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    Larry Niven The Theory and Practice of Time Travel Pt5

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    J Halstead

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    Larry Niven The Theory and Practice of Time Travel Pt5

    Uploaded by

    J Halstead
    19 views1 page

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    Larry Niven the Theory and Practice of Time Travel Pt5

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    19 views1 page

    Larry Niven The Theory and Practice of Time Travel Pt5

    Uploaded by

    J Halstead

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as rtf, pdf, or txt
    of 1

    NIVEN'S LAW: IF THE UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE PERMITS THE POSSIBILITY OF

    TIME TRAVEL AND OF CHANGING THE PAST, THEN NO TIME MACHINE WILL BE
    INVENTED IN THAT UNIVERSE.

    If time travel is so manifestly impossible, why does every good and bad science
    fiction writer want to write a new, fresh time travel story?
    It's a form of competition. No writer believes that a field is completely mined out.
    And no field ever is. There is always something new to say, if you can find it.
    Time travel can be a vehicle, like a faster-than-light drive. Our best evidence says
    that nothing can travel faster than light. Yet hard-headed science fiction writers
    constantly use faster-than-light spacecraft. If a character must reach the Veil Nebula,
    and if the plot demands that his girl friend be still a girl when he returns, then he must
    needs travel faster than light. Similarly, it takes time travel to pit a man against, a
    dinosaur, or to match a modern man against King Arthur's knights.
    There are things a writer can't say without using time travel.
    Then, time travel is so delightfully open to tortuous reasoning. You should be
    convinced of that by now.
    The brain gets needed exercise plotting a story in a universe where effects
    happen before their causes; where the hero and his enemy may be working each to
    prevent the other's birth; where a brick wall may be no more solid than a dream, if one
    can eliminate the architect from history.
    If one could travel in time, what wish could not be answered? All the treasures of
    the past would fall to one man with a submachine gun. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy
    might share his bed, if bribed with a trunkful of modern cosmetics. The dead return to
    life, or cease to have been at all.
    Bothered by smog? Henry Ford could be stopped in time, in time...
    No. We face insecurity enough. Read your newspaper, and be glad that at least
    your past is safe.

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