chipper2) Books I have read and loved lately: I Am Not A Serial Killer. Saltation. Freaks: Alive On the Inside (which I found at the used bookstore, signed!). Unshelved: Volume I.
3) Books I have written and loved lately: Deadline. The Brightest Fell. This is a much shorter list, and that's a good thing, because it means I probably haven't actually sold my soul to the devil. Much.
4) I love superheroes. I love Disney. I love these Disney heroines presented in glorious super-heroic style. I especially love the zombified Snow White. This is because I am, in many ways, predictable, and I am not ashamed of that fact. Not in the slightest. Nor do I think I should be, really, as my predictability makes me easy to shop for.
5) Lilly and Alice have figured out that, together, they now possess sufficient mass and surface area to prevent me from moving when they don't want me to move. This is fine when I have a book with me and nothing in the oven, but other times...not so fine. In other news, the house did not burn down, although it was a somewhat close thing. And it wasn't my fault.
6) What he said.
7) This looks like it's going to be an amazing season for movies. My favorite so far this year are How to Train Your Dragon and Kick-Ass, with The Crazies coming in as a close third, but oh! The glories ahead! Nightmare on Elm Street, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After, and Letters to Juliet! Splice! Even Resident Evil: Afterlife, because my love for the franchise outweighs my scars from the third movie. What a wonderful thing a movie ticket can be.
8) I appear to be thinking in almost purely short fiction terms right now, as I recover from finishing Deadline and tackle the trickier bits of The Brightest Fell. So far this week, I've finished two Toby shorts, started a third, finished an InCryptid short, and started my story for an invite-only anthology. I'm hoping I can even get a Vel piece shoved in somewhere, before the steam runs out.
9) Guess what I get tomorrow. I get a Vixy. Do you get a Vixy? No, you do not. I am not much of a gloater, but right now? Right now, oh, I'm gonna gloat. Because I get a Vixy. Of my very own.
10) Jean Grey is dead, James Gunn needs to call me, and zombies are love.
April 23 2010, 03:01:48 UTC 7 years ago Edited: April 23 2010, 03:03:06 UTC
Assume for a moment that you've got a time travel method that is logically consistent and that multi-thread string theory is correct. Backwards travel is to be assumed possible, even into your own timeline. Forward travel is to be considered possible, even into your own timeline.
So, here's the problem: paradox is impossible if you can return to your own timeline.
Your timeline exists. Your existence is proof of it. Nothing happened in the past of that linear path through time that prevented your existence or even happened any differently than you know from history. If it had, by definition, this would not be your timeline. It would be a different timeline. If you travel negatively along the time axis, do something that alters history, and travel forward a positive amount equal to your original negative travel and find that your action is remembered where in your original timeline it wasn't remembered... you are not in your original timeline. You have traveled down a branching line. Indeed, if your sudden presence in time, appearing from the local perspective as out of nowhere with no causality, is not something that was always the case, you either could not have traveled into your own timeline OR nothing you do will be remembered or matters. Your original line exists untouched, and the negative transit along what you thought was the time axis was along a branched axis. (I like how Robert Heinlein handled this, considering three possible time-related axes as opposed to a singular linear timeline. Time travel is messy to consider and has been done so poorly by so many authors, I am hesitant to give it a fair shake when I see it used as a plot device, but Heinlein's was internally consistent.)
I theorize that travel in your own timeline is only possible three ways: 1) you know you went back as your presence is remembered, so you were always there and nothing you do will vary as it has already happened, thus no paradox possibility; 2) your presence was unremarkable and went unremembered, so even if you do go back, nothing you do matters and thus no paradox possibility; or 3) you can only go back and perform events of which you yourself were unaware and will remain unaware of when you return. The last is conditional on the idea that subjective observation determines the nature of reality; observation collapses the waveform of potentiality into observed and thus temporally fixed reality. In traveling back, you are unaware of anyone having done this ever before you. You transit negatively on the time axis and perform actions; the rippling consequences are in fact not ripples at all, merely the events that had always happened. You fear paradox because you don't know the outcome, and return to your own start point to find nothing has changed. Why not? Two possibilities: either ripples in time are affected by a type of inertia that makes them fade against the larger reality and thus become pointless over a long enough scale, or there were no ripples because what you did had always been the case, a fact of which you were simply unaware.
(blink) Sorry. It's... a sticking point for my geek nature.
April 23 2010, 05:41:27 UTC 7 years ago
Also, frankly, massive changes to the past (and yes, even "I tell my eleven year old self how to become unbelievably wealthy" can be a massive change) are a form of genocide, and that's another thought experiment altogether.
April 23 2010, 12:47:59 UTC 7 years ago
Also, I am not seeing how a change to the past is automatically genocidal. If you are capable of changing things and we assume your actions are not of the "always what had occured" variety, why is every change defined as the extermination of a population? It may be a sweeping change, but it could also be a net positive. Otherwise, if that isn't the case, every time traveler ought to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.