Re: The man who folded himself - time travel vs hero quest

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From: Henk Langeveld - Sun Nederland (henkl@yelm)
Date: Tue 07 Dec 1993 - 03:06:49 EET


Rich Staats writes:

>Greetings!

> There was a book called "The Man Who Folded Himself" (can't remember

        by David Gerrold

> the author) that presented the view that travelling back through time
> allowed one to alter the future, but it did *not* alter it for the
> future you came from. Time travel was a one-way ticket to another
> dimension.

The most satisfying book on the theme I have ever read. It made the whole concept of time travel consistant just by imposing this one simple rule: If you change the past, you spawn a new thread in history, branching off from the point in time where the change was introduced. Paradox? What paradox? The two realities co-exist, although the time traveller will not be able to return to that reality he came from.

And indeed do I see a parallel with heroquesting. If we take the model of the bundle of fibers, a time traveler will travel back along the fiber he currently is on, making a change which results in that particular fiber splitting. He then travels back to the future along that new fiber to his era of origin, which may or may be not recognisable.

Well, we all agree :-) that time travel is not possible in Glorantha, so I will not continue this thread. There's no need! In Glorantha, we don't need time travelers to change reality, instead we have people jumping out into the hero-plane, messing around with a couple of threads of history/reality and jumping back into time.

-- 

Henk	|	Henk.Langeveld@Sun.COM - Disclaimer: I don't speak for Sun.
oK[]	|	My first law of computing: "NEVER make assumptions"

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