that would be, sends back
> things like Democritus's atomic theory, Eratosthenes' spherical Earth,
> and other things that he knew that they already knew, but that his
> sponsor would think would be great scientific advances.
>
> The point being that the Ancient Greeks were a bunch of numbskulls
> (being both foreign and primitive) and so they would not have come up
> with those theories otherwise, so the historian preserved and
> instigated recorded history, even while his sponsor was trying to
> change it.
Isaac Asimov, "The Red Queen's Race"
--
Dan Goodman
Journal at:
dsgood.livejournal.com
dsgood.dreamwidth.org
dsgood.insanejournal.com
John
>"Quadibloc" <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote in message
>news:d5e71ca4-0a0c-450b-b5fc->7b3bdc...@h40g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
No, their existence unsures that they willen alsobe successful.
Wayne Throop
: Shouldn't the headquarters of people whose goal is to change history
: to set the future to a certain value, against interference, have their
: headquarters in the *ancient past*, so that they're not going
: disappear the first time anything changes?
Why would displacing it into the past help? Their causal antecedents
would still be vulnerable. It's also not clear but what the "space
station" in Time Squad wasn't in some extratemporal void (sort of like
Asimov's Eternity, only different). For that matter, it isn't clear
that it in the far the past... but of course, you have to have some
way to monitor what the future is doing.
And then, of course, there's the traditional metatime thing, where any
change made in the past takes a finite amount of metatime to propogate
to the future, and the old timelinle continues for a short period
of ... well, time, but realtime that corresponds to the metatime.
Sort of. Despite it being a horrid model, it's a common one.
Everything from Back to the Future to Meet the Robinsons. Yeesh.
Dorothy J Heydt
David M. Palmer <dmpa...@email.com> wrote:
>In article
><09b27582-840f-463f...@p9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
>Ilya2 <il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>
>> A SF trope done to death is time traveler does something in the past,
>> then either finds out upon his return that his own time has been
>> altered (usually for the worse), or simply disappears. In "Lady Slings
>> The Booze", Spider Robinson turns this trope on its head: Lady in
>> question travels into past (into 1986, IIRC) in order to *fix* history
>> -- to prevent US/USSR nuclear war and thus to make her own time and
>> her own existence possible.
>>
>> Has anyone else done this plot: somebody with time travel capability
>> examines history and comes to conclusion that a certain event was so
>> improbable, it could only occur with outside interference, and
>> therefore it is THEIR responsibility to travel into past and to make
>> the event happen?
>
>That ?Asimov? story where the scientist is historian is hired to write
>a science textbook in ancient greek, with the goal of sending it back
>to the appropriate time period to give the present day people 3000 more
>years of advancement.
Yes, Asimov: "The Red Queen's Race."
>
>And the historian, realizing what a bad idea that would be, sends back
>things like Democritus's atomic theory, Eratosthenes' spherical Earth,
>and other things that he knew that they already knew, but that his
>sponsor would think would be great scientific advances.
>
>The point being that the Ancient Greeks were a bunch of numbskulls
>(being both foreign and primitive) and so they would not have come up
>with those theories otherwise, so the historian preserved and
>instigated recorded history, even while his sponsor was trying to
>change it.
No, not really. But the Greeks had (like every other people in
every other period) preconceptions and blind spots, and the
modern physics got distorted into some mythology, some basic
Greek science. The plot of the guy who sent the book back,
hoping to change history, was thereby foiled.
Ted Nolan <tednolan>
>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
>: Or the various Poul Anderson stories about the Time Patrol, including
>: the bit about going back in time and impersonating Odin in order to set
>: up Iforgetjustwhat.
>
>Oh, doy, there's also Time Squad, late of Cartoon Network, where
>the protagonists live in a massive space station in the far future,
>monitoring history for things going wrong, whereupon they go back and
>put them right again. And, like Sherman and Peabody, the whole notion
>is to teach history to the viewers, schoolhouse rock style. Sort of.
>
I never really liked Time Squad. The concept was OK, and the initial
teaser:
"Hello, I'm Eli Whitney, and I'd like to introduce my
latest invention --- the flesh eating robot!"
was great, but the series never lived up to it.
Ted
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..
