Changing the Past

I've recently finished the latest book by S. M. Stirling (best known for alternate history SF), a time-travel adventure, TO TURN THE TIDE, first volume in a new series. Partially inspired by L. Sprague DeCamp’s vintage novel LEST DARKNESS FALL (but Stirling's book is better), TO TURN THE TIDE transports a Harvard professor of history and four graduate students to central Europe in 165 A.D., era of the Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius. They know they've made a one-way trip, since the time machine is stationary instead of a vehicle like the one in H. G. Wells's classic, so they decide to use the literal ton of supplies sent with them as planned by the inventor of the machine (who accidentally fails to come along as he'd meant to). They set out to change history for the better, beginning with simple improvements, e.g, sterile medical procedures and wheelebarrows, and building on their early successes. In this first installment of the series, their innovations consist of “Type A” changes, things the inhabitants of that era and locale can implement with available tools and materials once they’re given the concepts. “Type B” developments, those that require inventing the tools to make the tools to construct the new things, will come later.

In fiction, altering the past in an attempt to improve the future produces a wide range of effects. At one extreme, we have Ray Bradbury's story of a tiny, accidental change with disastrous results, when a visitor to the age of dinosaurs crushes a butterfly, thereby generating a future worse than the one he originally came from (yet unrealistically similar, but, then, it's a short story with no real pretense of scientific rigor). At the other extreme, some of Heinlein's fiction, notably THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, postulates that any alteration you make in the past isn't a real change at all. You're just doing whatever you did in the first place but weren't aware of in hindsight until after you went back and did it. (Is your head spinning yet?) Likewise, in one of the Harry Potter books, the actions of Harry and Hermione when using the time turner simply cause things to happen just as they had all along, previously unknown to the characters. In Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series, Claire (the traveler from the 20th century to the mid-18th) and Jamie strive to prevent the 1745 Jacobite rising and Bonnie Prince Charlie's invasion of Scotland. Although not completely powerless, they find their major goals unattainable. After the war unfolds on schedule, culminating in the catastrophic battle of Culloden despite their strenuous efforts to influence the course of events, they realize they can make only minor changes. It's as if the flow of time resists any significant alterations.

Time travel seems to work similarly in Connie Willis's series about mid-21st-century historians from Oxford. The transporting device can't send them anywhere close to a major historical event. If they deliberately or inadvertently aim for a critical nexus point, the traveler is simply bounced to a different nearby location. Thus the timeline corrects itself, smoothing out any ripples the characters create. Or so they believe -- this postulate is tested in the two-volume World War II epic BLACKOUT / ALL CLEAR, in which the historians fear they may have triggered disastrous changes in the original history.

The major theoretical issue with trying to improve the future -- one's own present -- by altering the past is what happens if you succeed. You would have had no reason to go into the past in the first place, and therefore you couldn't have peformed the actions that result / resulted / will or would result in achieving your goal. Many time-travel authors simply ignore this paradox. Some stories work on the premise that the travelers exist in a sort of bubble, in which only they remember both the original timeline and the new one, while everybody else is oblivious that anything has changed. The most logical solution is the outcome Stirling implies: The paradox makes it impossible to reshape one's own original history. Instead, the chrononaut's actions generate a new timeline branching off from the point of intervention. The protagonist of TO TURN THE TIDE can never find out whether that's what happens in the history he and his friends are creating, but the question is moot anyway. In the future they left, every person and thing they knew and loved has almost certainly been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Their hope is to spawn a new future without that apocalyptic destruction, even though they'll never know whether they've succeeded.

Although the "branching timelines" model makes the most rigorous sense, I do enjoy stories in which the protagonist achieves positive change by tweaking the past and returns home to enjoy the fruits of his or her efforts.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

If We Could Do It Over Again

Recently, I've often pondered the question, "What if you could live your life over?" Many works of science fiction and fantasy explore this provocative idea, such as the 1986 movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED. Peggy Sue, disillusioned with her marriage, gets transported back to her senior year in high school. Her second chance, however, ends with her making the same decision as before, becoming engaged to her future husband just as she did on the first go-round. Would I take such a chance if offered? The prospect of avoiding so many past mistakes is attractive. OTOH, there are many things I would dread living through again, such as the hard work of getting through college and grad school And live one's life from what date? If I had to start over as a child (say, at the age of eight when my father remarried) with full memories of my first life, it would sound more like a nightmare than a gift. The idea of reliving childhood with an adult's mind -- and being treated as a child, with no significant power to affect events -- would be frustrating and depressing, I think. If I had to pick a "reset" point, I would probably choose to start over on the day after our wedding. But how could I convince my husband to make the desired changes? He'd think I was joking or crazy.

