I’m not convinced. I think he has free will, but by the time he’s in a position to do anything with his knowledge, he’s just too conditioned by his work with the Temporal Bureau, or too afraid of poofing himself out of existence, to risk chaning anything,
After a reread, I think you’re right that it’s at least ambiguous, though largely because of the restricted viewpoint (we see only how the loop gets set up but not how is experienced) and the “Mistake of '72”, alluded to but not explained. A little more definitive is the second “By-Law of Time” in the final scene (“If At Last you Do Succeed, Never Try Again”) which seems to imply that the timeline can change, and multiple times.
At that, the Dragonlance series makes it seem like time travel can’t really be used to change the past at all, let alone for the better — but it turns out that there is a way to change things for the better via time travel, and, so, well, that happens, is all.
Doesn’t the Unmarried Mother note that the Mistake of '72 can’t be undone?
Ah, here:
It’s rough, but somebody must dc it and it’s very hard to recruit anyone in the later years, since the Mistake of 1972. Can you think of a better source than to pick people all fouled up where they are and give them well-paid, interesting (even though dangerous) work in a necessary cause? Everybody knows now why the Fizzle War of 1963 fizzled. The bomb with New York’s number on it didn’t go off, a hundred other things didn’t go as planned — all arranged by the likes of me.
But not the Mistake of '72; that one is not our fault — and can’t be undone; there’s no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn’t, now and forever amen. But there won’t be another like it; an order dated “1992” takes precedence any year.
[bolding mine]
I read that as “The timeline is fixed - and includes the work of the agency the Unmarried Mother works for - they didn’t change the past to make the Fizzle War fizzle, they were always the reason why. The Mistake of 1972 made the existence of that agency public knowledge - so after that it’s hard to recruit”
That one sounds a lot like “Last Year” by Robert Charles Wilson. But not enough to say that it is.
I don’t recall the title, but I recall a novel where it turned out that time was a helix, and time travel could only take you to the next “rung” up or down on the helix rather than to any arbitrary time. And, while you could change the past the changes wouldn’t propagate forward any faster than normal time, so you just ended up with an alternate past and an unchanged present.
At any rate, it’s bit of the backstory that one of the accessible time periods to the time travelers is in the 1800s, and that they cut the US Civil War short by showing up and crushing the Confederacy. That certainly strikes me as a good result, there’s few groups as blatantly and unambiguously evil as the Confederacy (Lincoln is still alive too).
Hmmm. I never got around to reading the later books, but in the ones I read in the 1632 series show the effects of the temporally-displaced town of Grantville to have been mostly positive.
Sounds sort of like Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, but the other way around - that one’s about a group of Afrikaaners from 2013 who can travel back exactly 150 years, so they go to 1863 and arm Lee with AKs, allowing the Confederacy to win the war. It doesn’t work out the way they want it to, though - the Comfederacy winds up abolishing slavery a few years later, and Lee turns on the Afrikaaners after finding out the truth about the original timeline that they disrupted.
I’ve read most of them, and I’d agree. Though it’s notable that they didn’t deliberately time-travel (nobody in the books knows how it happened), and since they’re now stuck there (then), they’re mostly motivated by just making the best life they can for themselves, rather than directly trying to improve the rest of Europe.
They’re a mixed bunch, I’d say. None of them have quite the impact of the first book, because the idea has already hit. And at least one, written by Virginia DeMarce, drags like shoes in deep mud. As someone said, she may be a crackerjack researcher, but for Pete’s sake don’t let her write!
But the later ones do have some good spots.
Except for the Marty that grew up in that timeline. I assume Doc Brown surreptitiously programed the time machine to send him to Earth after the heat death of the sun in order to protect the timeline.
I’m not completely sure how to parse that sentence of Heinlein’s, though - if the clause after the semicolon is explanatory, it would seem to be saying that if there is a paradox, then something can be undone. Am I reading that right? It’s a weak thing to rest an argument on, but I can see how it might be the case.
An aside: seems like Heinlein liked to have nuclear wars that never quite got too bad - The Fizzle War from AYZ here, the Wet Firecracker War in the back story of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the war that happens in “The Year of the Jackpot” are the ones that come to mind. Any others?
Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. I think he is calling a paradox any event that looks uncaused/unexplained - so the time agency “resolves” paradoxes by using time travel to cause things like the “Fizzling” of the war and the existence of the Unmarried Mother. If time was really changeable, the story wouldn’t be quite so neat and tight - someone could make the Unmarried Mother not exist, etc., instead of leaving him as a self-caused anomaly buffeted by interactions that all turn out to be his fault.
Don’t have time to read the entire thread, but has anyone mentioned Happy Accidents?
It’s been years since I read it, but IIRC Gregory Benford’s “Timescape” averts an ecological disaster in the future by sending a message to the past in a tachyon beam. And also JFK doesn’t get assassinated.
If sending messages counts, in James P. Hogan’s Thrice Upon a Time the protagonists both aid in stopping a major plague and prevent the destruction of Earth. The latter happening because it turns out that thanks to the physics involved in sending temporal messages, the recently activated inertial confinement fusion power plants (which are not functioning properly) are actually manufacturing stable micro-black holes rather than just inducing fusion. By the time they find out they’ve already made two million holes…without the message, Earth would have been consumed.
As an aside, I’ve long suspected that in that setting, that’s the explanation of the “Fermi Paradox”. Nearly every species doesn’t develop the theory of temporal mechanics before inventing fusion and destroying their planet before realizing the danger.
Thrice Upon A Time and Timescape are an example of similar books published too close in time to have influenced each other - both involve messages sent back in time from Great Britain to prevent problems starting in California
Unless the authors knew each other and inspired one another.
I don’t think they did, but that’s not impossible, I suppose - Benford was living in the States, and Hogan in the UK at the time, but there were ways to communicate if they chose.
A similar duplication case is Clarke and Sheffield, who both wrote about space elevators at the same time - and in that case, Clarke denied any communication, writing: “A clear case of plagiarism? No—merely an idea whose time has come.”
Hogan was a bit of an odd egg. He started out writing quite hard SF, but later in life drifted off into a weird mixture of conspiracy and woo-woo theories. Like Velikovsky, and holocaust denial..
He apparently just lost it mentally when he got old; I ignore his most recent works, they are effectively written by a different person.