Michael Grosberg
Orson Scott Card, _PastWatch_. Mind you, it's not a good book by any
stretch of the imagination, bit it does contain a similar scenario.
The protagonists, using a time-watching machine, find evidence that
history (specifically, the career of Christopher Columbus) was changed
by someone from an alternate timeline in which history went badly.
Having found that out, and knowing that the fix didn't really do a
whole lot of good in the long run, they then figure out how to make
history even better and proceed to do just that, nullifying the
existence of their own timeline in the process.
Jerry Brown
In RAH's The Door into Summer, the protagonist finds evidence that he
did travel into his past, so then has to locate the means to do so.
Jerry Brown
--
A cat may look at a king
(but probably won't bother)
Dorothy J Heydt
Yes, except I *think* he'd already discovered the (putative)
means, and the evidence he found motivated him to make the
attempt.
Steven L.
Yes, as others have already posted.
I think it's safe to say that time travel, with all its permutations and
implications, has been done to death already.
Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
--
Steven L.
Email: sdli...@earthlinkNOSPAM.net
Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.
Joseph Nebus
>I think it's safe to say that time travel, with all its permutations and
>implications, has been done to death already.
>Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
Or at least it will have been done by now, once the Large Hadron
Collider gets powered up next year.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Butch Malahide
> I think it's safe to say that time travel, with all its permutations and
> implications, has been done to death already.
>
> Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
Pseudo-YASID: Time explorers verify literal interpretation of the
Bible? Time travelers in the Garden of Eden, trying to interfere with
Adam's Fall? Maybe Heinlein did it. Maybe it's in _The Number of the
Beast_, which I tried to read once but didn't get very far.
David Johnston
<jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>On Oct 25, 8:40�pm, thro...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) wrote:
>
>> Oh, doy, there's also Time Squad, late of Cartoon Network, where
>> the protagonists live in a massive space station in the far future,
>> monitoring history for things going wrong, whereupon they go back and
>> put them right again.
>
>For a cartoon show, criticizing the accuracy of the "science" may not
>be reasonable,
Particularly that one where the things going wrong included the guy
who invented the cotton gin instead inventing a species of flesh
eating robots.
but a lot of SF stories get this wrong too.
>
>Shouldn't the headquarters of people whose goal is to change history
>to set the future to a certain value, against interference, have their
>headquarters in the *ancient past*, so that they're not going
>disappear the first time anything changes?
Assuming it works that way.
David Johnston
<fred....@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Oct 26, 9:59�am, "Steven L." <sdlit...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> I think it's safe to say that time travel, with all its permutations and
>> implications, has been done to death already.
>>
>> Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
>
>Pseudo-YASID: Time explorers verify literal interpretation of the
>Bible? Time travelers in the Garden of Eden, trying to interfere with
>Adam's Fall?
As I recall one of them ended with the time traveller in question
being forced to take on the role of the serpent and get the serpent's
curse
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<fred....@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think Heinlein ever did it, but I've read a story where a time
traveler does prevent the Fall. Might've been by Mike Resnick, but
I'm not sure, and I'm totally blanking on the title.
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html
Butch Malahide
> implications, has been done to death already.
>
> Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
There are a bunch of stories about time machines which can only go
forward in time. Has anyone written about a time machine that only
goes backward?
cryptoguy
Michael Moorcock: Behold the Man. (but the protag didn't get the idea
until he was already there).
pt
Joseph Nebus
>: Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca>
>: Shouldn't the headquarters of people whose goal is to change history
>: to set the future to a certain value, against interference, have their
>: headquarters in the *ancient past*, so that they're not going
>: disappear the first time anything changes?
>Why would displacing it into the past help? Their causal antecedents
>would still be vulnerable. It's also not clear but what the "space
>station" in Time Squad wasn't in some extratemporal void (sort of like
>Asimov's Eternity, only different). For that matter, it isn't clear
>that it in the far the past... but of course, you have to have some
>way to monitor what the future is doing.
More important, would you want to reassure Buck and Larry that
even if they blow off their jobs, it's not going to result in wiping
themselves out of existence? Metatemporal shielding would drain away
the slender molecules of motivation these guys *have*.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VSim
Come think of it, the greek victory at Salamis was pretty improbable.