Anyway, in practice the memories would get fuzzy and confused after a while, so that one would eventually lose most of the advantage of hindsight/foresight (which would it be?). Maybe writing a detailed letter to oneself at an early age would work better; there's a country song about what advice the narrator would include in a message to himself at seventeen. With everything in writing, one couldn't forget the details with the passage of time. (How granular should one get, anyway? "Don't let that salesman in Albuquerque talk you into buying a sewing machine; it will be a waste of money.") But -- as soon as a few significant alterations were made, the past as I remembered it would go off the rails anyway. A shift in a day or two would mean different children would be conceived, rendering a lot of the memories moot. And changes might end up making things worse instead of better. Science fiction provides an abundance of cautionary tales about time travelers who try to "fix" the past and precipitate disasters instead (e.g., the protagonist of Stephen King's 11/22/63, on a mission to prevent President Kennedy's assassination).

On the whole, it may be better we can't do that. There's a TWILIGHT ZONE episode (based on a short story) about a rich man who wants the fun of returning to the prime of life and building his fortune all over again, so he strikes a deal with a demon. It turns out he doesn't enjoy the early 20th century as much as he thought he would on the basis of his rose-colored memories. Also, he keeps waiting to turn young again, which doesn't happen, so he dies of a heart attack (no modern medicine available). The demon appears to him and points out that he wanted to travel back to the time he remembered -- "Can we help it if your memory is lousy?" -- and he never mentioned having his youth restored. I'd probably tell the demon or genie, "No, thanks," and play the hand I've been dealt.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Is Time Travel Impossible?

A character in C. S. Lewis's posthumously published novel fragment THE DARK TOWER asserts it is. (Granted, one faction within Lewis scholarship maintains THE DARK TOWER wasn't actually written by him, but I don't find that claim convincing. Anyway, the issue doesn't affect the point of the story.) He argues that physical travel to the past or future can't be done for a basic, irrefutable reason: A corporeal trip into a different time necessarily carries all the atoms in one's own body into that other time. But in the past, all those particles existed in other entities in the physical world, whether inanimate objects, living creatures, liquids, gasses, whatever. In the future, those same particles will again be distributed through the environment. The only way you could materialize in a different moment would be if duplicates of each of your atoms, molecules, etc. existed in the same place at the same time. According to the laws of physics as we know them, that's impossible. Therefore, physical time travel is forever, irrevocably ruled out, unless we invoke magic rather than science.

That story is the only place where I've encountered this argument, which strikes me as highly convincing. On this hypothesis, other temporal "locations" could be only viewed, never visited. Accordingly, Lewis's character has invented a device for viewing other times, although it turns out the true situation is more complicated than he believed.

While I've come across other stories of observing rather than traveling to some non-present time, I don't remember any that offer a theoretical grounding for the impossibility of temporal travel in the flesh. It's not unusual in time-travel fiction, however, for a traveler to be unable to exist in the same location more than once in the same moment. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTNING, a traveler can't visit a place/time where he already is/was. He's automatically shunted away from that point. In Connie Willis's series about time-traveling historians from a near-future Oxford University, the same prohibition applies, but it's not clear whether the simultaneous existence of two of the same person is outright impossible or would produce a catastrophic result if it accidentally happened. In such works as the Harry Potter series, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, and Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," on the other hand, any number of you can be in the same point in space/time at once.

