Wherein there are sentient agents who move “backward” relative to each other in time?
As in, one group of sentients moves through time the same way we do, while another group of sentients moves in a way that would appear “backward in time” to us? Like, they walk backwards, react to events before they happen, and so on?
I know there are massive engineering problems with such a scenario.* I’m just curious if anyone’s tried it in a story, whether science fiction, fantasy, or something else. I wonder how it could be possible, if it could be possible, for the two groups to interact or communicate.**
-FrL-
*But I think it’s just barely strictly possible, even (barely, strictly) physically possible, though totally freaky.
The only one that comes to mind is the second book of Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, Bearing an Hourglass. The series concerns a number of humans who step into the magical roles of incarnations of abstract concepts (Death, War, Mother Nature, etc.). The second book concerns the Incarnation of Time, who, upon assumption of his role, lives his life backwards compared with everyone else. He can manifest in the regular temporal direction from time to time to communicate with people. But it’s just the one guy, not a race of people. And although there are science fiction elements in the book, this particular thing is magical, and not treated in a sci-fi way.
Not exactly – at least not in the temporal sense the OP seems to be asking for. It would be more accurate to say the characters in these stories “youthen” instead of “age” - but they follow the entropy arrow in the same direction as the rest of us. They don’t experience “cause” after “effect.”
Well, there was the Red Dwarf novel Backwards (link has summary, spoilers), but I could only recommend that to someone who’d read the earlier books and/or was very familiar with the TV seres.
In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlin is “living backwards” and remembers all of history up to the 20th Century. This does not cause him to behave consistently – he should foresee the ultimate destruction of Arthur’s kingdom as a thing fated and unavoidable, but he doesn’t, although he does seem to foresee the danger. Nor does he have any amnesia regarding what everybody else would consider the “past.”
In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the Tralfamadorians are not living backwards, but they do have a perception of events from outside of time, as it were. They know how the Universe will end – one of their scientists will destroy it in some sort of experiment, testing a new spaceship drive, I believe – but they don’t let that depress them – "He always has pressed that button, and he always will" – they just focus attention on the nice moments.
I don’t recall anything like that on a continuous basis. There’s something like it on an intermittent basis in Ben Bova’s Orion, in which the two main characters are time-travelling in opposite directions between sections of the story, so that the first section is the first time Character A has met Character B and the last section is the first time Character B has met Character A.
Nah, that’s not it. As Chefguy points out, the situation in that story is not really like what I’m asking about.
What prompted the question was just the fact that several settings for sci-fi-ish stories have sprung to my mind, unbidden, in the last week and this was one of them. I’m interested to see if real live actual writers have done anything with the idea.
-FrL-
You may safely ignore the following. I am just listing the other four ideas that I’ve been thinking about in the past week or so. (One of them I originally thought of a few years ago but hadn’t seriously thought about til recently.) To the extent that any of them remind you of actual stories that have been written, I’d love to read them.
Other ideas:
Some cosmologists have (IRL, not just in this setting) claimed that there are models of the universe which have only two spatial and one time dimension, and which are just as consistent and predictive as our conventional three dimensional model. So in this setting, humans are in contact with an alien race which concieves of the universe two dimensionally. Their language is strictly translatable into ours (as I think it would have to be) but it is not really translatable in any practical sense. Their ontology and understanding of space are just too radically different than ours. No human can really pull off the feat of translation in real time. Nevertheless, they evolved in the same universe we did, and so deal with things in pretty much the same way we do. We can not communicate very well, but we can compete and cooperate perfectly sensibly. The partial story that sprang to mind involves a human and an alien playing a game of Go (which of course would be independently invented by any intelligent species, cf Lasker ). Actual plot? No idea.
It ends up being economically most feasible to get at some of the more difficult energy reserves–difficult oil deposits for example–by, for all intents and purposes, laying a pipeline to the energy source into our past. So some companies go ahead and do this, mining for energy sources from the planet’s past. And it turns out this has an effect on history–mankind’s development is continuously kept at the very bare minimum level necessary for time travel, because the resources for anything more don’t exist, because if they did exist, the more advanced mankind taking care of them would suck them up, leaving them nonexistent and therefore in fact unavailable for mankind to take advantage of. (On the other hand, the temporal drilling has the other effect of guaranteeing that mankind’s level of development is enough to sustain the invention and continuing use of time travel.)