As was the beating the Armada took from the british in 1588. One of us
should probably go back there and fix these things.
VSim
I strongly doubt that.
Mike Schilling
> Steven L. wrote:
>> Ilya2 wrote:
>>> A SF trope done to death is time traveler does something in the
>>> past, then either finds out upon his return that his own time has
>>> been altered (usually for the worse), or simply disappears. In
>>> "Lady Slings The Booze", Spider Robinson turns this trope on its
>>> head: Lady in question travels into past (into 1986, IIRC) in order
>>> to *fix* history -- to prevent US/USSR nuclear war and thus to make
>>> her own time and her own existence possible.
>>>
>>> Has anyone else done this plot: somebody with time travel capability
>>> examines history and comes to conclusion that a certain event was so
>>> improbable, it could only occur with outside interference, and
>>> therefore it is THEIR responsibility to travel into past and to make
>>> the event happen?
>>
>> Yes, as others have already posted.
>>
>> I think it's safe to say that time travel, with all its permutations
>> and implications, has been done to death already.
>>
>> Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
> I strongly doubt that.
There is one unused possibility. Hold on a sec.....
Now it has. (Originally published in 1958.)
Lawrence Watt-Evans
By the amazing Todd Thromberry, of course.
William December Starr
thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) said:
> Hm. Or, say, Singularity Sky, and the Big E therein. If you try
> to do something that *doesn't* lead to the Big E (or even alters
> the Big E's historical record, improbable as it is), you get
> stomped on.
Or not. Frankly, the whole "Or else" threat looks to be possibly
empty. Consider the contrast between the event, one of, singular,
in which the Eschaton actually did something godlike, and all that's
followed in which all it's done is run a small network of secret
agents around to commit human-level acts of surveillance and sabotage.
It may say or imply, to its agents, that it has to tread very
lightly within its own lightcone, but an equally reasonable
explanation is that it _can't_ do any more than that. (And of
course maybe the thing they're working for isn't even really the E
at all.)
-- wds
VSim
> Has anyone else done this plot: somebody with time travel capability
> examines history and comes to conclusion that a certain event was so
> improbable, it could only occur with outside interference, and
> therefore it is THEIR responsibility to travel into past and to make
> the event happen?
Anyway, why would he want to do this, since things are already OK the
way they are ? What is he afraid would happen if he doesn't go there
and make things happen ?
William December Starr
Butch Malahide <fred....@gmail.com> said:
> There are a bunch of stories about time machines which can only go
> forward in time. Has anyone written about a time machine that only
> goes backward?
The "cannonball" method of time travel is not uncommon, where the
traveler is like a cannonball fired form a cannon -- he travels but
the machine that propels him stays where (when) it is. If you used
one of those to go into the past, and it wasn't one of the cool
models that has the capability to recall you, you'd be stuck there
unless you could build a go-into-the-future time machine from
available resources.
Consider the whole "Terminator" mythos, for example, or more
obscurely, Monica Clee's BRANCH POINT. Though that latter one was a
variant in which the four travelers (from 2062 to 1962) had some
ability to make additional jumps further into the past even though
the time machine itself was in 2062 (or wasn't, after they changed
history). I don't recall the details though, mostly because I got
bored after the initial action in which they leapt into the Kennedy
White House and prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from going
critical, and stopped reading the book.
-- wds
William December Starr
VSim <inte...@yahoo.com> said:
It depends on which theory of time and causality the protagonist
believes in:
Theory #1: The important Good Thing in the past has happened, it's
part of history, and that cannot change. Therefore I don't have to
do anything to "make" it happen.
Theory #2: The important Good Thing in the past has happened, it's
part of history, but that's all conditional on somebody (and it
looks like it has to be me) completing the causal loop; if the loop
isn't closed the exact way that it's supposed to be then the Good
Thing will unhappen. Therefore I better get off my butt and do this.
-- wds
VSim
> In article <ef4363cd-9056-4708...@k19g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
> VSim <inte...@yahoo.com> said:
>
> > Ilya2 wrote:
> >
> >> Has anyone else done this plot: somebody with time travel
> >> capability examines history and comes to conclusion that a
> >> certain event was so improbable, it could only occur with outside
> >> interference, and therefore it is THEIR responsibility to travel
> >> into past and to make the event happen?