To me, the former rule seems more plausible, because it makes the issue of the same material object being in two places at once less obvious, although I've enjoyed lots of fiction in the second category. One possible way to get around the problem raised in Lewis's DARK TOWER: Instead of a corporeal leap into a different time, travelers might project their consciousness and build temporary bodies in the other time by "borrowing" stray particles from the surrounding air, water, and earth. When the traveler released the borrowed matter to return to his or her point of origin, the particles would dissipate harmlessly into the environment. Another method of bypassing the problem shows up in the new QUANTUM LEAP series: The leaper's consciousness occupies the body of a person in the past, presumably suppressing the host's personality in a sort of temporary, benign possession. (The time-shift operated differently in the original series, while this version does leave unanswered the question of where the leaper's body is while his immaterial consciousness travels to multiple past eras.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Time Travel as a Curse

If you've read Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, you know it's a highly unusual approach to time travel. In fact, I haven't come across any other science-fiction or fantasy novel quite like it. Henry, the traveler, bounces through time uncontrollably and at random. Most often, he lands in moments related to his own life, but not always. Visiting points in the past and future in no particular order, he arrives at each destination disoriented, nauseated, and naked, for he doesn't take anything along on the temporal jaunts. Even tooth fillings, since they aren't technically part of his body, don't stay with him. He has multiple encounters with his wife, Clare, in the past (from his viewpoint on his timeline, after they're married) when she's between the ages of six and eighteen. On one visit, he tells her which dates he will appear on, and she writes them down. Later, when the two of them meet earlier in his timeline (for him at that age, the first time), she gives him the written list, which thereby becomes the source of his knowledge of their predicted meetings. So how does this list exist? As Clare says, it's a mysterious "Mobius" loop. Similarly, Henry appears to his younger self when child-Henry makes his first time leap, into a museum. Adult-Henry knows he'll need to teach child-Henry the rules of time travel because he remembers a friendly stranger doing that for him when he experienced his first leap.

HBO is airing a new series based on the book, starting last weekend. Judging from the first episode, it's going to follow the novel closely. The book's chapters have helpful headings that state the year and how old each character is on his or her timeline in that encounter. The TV program, likewise, has captions at the beginning of each scene to indicate the ages of Henry and Clare at that point. Otherwise, viewers could get hopelessly lost.

I've never encountered another story that portrays time travel as a disability rather than a superpower (although TV Tropes mentions a few). Henry has no way of knowing whether he'll bounce back to his point of origin within minutes or remain stranded for days or more. He has to steal to survive. He frequently gets beaten up, in addition to the hazards of bad weather and the risk of landing in the middle of a street or railroad track. Small wonder that, at the age of twenty, the first occasion in his timeline when he meets Clare, he's a bit of a self-centered jerk. It takes her love, reinforced by her knowledge of the man he will become, to transform him. One of the saddest features of the novel consists of the multiple miscarriages Clare suffers because her unborn babies inherit Henry's mutant gene and spontaneously time-leap out of her womb. Another inevitable source of sorrow for Henry is knowing when he'll die and keeping that information a secret from her.

Unlike some fictional chrononauts, Henry has no problem being in the same time slot more than once. He can and often does meet other versions of himself. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTING, the Germans who come forward from World War II into the present can't jump into a moment where they already exist, a restriction that plays a critical part in the novel's climax. Connie Willis's Oxford-based time travelers (in DOOMSDAY BOOK, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, etc.) have the same limitation. Whatever force controls the space-time continuum won't allow them to overlap themselves, just as it prevents them from getting too close to any critical historical events they might alter. For Henry, on the other hand, there's no worry about altering the past. Whatever he does in any moment he travels to is simply what he has already done. As in Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, whose protagonist also has the ability to have two of himself in the same spatio-temporal location, anything you "change" in another time period doesn't really change the outcome but causes it to happen the way it was/is supposed to all along. While THE DOOR INTO SUMMER ends happily, with the narrator using a time machine to bring about the optimal conclusion, Heinlein's "All You Zombies—", in which every major character is the same person, whose life endlessly loops upon itself, concludes with a cry of existential despair.