A retelling of the Popol Vuh in a style that is a mix of futurist science fiction, fantasy, and folk tale. I don’t know why I got this idea and it won’t go away. Anyway, the reader would not really know whether it’s set far in the future, far in the past, or in some parallel realm, or what. The world it’s set in is a ginourmous (galaxy sized? universe sized?) concentric sphere with worlds getting more and more heavenly (ordered and aesthetically pleasing) as you go up and hellish (disordered and aesthetically displeasing–though perhaps not to many inhabitants of these levels) going down. The world shows signs (to the reader at least) of being an artificial construction. There are hints that the world has a purpose, the fulfillment of which will be such as to be very hard to distinguish from the world’s destruction. But the events retold in the story would not lead up to this fulfillment, whatever it is. They would be a miniscule part of its outworking. The story would only deal with two levels–that of the cosmic twins–slightly below earthlike in orderliness and pleasantness–and the one immediately below them containing the kingdom of the dead.
Why this setting? I don’t know.
Time travel technology is in common use, and a very salient effect of it has been that as history has been changed over and over again, humankind has lost track of its “original history.” In the timeline the story is set in, time travel has existed for as long as humans have. This is due to the use of time travel by militaries and corporations and other groups to interfere with history in various ways. This has necessitated going further and further back in time and has basically altered the shape of history completely. Furthermore, space is littered with debris from alternative timelines, histories that have been deleted by time travel but from which “time capsules” were preserved far in the past in places and times that saved them from causal interference. And there are legends about an “original timeline” and there are sort of “temporal archaelogists” that study the various time capsules (which are, basically, everywhere) for various purposes nefarious and non-nefarious. And in the setting, a time capsule pops up somewhere way way back in the past that (somehow) plausibly is thought to be from the original timeline. And the story would be about the intrigues surrounding this time capsule as representatives from various factions are sent to research it and deal with it.
Hmm… this is all I could find and the description doesn’t sound like it involves sentient beings living their lives backwards through time. Could be that’s an important spoiler point so the reviewers don’t mention it?
Dr. Manhattan in the graphic novel Watchmen sees all points in time simultaneously except when (conveniently) “blinded” by tachyon interference. Like the Trafalmadoreans, he believes it is futile to try to change the outcome of even terrible events, most notably JFK’s assassination, but he isn’t moving backwards in time.
The amazing novel Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis is told from the point of view of an invisible spirit (mind, soul, demon, presence) passively inhabiting the body of a man, but who perceives time backward. It is “born,” or comes into awareness, when the man dies at the very beginning of the book, and it lives backward from there.
The second spirit is a purely passive observer and cannot control the man’s actions or communicate with him or anyone else – but it has no idea that this is unusual. This perception is the only world ithas ever known. It is watching a man’s life unfold in a way that we would consider backward, and it is trying to interpret what it sees in a way that makes sense to it.
In other words, if someone viewed your life backward without knowing that it was backward, what would that person think you were doing at any particular time?
One idea from that book–that reversing time also reverses moral significance–illustrates part of the problem I was having imagining time-normal and time-reversed people interacting. Even if you find a way to solve the problem caused by the fact that neither party can remember the others’ “past” actions in order to form a hypothesis about their motivations and so on*, there’s the problem that if one tries to help the other, she’ll actually be hurting the other, and vice versa. It could kind of work out though–say I help timereversed Joe at time B. Joe sees this as me hurting him, so in Joe’s future–my past–he reciprocates by trying to hurt me. But actually, from my point of view, he will have been helping me. So my attempt to help Joe at time B results in my having been helped by Joe previously. Though to Joe it looks like we’re fighting, not cooperating. So this only works out for one party, not for the other.
-FrL-
*I think maybe this could be solved (in a way that smacks of paradox though) through the parties’ having experience of extended patterns of each others’ behavior.
I was going to mention the first of Piers Anthony’s Mode novels, Virtual Mode, which features a character named Provos whose entire species lives time backward relative to humanity; they remember what we think of as the future and are clueless to what we think of as the past. Unfortunately, I’m not prepared to admit to having read anything by Anthony at this time.
Part of Gene Wolfe’s BOOK OF THE NEW SUN involved a group of aliens who (it turns out) are travelling through time in the opposite direction of the protagonist - the first time he meets them, they greet him warmly; the last time, it’s the first time they’ve met him. Although each encounter proceeds in a normal time-direction.
I’m pretty sure that if you map out the sequences of events in Roger Zelazny’s ROADMARKS from the point of each viewpoint character, there will be differences in the sequence as seen by the different observers.
This kind of thing is briefly touched on in Douglas Adams’ Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, a short story in the HHGTTG universe. They have things called aorist rods, which allow you to mine energy from the past. Everyone thinks it’s great, until they realize those complete bastards from the future are stealing energy from us.
There is no time travel in Zelazny’s Amber novels. What Corwin did was travel to a Shadow where those diamonds were as common as sand grains on Shadow Earth and grab a bagful. No one (to my recollection) actually time-travels in either the original Amber novels or the Merlin sequels.
). Actual plot? No idea.