> >
> > Anyway, why would he want to do this, since things are already OK
> > the way they are ? What is he afraid would happen if he doesn't go
> > there and make things happen ?
>
> It depends on which theory of time and causality the protagonist
> believes in:
>
> Theory #1: The important Good Thing in the past has happened, it's
> part of history, and that cannot change. Therefore I don't have to
> do anything to "make" it happen.
Whether it can change or not is irrelevant. The important thing is, it
won't change as long as nobody goes back to change it.
> Theory #2: The important Good Thing in the past has happened, it's
> part of history, but that's all conditional on somebody (and it
> looks like it has to be me) completing the causal loop; if the loop
> isn't closed the exact way that it's supposed to be then the Good
> Thing will unhappen. Therefore I better get off my butt and do this.
OK. Sound like replacement theory to me. Fairy tales, for me at least.
BTW, what if the hero is wrong, and it actually didn't have to be
him ? What if he goes there and messes things up instead of making
them happen as they already have ? Now that's a little more
interesting a plot (in its naive way). But I suppose it has been done
already.)
William December Starr
> And then, of course, there's the traditional metatime thing, where
> any change made in the past takes a finite amount of metatime to
> propogate to the future, and the old timelinle continues for a
> short period of ... well, time, but realtime that corresponds to
> the metatime. Sort of. Despite it being a horrid model, it's a
> common one. Everything from Back to the Future to Meet the
> Robinsons. Yeesh.
Has there ever been a story in which that propogation rate was one
second per second? I almost recall an Asimov story like that.
-- wds
Marcus L. Rowland
<b46ad59d-865e-4816...@y28g2000prd.googlegroups.com>,
Butch Malahide <fred....@gmail.com> writes
It's not that uncommon, the one that immediately comes to mind is the
one in DeCamp's _A Gun for Dinosaur_ and sequels.
I wrote one into my RPG - no problems going into the past, but you
couldn't come forward to a moment later than the moment you left plus
the subjective time you'd been travelling, e.g. if you spent two
subjective days travelling in time, and eight days in the past, you
couldn't come forward past ten days after you left. One of the quirks
was that you _had_ to come forward those additional ten days, the past
wasn't quite real (or at least didn't appear to be) if you were even a
few seconds behind your present.
Silverberg had one which only sent people back into the really deep
past, used as an alternative to execution. But there was a trick to that
one...
--
Marcus L. Rowland http://www.forgottenfutures.com/
http://www.forgottenfutures.org/
LJ:ffutures http://www.forgottenfutures.co.uk/
Forgotten Futures - The Scientific Romance Role Playing Game
Diana: Warrior Princess & Elvis: The Legendary Tours
The Original Flatland Role Playing Game
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> In message
> <b46ad59d-865e-4816...@y28g2000prd.googlegroups.com>,
> Butch Malahide <fred....@gmail.com> writes
>> On Oct 26, 9:59 am, "Steven L." <sdlit...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> I think it's safe to say that time travel, with all its permutations and
>>> implications, has been done to death already.
>>>
>>> Probably every type of plot has been done by now.
>>
>> There are a bunch of stories about time machines which can only go
>> forward in time. Has anyone written about a time machine that only
>> goes backward?
>
> It's not that uncommon, the one that immediately comes to mind is the
> one in DeCamp's _A Gun for Dinosaur_ and sequels.
>
> I wrote one into my RPG - no problems going into the past, but you
> couldn't come forward to a moment later than the moment you left plus
> the subjective time you'd been travelling, e.g. if you spent two
> subjective days travelling in time, and eight days in the past, you
> couldn't come forward past ten days after you left. One of the quirks
> was that you _had_ to come forward those additional ten days, the past
> wasn't quite real (or at least didn't appear to be) if you were even a
> few seconds behind your present.
