[HPforGrownups] Re: World Building And The Potterverse

[Jordan Abel]

No: HPFGUIDX 167343

> Ken:
>
> I don't know if you are being serious or not so I don't know whether
> to respond seriously or not. Perhaps this time travel sidetrack has
> gone on long enough so rather than post a detailed discussion, let me
> just say this: "perfectly self-consistent recursive causation"? I LOVE
> it, it has me rolling on the floor in fits of laughter! I don't know
> if that is the response you expected or not. I cannot take this
> seriously as a plausible element in a "serious" work of fantasy or SF,
> there are way too many problems with it. If you were being serious and
> it works for you, so be it, I am sure you are not the only one who
> enjoys stories written around the notion. It's just a big, ugly wart
> on the HP series to me. I can ignore it well enough to truly enjoy the
> rest of the story, I can never accept it.

I meant that there was no easy "go back and change things" like you
see in certain genres like alternate history - everything they did
when they went back in time, happened the first time around. Like in
the Heinlein story "All you zombies", except, you know, with less
complexity, and less baby-making.

> Ken:
> I've been running all this over in my mind and come to think of it I
> do not believe that the authors I enjoy most make much use of time
> travel. Isaac Asimov's Spacer/Robot/Empire/Foundation universe started
> out with a time travel culture but then a character in the time travel
> ministry realized that the technology was ruining the human race and
> managed to kill off time travel entirely. As I recall only one other
> character after that time traveled and he was blown forward in time.
> Mostly the authors I like avoid the notion like the plague and I don't
> pick authors based on their stance on time travel so I guess the kind
> of mind that dislikes time travel just naturally seeks out its own kind.

There are two kinds of time travel - the "silly" kind, where you can
change the past, there are "ripples" or whatever ridiculous mechanism
for the changes to propagate in a way that looks good on screen, you
can create paradoxes and contradict your own existence, you can go to
alternate futures, then back to the past to fix it and somehow it goes
100% back to normal, etc.  And then there's the "serious" kind, where
there are no paradoxes, you cannot change the past (though you can be
your own grandfather, it just means you were all along), everything
that happens when you go back in time happens the exact same way that
it did before when your future self (possibly unknown to you at the
time) arrived. You seem to have mistaken HP for the former, and maybe
you're not even aware of the latter's existence at all.

> Ken:
> "Tensor calculus? That's a joke... I say, that's a joke, son".

Well, in the context it seemed like you had a problem with the way
time travel was executed in the books, rather than with time travel in
general.

As for my literary preferences... generally I do like stories that
just e.g. handwave an aircraft carrier back in time and forget about
the whole time travel thing after that (focusing the rest of the story
on what they do now that they're there), but those stories aren't
_about_ time travel. They're about an aircraft carrier from 2020 sent
back to 1942, or about what the south would do in the civil war if
they had AK-47s, etc. For stories _about_ time travel, stuff like back
to the future that goes with, again, the "silly" kind, but then tries
to explain it and build a coherent system out of it, are painful. But
the serious kind can be interesting.

Random832