The more one thinks about it, the more this aspect of Henry's time travel seems like a reason for despair. If his life is locked into a preset pattern dependent on events he has already experienced, whether in the past or in the future, what happens to free will? Yet Niffenegger manages to conclude the story on a note of love and fulfillment rather than futility.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alternate Timelines

One of my favorite authors, S. M. Stirling, recently launched a new alternate-history series with BLACK CHAMBER, published in July of this year. His website has begun displaying sample chapters from the first sequel, due in spring of 2019. Reading them started me thinking about the effects small or large changes might have on the historical timeline. The POD (point of departure) for the Black Chamber universe—the moment when it diverges from our reality—occurs in 1912, when President Taft dies prematurely and Theodore Roosevelt returns to the White House (instead of Woodrow Wilson becoming President). With no constitutional term limits for the presidency at that time, Roosevelt has free rein to shape the nation according to his principles. Not only the circumstances of U.S. involvement in World War I but the direction of the entire twentieth century will change. The main story line of the novel begins in 1916.

If you could go back in time and alter the twentieth century for the better, what single action would you take? Killing Hitler before he can do any damage immediately springs to mind, of course. However, aside from the ethical problem of murdering a person who hasn't yet committed evil deeds, killing Hitler never works. TV Tropes even has a page on this topic, "Hitler's time-travel exemption." One example: In an episode of the later incarnation of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, a time traveler from the future installs herself as a servant in the household of Hitler's parents. She finally manages to kill baby Adolf along with herself. The nursery maid, however, is so terrified of Herr Hitler's probable reaction to the loss of his son that she substitutes a look-alike infant taken from a beggar woman. So history still plays out with an Adolf Hitler, just not the original one. Nonviolent ways of eliminating Hitler might work, such as preventing his parents from meeting, kidnapping the baby and having him adopted by a nice English couple, or giving young Adolf a scholarship to art school. Would forestalling his political career actually prevent the war, though? Some authors speculate that, given the conditions of post-World-War-I Europe, the Nazi Party would come to power anyway with a different, possibly worse tyrant in charge.

Arguably, the most productive single thing you could do to avert the catastrophic events of the twentieth century would be to go to Sarajevo in 1914 and arrange for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car to be re-routed so the assassin would never have a chance to shoot him. But would the erasure of the assassination definitely prevent the Great War? The nations of Europe, with their weapons development and entangled alliances, had been building toward that conflict for decades. It's not unlikely that some other spark would have set off the conflagration anyway. Various speculative fiction authors disagree about the ease of altering the timeline. Do we embrace the "Great Man" theory, where the removal of one person makes all the difference? Or do we lean toward Heinlein's position that "when it's time for railroads, people will railroad"? In Stephen King's novel about a time traveler who tries to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, saving Kennedy creates a major disruption in the flow of history, but not for the better.

Jo Walton's fascinating novel MY REAL CHILDREN takes a unique approach to the theme. The protagonist, as an old woman in a nursing home, remembers two different lives in two worlds (neither of them our own timeline). In one, the more prosperous and peaceful version of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she suffers through an unhappy marriage. In the other timeline, which verges on dystopia, she has a generally happy life. If she has the power to make one of them definitively "real," which should she choose?

In most of Heinlein's time-travel fiction, he reveals that no change actually occurs, because the traveler's actions simply bring about what was destined to happen anyway. The past as we know it already includes whatever input we contribute—as in, for instance, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER. Some other writers postulate that history inevitably tries to repair itself when "damaged." Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series illustrates the elasticity of the timeline. Claire (a visitor to the eighteenth century from the twentieth) and her husband Jamie can make small changes, but all their attempts to prevent or mitigate Bonnie Prince Charlie's disastrous 1745 campaign fail. The ultimate example of this principle may be "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester. The time traveler assassinates a series of successively more important personages without ever managing to make a permanent mark on the past.

The opposite approach postulates that the slightest change will have vast consequences—the "butterfly effect." Appropriately, Ray Bradbury provided the classic example of this theory in "A Sound of Thunder," when a member of a tourist group traveling to the age of the dinosaurs alters his own future by accidentally killing a butterfly. The trouble with this story, alas, is that if a small change that far back could shift the entire direction of history, by the traveler's present day the alterations would have snowballed to such an extent that his native time would become unrecognizable, not just subtly distorted toward a dystopian outcome. On the same principle, consider the many alternate-history stories whose authors introduce famous people from the past in different roles from their real-life ones. Actually, depending on how far back the POD occurs, random alterations in meetings, matings, and conceptions would ensure that most if not all of those people would never be born. But what fun for writers and readers would that be?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Timey-Wimey Tangles