>
A variation is that you can go back in time and change things, but if
you try to return to your home time you will go back on YOUR timeline;
i.e., you can change things for the better in the past and there will be
a new future for those people, but YOU are stuck with the old future
because that's the probability line you came from. The only way for you
to escape that is to travel into the future like everyone else: one
second per second.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
David DeLaney
>I wrote one into my RPG - no problems going into the past, but you
>couldn't come forward to a moment later than the moment you left plus
>the subjective time you'd been travelling, e.g. if you spent two
>subjective days travelling in time, and eight days in the past, you
>couldn't come forward past ten days after you left. One of the quirks
>was that you _had_ to come forward those additional ten days, the past
>wasn't quite real (or at least didn't appear to be) if you were even a
>few seconds behind your present.
... based on Watson's (?) Croyd novels?
Dave "and then there's the Veils of Azlaroc" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
Marcus L. Rowland
<d...@gatekeeper.vic.com> writes
>Marcus L. Rowland <forgotte...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>I wrote one into my RPG - no problems going into the past, but you
>>couldn't come forward to a moment later than the moment you left plus
>>the subjective time you'd been travelling, e.g. if you spent two
>>subjective days travelling in time, and eight days in the past, you
>>couldn't come forward past ten days after you left. One of the quirks
>>was that you _had_ to come forward those additional ten days, the past
>>wasn't quite real (or at least didn't appear to be) if you were even a
>>few seconds behind your present.
>
>... based on Watson's (?) Croyd novels?
>
large steam ship - you needed something mobile with a conductive
exterior weighing a minimum of a couple of thousand tons or it wouldn't
work. I had a lot of fun with that one, it _seriously_ buggers up a lot
of the "get rich quick" time machine tricks.
>Dave "and then there's the Veils of Azlaroc" DeLaney
Doubt it, I'm not sure I ever read that one either. Saberhagen?
William December Starr
"Marcus L. Rowland" <forgotte...@ntlworld.com> said:
> David DeLaney <d...@gatekeeper.vic.com> writes
>
>> Dave "and then there's the Veils of Azlaroc" DeLaney
>
> Doubt it, I'm not sure I ever read that one either. Saberhagen?
Yes. I'm not sure why Dave mentioned it as it doesn't really involve
time travel. Basically, on a lightly colonized planet under a weird
sun, once a year the star would emit a 'veil' that would settle on
the planet and trap everything under it in a temporal field that
mostly isolated it from the rest of the universe. ("Mostly" because
it was light-permeable, though not 100% transparent, but matter
couldn't pass through it.) If you were on the planet when a veil
fell, screwed you were; you were stuck there, able to interact only
with everybody else that was trapped in the same layer as you were.
I think there was a plot too, but I have no memory of it.
-- wds
Rebecca Rice
Iirc, the "plot" was that there was a couple who were
visiting Azlaroc, and were doing time-diving as a scientific
experiment, and they got separated (one of them may have
seen a companion from a previous trip that got caught by
veil-fall) and the tension of whether they both get back to
the ship before this year's veil-fall, or will they be
separated forever? But yeah, it was mostly a travelogue.
And the interesting thing to me was the idea that the
buildings, etc., could still be built on after the
veil-fall. So you could add a room to house in Year 2, that
year 1 people can't get to because it doesn't exist in their
year, but the Year 3 people can walk into the room which
is coexistent with the room that the Year 2 people can get
to. I just can't wrap my mind around how that works. It
seems logical to me that the veil should somehow keep you
from adding to a building that is covered with it.
Rebecca
Wayne Throop
: Iirc, the "plot" was that there was a couple who were
: experiment, and they got separated (one of them may have
: seen a companion from a previous trip that got caught by
: veil-fall) and the tension of whether they both get back to
: the ship before this year's veil-fall, or will they be
: separated forever? But yeah, it was mostly a travelogue.
Yep. There was also a subplot about somebody who had a scheme
for getting out from under the veils, to escape, iirc something
like sneaking around them in the/a 4th dimension or sommat,
but it backfires and he's trapped under more veils than ever,
so many that he's barely detectable anymore; I'm thinking
hundreds of thousands of yearly veils, or maybe it was millions.
: And the interesting thing to me was the idea that the buildings, etc.,
: could still be built on after the veil-fall. So you could add a room
: to house in Year 2, that year 1 people can't get to because it doesn't
: exist in their year, but the Year 3 people can walk into the room
: which is coexistent with the room that the Year 2 people can get to.
: I just can't wrap my mind around how that works.
