I like the idea that we're all the same entity, experiencing itself backwards and forwards through time, eternally forgetting and re-remembering who we really are.
That's a fun one.
Maybe next time I'll be the individual reading this comment.
I always loved Ram Dass’ occasional light-hearted remarks about this concept. Sometimes he would address his audience and say something like “I mean come on, there’s only three of us after all…”
In my view, there is no 'going back' with time travel. Rather, you appear in realty A+B where A is a similar state of the world at that moment in time that now has B applied to it by having present self placed in it. This solves all paradoxes with time travel as you never change the past, but rather, you are creating/finding forks of reality that appear backwards/forwards in time. Each time you 'travel in time', you are mearly moving between possible states of the universe. In this lens, nothing you do in 'the past' when affect you in the present because you're never actually in the past, but rather a fork of that time/space with you in it. That's just how I've always imagined it.
> This solves all paradoxes with time travel as you never change the past, but rather, you are creating/finding forks of reality that appear backwards/forwards in time.
You would be breaking conservation of mass/energy, though. Either you restate 'conservation' such that it applies across all universes instead of just within one (and you are moving energy/mass , in which case the number of timelines has to be fixed (which leaves open the possibility of paradoxes), or you're still violating conservation by creating entire universes every time you fork the timeline.
There are ways to get it all to work out, but they are all pretty weird and unintuitive. The first is that paradoxes are simply not permitted (or more accurately, can't be observed) and that the universe hides attempts to create them the same way it hides information that would violate the uncertainty principle.
The other main way you can resolve it is by asserting that while there are an infinity of parallel universes, and more are being spawned all the time, just as many are merging, keeping the number of universes at the same infinite number. Time travel is then permitted to spawn a new universe as long as the books remain balanced. Of course, the easiest way to balance things is for any changes to not matter enough to prevent timelines from merging again.
This would seem the most logical to me as well - time being viewed not as a line, but a plane (or even a 3d space), where attempts to alter "the past" put you in a distinct branch of the timeline (a different spacetime).
Of course, this isn't as romantic or digestible as time-travel as envisioned in most fiction (BttF).
What about the future affecting the past? Rather than A+B, there is A. In this scenario, you don’t go to the past, you were/are already there. In other words, there never was a past without you in it. You never could go back and kill your mother/father since it would break a causal loop. You may think you have the agency to do so, but try as you might, you won’t/don’t.
What this means is that the universe is solving a fixpoint equation: find a history that is self-consistent. The question this raises is, which one does it pick? There are infinitely many to choose from, and no clear criteria that I know of. You can have a fixpoint where someone is their own parent, but what chose this fixpoint over any other? I don't mean "woah man, who get's to decide?", I mean "this description of physics is incomplete; to complete it you need to specify the method of selecting which fixpoint gets chosen".
I’m not sure how self consistent histories might be chosen. It seems like some futures should be more common based on our physical understanding. Maybe they are all there (many worlds) and we happen to find ourselves in the compatible (most common?) ones.
> In my view, there is no 'going back' with time travel.
There are many distinct models of time travel, some self-consistent and some not. You are describing one you like, but this does not tell us much about how time travel works in the actual universe, if it occurs at all.
which is popular among poly people but is one of the very Heinlein books I didn't read when I was a kid, maybe because being the story of a 2000-year old man it's crazy long. (It doesn't help that Heinlein had serious health problems after he wrote "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and that everything he wrote after that had quality problems)
It's not quite that simple; after he had an operation things got much more coherent. Friday is arguably a return to form. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is also worthwhile. The thing about his works after Moon, both with brain problems and repaired-brain is that he clearly decided he was done with avoiding explicit sex and that he would write about it the way he wanted to write about it.
The first few chapters of 'The Number of The Beast' are some of the most amazing chapters ever written but then the book degenerates into senselessness which is really too bad.
It's been a long time since I read it but I feel like that was part of the point, eh? Like the title points to the degeneration into senselessness as the strictures of space and time and literary form and convention dissolve...
I actually really like Time Enough for Love (though not as much as Moon). That said, it's more a series of linked stories than a conventional novel. (And you should probably read the prequel short first.)
Even more so... Plus "Door into Summer" is unambiguously a good read.
(Actually though I tell people who like Heinlein that Joe Haldeman set out to out-Heinlein Heinlein and was successful with "The Forever War" and "Worlds")
If we're doing recommendations, I'd say Double Star is Heinlein's best work of the 1950's, although it contains neither time travel nor implied incest.
Just like "The Forever War" is a reply to "Starship Troopers", "Worlds" is a reply to "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". I would put "Worlds" in a category like Pohl's "Gateway" (but not the sequels to Gateway) in that it reads more like literature than genre fiction.
The copy of Worlds that I have has a false copyright date (I think 1954) and I was thinking "... they didn't have lasers in 1954" and "... they sure didn't have O'Neill colonies in 1954". I think the fake date was no accident but part of the homage.
Personally I think you should beam yourself into the past and tell your former self to read Worlds... It's that good.
> Pohl's "Gateway" (but not the sequels to Gateway)
Side note: am I the only one who loved "Gateway", when the Heechee and their ships and artifacts were mysterious and almost unknowable -- the whole "we think ships of size 5 or 1 are dangerous. Also these colors are probably good, and we think these are bad" -- but was disappointed when the Heechee finally made their appearance and lost some of their mystery?
I never read the sequels to Gateway and now I'm glad I didn't. Gateway is such a great novel, but it's unsurprising Pohl wanted to investigate more of the universe.
I obviously need to read "Worlds", but one thing I've wondered for a long time is whether LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" was also partially written in response to "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
It's been a long time since I've read either although Moon is my favorite Heinlein and The Dispossessed is my favorite LeGuin. But I never noticed any connection.
I will have to take a look at Worlds. The Forever War is one of my favorites but I have never really cared for any other Haldeman--but haven't tried that.
Although, at least at one time, that was his book that was probably best known to a mainstream audience that was far from my favorite of his. But I guess it did plug into the attitudes of a certain time. There are probably a good half dozen of his books I prefer though.
This sounds great, I will try and read it. I recently read a science-fiction novel with similarly strongly-consistent timelines which was very enjoyable (if a bit slow to start).
Odd entry to hit the front page but when I was putting together a list of favorite shorts/novellas from a list of SF authors a while back, this was my Heinlein pick in spite of him having a lot of great ones. (As the article notes his older By His Bootstraps is pretty good too in a similar vein.)