I just finished watching a Netflix series (which I won't name because there are spoilers ahead) at the climax of which the hero learned the only way to avert apocalyptic disaster was for him to go back in time and refrain from a certain action he performed at the beginning of the series. Thereby, everything he'd done since then would never have happened. And of course nobody he'd come to care for over the course of the series would remember meeting him and participating in those adventures, because they never happened. The hero asks to be allowed to remember the now-nonexistent events, a petition the sorcerer performing the spell grants. The mage also grants a similar request from the hero's love interest. In the final scene, shortly after the hero has made the sacrifice of finding himself back at the start and choosing not to do what he did the first time around, the heroine joins him. They ride off into the sunset for a life of adventure together. Though the ending is bittersweet (everybody else has still forgotten the hero and his exploits among them), I liked it very much.

However—because we don't witness the conversation between the heroine and the sorcerer, we don't know whether she simply left her home and neighbors (with no explanation, since their memories have been reset) to meet the hero when she knew he'd show up or whether she, too, was magically sent back to the restart point. If the latter, now she is living in two places at the same time, in her home town and on the road with the hero.

Granted, that's not an uncommon situation in time-travel fiction. In the Harry Potter series, Harry and Hermione see their earlier selves when they revisit past events through the use of a time-turner. In THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, the hero often has duplicate selves in existence at the same moment. Heinlein frequently allows more than one of the same person to exist at the same time, e.g. in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, and the iconic short stories "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies."

In strict science fiction terms, though, that phenomenon amounts to having matter (the atoms and molecules making up the character's body) created out of nothing. If two iterations of one person exist simultaneously, where does the material for the duplicate come from? Dean Koontz's novel LIGHTNING postulates that a traveler can never occupy a point in time where he already exists, a rule that not only respects the laws of physics but creates suspense at the climax, when the time traveler has a very tight window in which to save the heroine without bumping into his former self. (That's a fantastic SF romance, by the way, although it isn't marketed as such.)

In the recent season finale of THE LIBRARIANS, a time reset similar to the conclusion of that Netflix series saves the world from a colorless dystopia in which the Library, and therefore curiosity and imagination, don't exist. Since the dystopic timeline constitutes a self-contained alternate world, when it's wiped out by the reset there's no problem of people duplicating themselves. In the case of such works as THE LIBRARIANS, the Harry Potter novels, and the Netflix series, we can say it works because it's magic. In SF terms, the unfinished story "The Dark Tower," attributed to C. S. Lewis (some scholars have doubts about the authorship), carries the paradox to the logical conclusion by declaring that physical time travel is impossible, because in either the past or the future the atoms making up the traveler's body would be dispersed elsewhere throughout the environment. A character in the story invents a device for remotely viewing a different time period, though. The protagonist of a short story whose title and author I don't remember discovers that, while physical time travel is impossible, he can project his consciousness into the minds of other people in the past. He uses the technique to invade Hitler's mind—and, not surprisingly, incites the global tragedy he's trying to prevent. (TV Tropes calls this phenomenon "Hitler's Time Travel Exemption." Anything a time traveler does to try to thwart him will fail or even produce a worse outcome.)

In my opinion, allowing corporeal time travel makes for more interesting fictional scenarios, even if they have to be justified with, "It's magic."

Margaret L. Carter/p> Carter's Crypt

Mundane Psionics

Many characters in fantasy and science fiction possess psychic superpowers. They can read thoughts, view events at a distance or (maybe by touching an object) in the past, or see the spirits of the dead. In a sense, we don't have to fantasize about having such abilities, because we already do, sort of. Through writing, we can transmit our thoughts directly into the minds of other people we'll never meet face-to-face. While reading, we receive the thoughts of the writers, even if they died centuries ago. Film allows us to travel in time, in that it shows us scenes from the past. We can even see dead people in the prime of life. Through recording technology, we hear their voices.

Psychologist Steven Pinker, in "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" (a chapter in his book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT), speculates on why taboo words—profanity and obscenity—have been forbidden or restricted in most human cultures. Often against our will, "dirty" words force images into our minds that we may not want to entertain. Unlike eyes, ears don't have "earlids" to shut out objectionable sounds spoken by other people. Also, as he points out, "understanding the meaning of a word is automatic"; "once a word is seen or heard we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise but reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning." Language equals thought control. The official Newspeak dialect in Orwell's 1984 strives to make heretical thoughts literally "unthinkable"—at least as far as "thought is dependent on language."