Yeah, I'm not sure it was fully consistent. But it was a bit more
complicated than "light but not matter can pass through a veil" per
upthread. That's maybe a good summary, but matter "in" adjacent veils
can interact somewhat (so isn't totally intangible), an light is blurred
somewhat (so things aren't totally visible), getting blurrier and more
intangible the more veils between. To see or interact through tens or
hundreds of veils, you need specialized equipment, called iirc "diving
gear", and reaching the guy mentioned above, essentially impossible
(at least, without trying the same sort of dangerous methods that
landed him in his predicament in the first place). However, even a
single veil prevents you fron leaving, despite being tantalizingly
able to interact almost normally with next year's visitors.
So... it wasn't like a thin, impenetrable layer of saran wrap that you're
trapped under. It was more that each atom of you got a metaphorical
teflon coating, making it difficult to interact with anyhing other than
atoms with the sane amount of teflon. Including interacting by bouncing
photons off. And incidentally making the potential energy "depth"
compated to the rest of the universe infinite. Sort of.
Anyhoo, an interesting setting if you like that sort of thing.
It's ridiculous that we still have a hole in the ozone layer.
We have men, we have rockets, we have Saran Wrap ... FIX IT!!
And don't come back until you do.
--- Lewis Black
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Gene Wirchenko
<jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>On Oct 25, 8:40�pm, thro...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) wrote:
>
>> Oh, doy, there's also Time Squad, late of Cartoon Network, where
>> the protagonists live in a massive space station in the far future,
>> monitoring history for things going wrong, whereupon they go back and
>> put them right again.
>
>For a cartoon show, criticizing the accuracy of the "science" may not
>be reasonable, but a lot of SF stories get this wrong too.
>
>Shouldn't the headquarters of people whose goal is to change history
>to set the future to a certain value, against interference, have their
>headquarters in the *ancient past*, so that they're not going
>disappear the first time anything changes?
I have wondered about that myself. Mind you, maybe it did fail.
"That might account for Atlantis", he said, his voice dopplering as he
GDRVVFed away.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Dorothy J Heydt
Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>On Oct 25, 8:40�pm, thro...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) wrote:
>
>> Oh, doy, there's also Time Squad, late of Cartoon Network, where
>> the protagonists live in a massive space station in the far future,
>> monitoring history for things going wrong, whereupon they go back and
>> put them right again.
>
>For a cartoon show, criticizing the accuracy of the "science" may not
>be reasonable, but a lot of SF stories get this wrong too.
>
>Shouldn't the headquarters of people whose goal is to change history
>to set the future to a certain value, against interference, have their
>headquarters in the *ancient past*, so that they're not going
>disappear the first time anything changes?
In Fritz Leiber's Time Wars stories (_The Big Time_, "No Great
Magic", "Try and Change the Past") their headquarters is God
knows where, but they have many substations and staging areas and
R&R places outside normal time altogether, from which with the
right machinery they can go to any part of space/time they want.
--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at hotmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the hotmail edress.
Kithrup is getting too damn much spam, even with the sysop's filters.
Gene Wirchenko
wrote:
SPOILER ALERT!
Brunner's "Times Without Number" has our timeline coming into
existence because of the Spanish Armada being defeated.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Greg Goss
>>As was the beating the Armada took from the british in 1588. One of us
>>should probably go back there and fix these things.
I remember hearing a radio interview with someone twenty years or so
ago. He was trying to get funding to raise and study a couple of the
Spanish ships to verify a theory. According to his theory, most of
the Armada had been recently upgraded with much higher power cannons.
When used in battle with full-power broadsides against the enemy, the
shock forces from these larger cannons were larger than the ships
could bear and (he theorized) the ships shook their seams open in the
battle. The unlikely victory could make sense if the Spanish ships
started sinking without even being hit.
>
>SPOILER ALERT!
RASFW cite removed.
--
apart from one noisy guy up in Canada, no-one wants
a three-cylinder tissue box on bicycle tires.
Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy
--
Terry Austin
Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole. - David
Bilek
Yeah, I had Terry confused with Hannibal Lecter. - Mike Schilling
Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.
Greg Goss
[nothing]
Naughty-naughty little boy. Keep the mutual admiration stuff to the
"trolling" thread I built for it. You know better than that.