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<\/p>\nThis is a fairly long blog post. In my usual fashion, I\u2019ll break up the text blocks with photos. Some of today’s images are from a recent trip to Italy. They have (at least superficially) no connection with the text. But never forget the Surrealist principle that everything illuminates everything!<\/p>\n
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\u201cNine Dragons\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, October, 2019, 40\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n I recently read Annalee Newitz\u2019s second novel, The Future of Another Timeline<\/a><\/em>. It’s great. I was beguiled by the prose, fond of the characters, absorbed by the action, and intrigued by Newitz\u2019s notions about time editing.<\/p>\n Men get harsh treatment in this book\u2019s pages. Monstrous male villains from the future are trying to enslave women throughout all of history. The loss of voting rights and the denial of abortion rights aren\u2019t enough for these goons. They\u2019d like to see women who lack hands and who maybe don\u2019t even have heads. Newitz\u2019s heroines have max impact against these GOPpy creeps.<\/p>\n Meanwhile (if that word makes sense in a time travel novel) the younger versions of our characters are hanging out in the 1990s. I like their conversations. \u201cWe talked for a while about the stupidity of Disney World, and how it was like wanting to take a vacation inside a plastic replica of a vacation.\u201d\u009d [Sorry, Cory!] And there\u2019s a nice evocation of them at a rock concert, as seen by one of their future selves:<\/p>\n What really jolted me was the way people occupied themselves as they waited for the music to start. Nobody was texting or taking selfies. And without phones, people didn\u2019t know what to do with their eyes. I didn\u2019t either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As well as going to rock shows, the younger characters are butchering sex-offenders in scenes of full-on horror gore. Not for the squeamish, but sick-funny in a Grand Guignol way. And, hey, they\u2019re only killing men<\/em>, so really it\u2019s okay. No worse than squashing bugs.<\/p>\n To remove any lingering moral ambiguity, one of the women gives up serial killing\u2014after a talking-to from her time-travelling future self. Newitz springs a fresh take on this normally mandatory time-travel-novel clich\u00c3\u00a9.<\/p>\n I was wondering whether I\u2019d ever see [my future self] Tess again. Would I grow up into her, and have to come back in time to visit myself? From what I\u2019d learned in our unit on time travel, that was fake movie pseudoscience. It was more like her visit had reshuffled the timeline, generating a new history and future in its wake. Only Tess would remember the timeline that existed before her edit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regarding being a killer or not, at the very end of the novel this character realizes she was meant to be one all along.<\/p>\n Maybe that was why I belonged in the first century B.C.E. In Nabataean, there was a word for what I did best. There was actually a job that combined my skills as an academic and a murderer. The savage settling of scores is refreshing in these fraught times, and the book is a punk feminist anthem. We\u2019ve seen enough bromantic sword-fighting, macho, jaw-jutting oink-fests, for sure. And the time travel scenes are enchanting.<\/p>\n Rain swarmed around us, full of fat hot drops and freezing bullets of hail, and we held each other in the void that meant history was still mutable. I concentrated on my friends, and how their breathing felt next to mine. We seemed to spin slowly, like a drifting asteroid or a diatom in the ocean\u2019s water column.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The novel also features a thread of warm historical-fiction interplay involving women\u2019s suffrage, family planning, belly dancing, and goddess worshipping. Things can be quite cozy when men aren\u2019t around. And Newitz is wonderful at sketching scenes. Here\u2019s old Chicago.<\/p>\n Wednesday night was humid. Sunset spread like a rash over the water, and the reek of rotting pig guts in the river mingled with smoke from roasting nuts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read The Future of Another Timeline<\/em>! It\u2019s cosmic, nasty, thoughtful fun.<\/p>\n My main goal today is to ponder the SF machinery in Newitz\u2019s epic. The novel is about editing our timeline. That\u2019s a geeky, techie concept I can wrap my monkey mind around. I realize that others have analyzed time travel, but rather than summarizing past efforts, I\u2019ll wing this essay on my own.<\/p>\n This said, I’ll mention that a good recent survey is Damien Broderic, The Time Machine Hypothesis<\/em><\/a>. And the Encyclopedia of Science Ficion<\/a><\/em>, has many, many links.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve thought about time travel a lot over the years. And this month a time travel story by Marc Laidlaw and me is appearing in Asimov\u2019s<\/em>: \u201cSurfers at the End of Time.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n The idea behind timeline-editing is to change your past so your present is more like you want it to be. That is, people hop to past times, do things there, and hop back to the era where they started. When competing groups are editing the timeline you get what’s known as a “change war” or a “time war<\/a>.” The Future of Another Timeline<\/em> is about an ongoing time war.<\/p>\n But let’s back up for a second. As is known to all SF readers, timeline editing leads to odd situations. Suppose I\u2019m sick of the corrupt and evil Premier Treadle. I hop back seventy years and drown him as a lad. Then I hop back to our present day. No more Treadle. Hooray!<\/p>\n But wait. Assuming my memories remain intact, I\u2019ll notice that the present which I return to is not the same as the present I started from. It used to have Treadle, and now it doesn\u2019t. How can one and the same present have two different forms?