It has been great but we are nearly finished.
Wright quotes, apparently uncritically, the absurd idea in a Back To The Future film that a man whose birth has been prevented would fade out of existence but he does go on to say that this is absurd. If your birth is prevented, then you do not exist and fade out. You do not exist. I have yet to arrive home and find a teenage girl who fades out of existence, saying: "I am the daughter that you would have had if you had not successfully practiced contraception sixteen years ago." Exactly the same logic - consistency between propositions - applies to time travel scenarios as to non-time-travel scenarios.
I have been told that Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer is a good time travel novel but have not read it so I looked forward to reading Wright's plot summary. However, having read that summary, I now think that the novel sounds far too complicated and potentially contradictory to be interesting to read. I can be persuaded otherwise, of course, but, for the time being, Dinosaur Beach is not on my reading list.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad Mr. Wright's time travel article was of such interest to you. I think one big reason why I took little interest in time traveling stories by other writers was because Poul Anderson covered that theme so THOROUGHLY that I took too little interest in how other authors handled that idea.
Sean