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.