<\/p>\n The paradox gets particularly intense if you go back in time and depressively kill your own self as a child. If you then hop back your starting time, you\u2019re in a world where you yourself have been dead for decades. So how can you even exist?<\/p>\n A separate issue is the fact that when we\u2019re doing timeline-editing, or doing any kind of time travel at all, we get into different dimensions or levels or directions of time. That is, if I talk about the former, unedited version of my present as being in my personal \u201cpast,\u201d\u009d that means that my life\u2019s individual timeline is distinct from the world\u2019s overall timeline.<\/p>\n Getting all lit-crit on your ass, the actions of time travelers are narrated as a (harrumph) diegesis<\/a>, that as in a POV stream of experience that includes its own arrow of time. The individual\u2019s diegetic time can be distinct from the world\u2019s time. This is a large and stinky elephant in the living room, and it\u2019s not often discussed.<\/p>\n So I\u2019ll get back to elephant in a minute, but let\u2019s say a bit more about the paradox issue first.<\/p>\n One option is just to insist that the paradoxes don\u2019t happen. You go back in time planning to kill young Treadle but, for whatever reason, you somehow don\u2019t manage to. Or you go back and kill your earlier self, and maybe it seems like you\u2019re successful, but guess what, your earlier self does not in fact really die, they have a miraculous recovery, accompanied by complete amnesia about nearly being killed, so there\u2019s not paradox.<\/p>\n This move appears in a number of Golden Age time-travel stories.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s the route that Marc Laidlaw and I recently took in our story \u201cSurfers at the End of Time\u201d\u009d, as I describe it in my on it post<\/a> on it. I once had a chance to discuss time travel with the god-like logician Kurt G\u00f6del, and he said, \u201cWhy not suppose that the world always arranges itself so that these paradoxes do not occur. If something is logically impossible, then it doesn\u2019t happen. A priori <\/em>logic is very powerful.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n The standard boilerplate time-travel-novel move is to say that, when you hop back in time, you don\u2019t enter the the past of your own original timeline, which we\u2019ll call timeline A. You go to the past of a parallel timeline B. And the changes you make in the past of B will be in effect in the present-day era of B, but not in the present-day era of A. You will have made timeline B into a better world than timeline B by deleting the foul Treadle. Or maybe you\u2019ve made B into a sadder, duller timeline be deleting your fabulous and scintillating self.<\/p>\n Fine.<\/p>\n A variation on the theme of parallel timelines is to talk about branching <\/em>timelines. Recently Bill Gibson integrated this move very smoothly into his wonderful novel The Peripheral, which I discussed <\/a>on my blog. If you go to this page, also check out San Jose physicist Ken Wharton’s incisive comment at the end of the post.<\/p>\n The branching timeline idea is that I hop to the past of my timeline A and make a change (or, in Gibson\u2019s case, make a change by opening a transtemporal communication channel to the past). And then (in which timestream is the diegetic \u201cthen\u201d\u009d situated? <\/em>) timeline A splits off a branch or pokes out a stub that we can call timeline B. Your intervention occurs in the forked-off timeline B, but not in timeline A.<\/p>\n In either case, a new question arises.<\/p>\n When you hop forward from the past of B to the present day, what happens? Do you end up in crappy old A or in the nice new B? If you return to the present of timeline A, then you\u2019re back in a world still addled with the vile Treadle, so your excursion has accomplished nothing in terms of improving your own life. And nobody in A will even have noticed that you were gone. You maybe disappeared for maybe a split second while you were doing your time excursion. Unsatisfying. What do you really care if some invisible timeline (or timeline-branch) B is okay, if your still in crappy timeline A?<\/p>\n It\u2019s more customary to suppose that you hop from the past of B to the present of B. This feels right if you suppose that your intervention in fact produced the branch timeline B. If you hatched B, then maybe you ought to be staying in it.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if we\u2019re using the Peripheral <\/em>set-up, in which you don\u2019t physically travel to the past, but you only send some signals to the past, then you yourself never really leave timeline A, so you will still be in timeline A, and the changes will be off in timeline B, which you can\u2019t see.<\/p>\n [I can\u2019t resist a joke here. Gibson says the trans-temporal communication links are made via a certain \u201cserver\u201d\u009d\u2014but nobody knows where it is. Might it be in…the Ukraine? Might this server have been operative in the emergence of that hideous election-gone-wrong stub that we\u2019ve been suffering in since November, 2016?]<\/em><\/p>\n There are a few issues with hopping from the present of timeline A to the past of timeline B.<\/p>\n First of all, when you hop from the present of timeline A to the past of B, and then stay in in B, you disappear permanently from the present of A, never to be seen again in timeline A.<\/p>\nLike a Book Review<\/h3>\n
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\n\u201cI think I\u2019d like to be an assassin.\u201d\u009d
\nHugayr smiled. \u201cGreat! We\u2019ve really been needing one.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\nTimeline Edits<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\nOption 1: Paradoxes Don\u2019t Happen<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nOption 2: Multiple Timelines<\/h3>\n
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