I am continuing to read and discuss John C. Wright's article on time travel. See here. My second post on this topic refers to Alfred Bester, Charles Dickens and Superman but not to Poul Anderson so that post will remain on the Logic of Time Travel blog whereas its predecessor will probably be copied here since the page view count continues to indicate that more people read this blog than that one. I value discussions of time, logic, free will, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and Anderson's There Will Be Time and want to share them as widely as possible.
In Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry sees his future wife draw a picture and tells her not to sign it because he has seen it unsigned in the future. See signs it. When he returns to the future, he looks for the picture on the wall and it is not there. It has fallen behind the fridge. When he retrieves it, it is unsigned. She had trimmed the signature off because she did not want to risk Henry returning to a future other than the one he remembered. In this novel, there seems to be only a single consistent timeline but the characters want to make sure of that.
My comment would be: in a single consistent timeline, logic dictates that, if the artist were the sort of person who would not have trimmed off the signature, then Henry would have seen her draw the picture and would not have told her not to sign it because he would remember having seen it signed in the future. This has taken us away from Poul Anderson but it remains relevant to the kind of time travel in his There Will Be Time.
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