Many fantasy novels postulate that magic depends on a special, often secret language. In one of my favorite series, Diane Duane's Young Wizards stories, learning wizardry consists mainly of mastering the Speech, the universal language of reality understood by all creatures, including those we ordinarily think of as inanimate. A wizard affects the world by using the Speech to persuade an object, creature, or system to change. However, some speech acts in the mundane world also alter reality. Enactive speech not only describes an event but makes it happen, e.g. taking an oath of office or uttering the words, "I now pronounce you husband and wife."

A prayer in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer titled "For Those Who Influence Public Opinion" makes this petition: "Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read, that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous." A heavy responsibility for authors, especially in this divisive, volatile era!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Timeless

As an almost lifelong science fiction reader (mostly "soft" SF, since I'm mainly a fantasy and horror fan), I can't help nitpicking at the new TV series TIMELESS, even though I'm enjoying it. Premise: The antagonist has stolen the prototype time machine (the Mothership) in order to leap around through U.S. history trying to change the past, for reasons that seem justified and vitally important to him. The good guys—a historian (Lucy), a soldier tasked with eliminating the villain by any means available, and the scientist mainly responsible for inventing the time travel device—pursue the thief in the smaller "Lifeboat" and struggle to keep history on track. The writers of the program attempt to take seriously the present-day reverberations of changes in the past, e.g., Lucy returns from the first excursion to discover that her terminally ill mother is fine and was never sick, she had a different father in the new timeline, she's engaged to a man who's a stranger to her, and her sister's existence has been erased. Alterations occur only when it suits the plot, however; the "butterfly effect" of small deviations potentially cascading into huge changes doesn't show up.

Just as series such as GILLIGAN'S ISLAND have the Omnidisciplinary Scientist, an expert in whatever category of science that week's plot requires, TIMELESS has an Omnidisciplinary Historian. Like experts in any other field of study, professors of history specialize. No one historian can know every period in minute detail, not even every period in American history (which seems to be Lucy's specialty). Her familiarity with the events of every date the time machine lands on and the backstory of every historical person they meet strains credibility. It wouldn't take more than an extra minute or two for each episode to show her reading up on whatever span of dates they're about to visit, which would go a long way toward plausible suspension of disbelief. And what's with that huge walk-in closet stocked with any type of clothing the travelers happen to need? When the time machine was built, did the designers PLAN to hop all over the past two or three centuries risking permanent damage to the timeline?

Hardest for me to accept is the scene in last week's episode, when Lucy tries to spook a serial killer in 1893 by revealing knowledge of details of his past that would appear only in an in-depth biography—and the team had no advance reason to suspect they would even meet this guy.

At the beginning of the same episode, Lucy has been kidnapped by the villain and taken to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. One character laments, as they're preparing to pursue the Mothership, "We're short a historian." Have they forgotten the Internet exists? If Lucy were there, she would probably have to look up the World's Fair to gather information or at least refresh her memory; the other characters could brief themselves the same way.

What really bugs me, though, is how the characters behave with such a sense of urgency in every episode. They have some means of tracking the Mothership. They always know where and when the villain has landed. Yet they act as if catching up with him is a life-or-death rush. Uh—they have a TIME MACHINE. They could research the target date and location for months or years, then transport themselves to the precise place and moment to intercept the villain.

Clearly the writers either haven't thought through the implications of time travel or ignore them in the interests of drama. A glaring example of consequences of the fact that a network science fiction series has to appeal to a general audience, not just the SF-fan subset thereof.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Timeless

Have you checked out the new TV series TIMELESS? So far, three episodes have aired. The intended appeal to the audience, I suppose, is that the characters visit a different point in history every week and have breathtaking adventures. The premise: The antagonist, Flynn, has stolen the prototype time machine for the purpose of changing the past—why, we don't know yet. The three heroes—a female history professor (devoted primarily to preserving the timeline as we know it), a soldier (tasked mainly with eliminating Flynn), and the engineer who's the main inventor of the time machine—pursue Flynn in a second time machine that fortunately happens to be available. The jumping to different dates in the past recalls QUANTUM LEAP, which is credited as one of the inspirations for TIMELESS. The heroes' chasing after a villain in a time machine brings to mind the movie TIME AFTER TIME, in which H. G. Wells travels to our present to catch Jack the Ripper.

