World Building And The Potterverse

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 167382

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jordan Abel" <random832 at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 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:

I guess the difference between us with respect to time travel is that I
lump them all together in the "silly" category. No matter how much 
more compelling "recursive causality" seems to you and millions of
others it is just absurd to me. Harry can be his own father? Seriously?
Then Hermione could be her own mother and if she happened to be
the mother of twins Harry could be the father, Hermione the mother,
of both of them (and yes I know that's not the pairing but work with
me here). This is perfectly consistent with recursive causality and 
I shudder to think that it could therefore be revealed to be the 
truth in DH (more dry humor, not a prediction).

I understand perfectly well the time travel theory used in HP and I 
understand perfectly well that it seems more serious to many of you.
It is still an ugly wart to me. Recursion is powerful, what controls
when it occurs? What defines the exit condition? The simple case
we see in POA is a single loop, more complex situations could 
produce infinite recursion. What does that do to the Potterverse?
In any universe that allows this kind of recursion infinite loops 
are bound to occur eventually.

Time travel just seems like a tired old crutch to me. It can be wickedly
funny when played for laughs and I'll even admit that it can be 
interesting in a story that is only about time travel. In Harry Potter
it seems jarring and unneccesssary. Rowling decided she wanted
to write a time travel story so it got tacked on. Other SF staples 
like faster than light travel are more acceptable to me because they
seem like normal extensions of the universe we know. FTL is just
a faster train. We don't know how to do it, it doesn't seem to be
allowed by Einstein but Einstein wasn't allowed by Newton so 
who knows for sure? I don't see the problem that Steve mentions
with infinite energy in sub-light travel in stories that use it. Larry
Niven for example was very careful to specify that the common 
Kzinti war ship had an acceleration capacity of two C: up 
to half light speed and then down to zero on the outbound trip, 
same on the return. Beyond current human capacity but not 
beyond imagining, not beyond energy plausibility, no offense
to Einstein.

Any universe that allows time travel seems of neccessity to be
profoundly different from ours. I'm not sure we can even imagine
how different it would be. I don't believe that *any* time travel
author has begun to scratch the surface of how different a universe
with time travel would be. The Potterverse certainly does not.
POA would work just as well without time travel.

Ken
 
> Jordan:

> 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.
> 

Ken:

Do I detect a reference to "Guns of the South"? Many years ago I saw
the cover with Robert E. holding an AK-47 and thought it must be 
a joke. No one would publish an 8 year old boy's fantasy about Lee
with a machine gun vs Lincoln with an F-16 would they? Well later on
I read that the story was about South African whites desperate to 
hang on to power and that made it sound a little more interesting
but still no sale to this reader. I assumed for years that "How Few
Remain" by the same author was more of the same. But then I 
discovered that this other book about how the South won the 
Civil War involved no time travel, only three cigars and a piece 
of paper. I've been reading Harry Turtledove's alternate historys
ever since, but only the ones that deal with plausible departures
from reality. No time machines or alien invasions need apply. The 
"problem" facing me this July is that "In At The Death" comes out
a few days after "Deathly Hallows", at the latest.

Ken


bboyminn:

If you believe 'Time Happened Once', everything is cool.

If you believe 'Time Happened Twice', headaches and misery
ensue.

I can't say what Ken and others believe, but Jordan seems
to clearly believe that 'time happened once' and we are
merely seeing it from two perspective. Naturally, that is
the camp that I am in.

(snip)

Again, I can't say how Ken sees the events, but I can
say with absolute certainty that if anyone see 'It
Happened Twice', then all I can say is -

'This way lies madness'.

Steve/bboyminnn

Ken:

Initially I saw it as twice through because if time travel
works at all that is how I see it most naturally working. Since
then I have come to understand how it supposed to be 
viewed in the Potterverse: recursive causality.

As I explain above that does nothing for me. It is absurd to
me whether once, twice, or infinite times through. The Harry 
who we are to believe is his own salvation could throw the 
Potterverse into a meltdown by simply refusing to go back,
or to cast a Patronus. That's a very odd way to run a Potterverse, 
in my opinion.

That way lies madness applies to all time travel as far as
this reader is concerned.

Ken