Operation Time Search - Discussion

[Lots-A-Watts]

And she hates another one.

https://www.tor.com/2019/12/16/neither-h...me-search/

[Marron4Gateau]

And she hates another one.

https://www.tor.com/2019/12/16/neither-h...me-search/

“Hate” is pretty strong. She had some fair criticisms. I always thought the ending with suddenly two mysterious continents appearing in the “present day” was poor back when I read this as a kid. And the criticism that equating physical features to the goodness/evilness of characters is unlike Andre’s later, much more racially inclusive & positive works and frankly, isn’t unfair.

It’s an interesting yarn but somehow I always found it and her other “time travel” books slightly forgettable compared to her much stronger space “Forerunner” universe novels and her wonderful Witch World ones.

[Lots-A-Watts]

And she hates another one.

https://www.tor.com/2019/12/16/neither-h...me-search/

“Hate” is pretty strong. She had some fair criticisms. I always thought the ending with suddenly two mysterious continents appearing in the “present day” was poor back when I read this as a kid. And the criticism that equating physical features to the goodness/evilness of characters is unlike Andre’s later, much more racially inclusive & positive works and frankly, isn’t unfair.

It’s an interesting yarn but somehow I always found it and her other “time travel” books slightly forgettable compared to her much stronger space “Forerunner” universe novels and her wonderful Witch World ones.

---

But I got your attention though - didn't I?

[Michael]

...I always thought the ending with suddenly two mysterious continents appearing in the “present day” was poor back when I read this as a kid...

And yet so many movies and TV shows have used that same plot twist. I just thought that was worth mentioning.

[Irene]

How to represent Time Travel is always tricky.

In a lecture Isaac Asimov gave at a Physics Society Dinner, I was in college, He said that time travel was impossible, as the earth kept moving in time, and even going a few minutes into the past or future, you would end up in space, or inside the earth.

That given: There is a short story that ends with "If you go into the past to kill your grandfather, you disappear."

I have always felt that what you do in the past had always happened, [OUTLANDER does this] Or perhaps changed the life of just a few people. If you stop that evil force history will snap back to it's original time line [Connie Willis does this] So if you change history, IMHO a land mass won't suddenly appear. More likely to discover that Atlantis was just a big island that blew it's volcano core, sometime between when you 'changed' history, in the pre-history that we all know. Or maybe Atlantis was a city-state someplace known. [Jerrico or Troy or Malta by another name]

This was never my favorite story. i.e. I could not put my finger on the spine and remember the whole tale.
I suppose that it is tie for e to start reading the whole series again.

[Michael]

One high school physics teacher said - in response to a question about whether time travel is possible - you'd have to rearrange all the molecules of the universe. In other words, reorganize the universe to return to a specific "state".

That wouldn't make for much of a story because you'd need an impossible amount of energy to do that.

Most time travel stories I've read assume there is some shortcut back to the past, like a wormhole (but not a wormhole) between moments without any consideration for how the distances the world has traveled through space work out. Although the Sun revolves around the galactic core about once every 280 million years, the Milky Way is hurtling through space, too.

You would need Gallifreyan mathematics to calculate where everything should be, assuming you could exit from space time and re-enter at a different point.

Technically we're already moving through time, but we can only move in one direction. The closest we've come to anything remotely resembling time travel is to send people into orbit, where time passes faster for them than for us here on Earth. The "slower path" time travel story is more plausible, where someone from the present takes a one-way trip into the future. The cool thing about that idea is that you need a gravity well to do it, so you will be carried along through space with whatever body whose gravity you're using to slow down your passage through time.

I think it more likely (in the remotest possible sense) that you could pass into another universe occupying the same quantum space as ours (sort of a reconfiguration of the sub-atomic particles that make up the universe) than that you could find yourself transported (randomly) to a past era.

Because like Azimov said, you'd end up in space if you could go back in time. Unless, of course, you can travel back along the "slow path". But I haven't heard about any theories suggesting that is possible. The closest anyone has come is to propose opening a wormhole and then moving one end of it through space. In that theory, you can enter the moving end and travel back through time to the static end, exiting at some point in the past (but no further back in time than the wormhole existed).