What I like about the series so far is that it makes some serious attempt to deal with the risks of changing history. In QUANTUM LEAP, Sam usually had to "set right what once went wrong" in the lives of individuals, not on a broader historical level. One exception was his interference in Kennedy's assassination. From the audience's viewpoint, Sam failed; JFK still died. In the universe of the TV program, however, Sam at least succeeded in saving Jackie Kennedy, slain in their original timeline. In TIMELESS, the first three episodes take the heroes to the Hindenburg disaster, the assassination of Lincoln, and a day in 1962 in Las Vegas, where Flynn plots to steal the core of a nuclear weapon from the nearby atomic testing facility. Because one of the Hindenburg passengers who should have died survives, the history professor's ancestry changes; she returns to the present to find her dying mother in perfect health—but her sister erased from existence. In the nineteenth century, she fights the temptation to try preventing Lincoln's death. History does change, though, in that John Wilkes Booth doesn't kill the President; Flynn does. You'd think the murder of Lincoln by an unidentified assassin with an unknown model of gun would leave a conspicuous trace on the timeline, but no change in the status of the twenty-first century is mentioned when the heroes return to the present. So the show's attention to problems of altering history is selective—not surprisingly, since their main objective is suspenseful entertainment, not cerebral SF. Still, it will be interesting to see how they grapple with such problems in the future. The history professor wants to protect the timeline. The soldier wants only to eliminate the threat of Flynn by any means necessary. As for the African American inventor/pilot of the time machine, if left to his own devices he would try to change history for the better in some cases (he was in favor of saving Lincoln).

It appears that each episode will pose its own challenge for the heroes—thwarting whatever Flynn's goal for that particular visit to the past—and meanwhile contribute to the solution of the long-term story arc problem: Why is Flynn trying to change the timeline? So far, we've had only cryptic hints. What disaster could he be trying to prevent that would justify wreaking havoc on history as we know it?

The history professor plays the role held by the generic "scientist" in many TV programs and movies. Any scientist (e.g. the Professor on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, the type TVTropes.org calls the Omnidisciplinary Scientist) is assumed for story purposes to have expertise in any field the plot requires, regardless of his nominal specialty. I'm not sure whether TIMELESS has mentioned what historical era the professor in this series specializes in, but she seems to know everything about every date they've landed in so far. And it's not as if the time travelers get long periods of respite between trips to do research. She even knows the name of one of Kennedy's mistresses who acted as a liaison between JFK and the Mafia in 1962. The audience just has to suspend disbelief in the breadth of the character's knowledge and go along for the ride (so to speak).

For a thrilling, ingenious story of an attempt to "fix" the past that makes things much worse, read Stephen King's 11-22-63, his novel about a time traveler trying to stop Kennedy's assassination. This book's theory of time travel has a twist I've never seen anywhere else: Every trip back through the portal (no matter who does it) resets the past to the default timeline. Pro, you can keep trying until you get it right; con, you have to start from scratch with every foray.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Back to the Future

I'm back. The past month has been hard. I've been out promoting my historical release, Rising Wind, trying to finish up Twist and spent a lot of time sitting in the hospital with my dad who got suddenly sick. He's fine now. But my time, so precious, suddenly got away from me.

Time is like money. You spend what you got. My former boss used to compare life to a ride. Everyday you get on the ride. Every day you pull a ticket out of your pocket. One day you reach in your pocket and there's no ticket. No more ride. You're out of time.

So I'm having all these time dilemnas while writing Twist,a time travel story. Yep, ran out of time. My deadline is today and I still have another 10,000 words or so to write. Luckily my editor gave me a bit more time to finish it. Time which is cutting into my next deadline.

I often wish I could stop time when I'm writing. Just long enough for me to get the book done so I could do some other things. Like unpack all the boxes piled up in my office from the move last summer. To finish all my crafty projects like quilting and scrapbooking. To go on trips.

If only I had more time...