I have two novels of time travel I'd like to work on now. One, I am.
In it, a jumper disconnects their 'signal' the immaterial part of themselves, and travels downtime dodging angels eager to escort him to Heaven, and connects up with someone in a previous year. If done properly, the jumper takes over completely, and the normal mind is mostly sedated.
An agent goes back in time several centuries, builds a jumper out of Radio Shack equipment (its a trope), and recruits a desperate father who has a dying child. The father can jump back thirty more years or so to the 70's, and keep a baby alive who will grow up to be a child prodigy, and solve the illness that is besetting the father's child.
Its an interesting question as to why the original time traveller does not do this himself. Perhaps their is a limit on how far you can safely jump, and the target era is thirty or so years too far.
Its also a more puzzling question as to how the uptimers know this child is going to grow up to be a child prodigy.
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The other idea is less fleshed out. I wrote a bit on it years and years ago. I now have a new beginning.
The beginning is a great walled city of the Middle Ages type that is besieged, and is losing the siege. All about, things are falling apart. Brigades of troops are routing at the first sign of the enemy. There's something sick in the culture of the great city.
The ruler of the city is beset by her advisor who begs her to at last admit she was wrong, to take the Sword and cast it backwards. The ruler, who is terribly stubborn, and full of the brilliance of her ideas is finally forced to admit that it did not work. And so she completes the ritual. But at the last second as the Sword of Time is about to fall backwards, she reaches out and grasps it as well. The aide gapes in dismay, and she and the sword are tossed backwards. Fortunately, she loses the sword in the swirling race of the timestream, or she'd just go ahead and redo all her old mistakes despite seeing how they did not work before.
The Sword falls to a field, and is found by Typical Farmboy with Dreams of Greatness. I think. In the earlier version it is sought as a quest by a young paladin.
In any case, the sword allows you to step outside of time, and watch the chain of events occur at whatever level of detail you wish. It allows you to intervene, but such interventions are rough on the user, and expose the user to danger since while the user does have a magic sword....1)He doesn't know how to use its full powers. 2)Other people are better at fighting and/or have basic magic swords of their own.
It becomes apparent to the user that manipulating things is the way to go rather than jumping in and swinging the sword blade everywhere. This is also true as he realizes the effect his creation of the Hero Out of Thin Air has on the culture which is probably not going to be totally good.
He starts manipulating people, guiding them to quest items and helping great heroes dodge nasty occurences that might cut their careers short. He's changed from Hero to Merlin.
In the process of this, he realizes that he can create heroes. All he has to do is guide potentialities to a max, and shut off the other possibilities. Make a man strong and quick, and bend the lines of potentiality in the time stream so that he cannot become a blacksmith or a farmer, but must become a Hero. In short, he can create Destiny.
And he has people who want him to create Destinies for them. They want to be the great Hero, the guy who knows what he is supposed to do. But he finds out that in so doing, he impoverishes the person. He takes away much of their freedom.
Eventually, he has to guide things to a successful conclusion, keep his Heroes from being too impoverished, and defeat the idiotic cultural innovations that his Nemesis, the Queen from the Future wants to recreate to make her imagined utopia.
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I think its clear that Book Two might be beyond my skill level at this time.
Actually, book two sounds more like a series--there's too much in the story for less than a trilogy. At the same time, there's not enough detail for a temporal analysis, although it looks rather messy--the sword being sent back is dependent on the queen making the mistakes, but sending the sword back undoes her mistakes.
You've also introduced Chekov's shotgun problem: the queen vanishes into the past, but out of the story. I can't help thinking that having ripped her from the future you've got to bring her back in the past as a problem in some way.
Concerning the first, you've identified some of the problems already, but let me turn some of them over.
The trope of spirit-jumping into someone in the past is pretty good. One limit frequently placed on it is that it has to be done based on the lifespan of someone now living. You might get the impact you want if you have him use a parrot. We know that they often live longer than a hundred years and can mimic speech, so he might have to leap back to the present into a parrot whom he can use to communicate how to build and use the machine to a human who can make the further jump.
As to saving a child who would become a prodigy, I think thirty years is probably too short if we're going to save a dying child now. Medical research and approval of cures takes years, and your child prodigy has to get enough of an education to start the work. I'd send him back fifty or sixty years, I think.
You're right, though--knowing that the child would be a prodigy might be plausible based on some sort of subsequent genetic analysis, but knowing that he would find a cure for a specific disease is stretching credibility. The alternative is that time has already been altered and someone is attempting to fix it; but that's a bad alternative on a lot of levels, and I recommend avoiding it (bad enough that someone is trying intentionally to change the past; worse if they are trying to change it back).
Of course, it's possible that the traveler from the future is lying, and has his own reason for wanting to save the child. It's also possible that he's involved this person in his scheme because what he's doing is illegal but he hopes to get plausible deniability from using someone who can't know it's illegal.
Anyway, that's a lot of thoughts to consider.
--M. J. Young
Yeah, book two is quite a bit of stuff to pack in one book.
Well, one way of looking at the sword is to see it as Time's Arrow, or as the Clockface of Eternity (well, not Eternity, but it sounded good). In other words, the Sword rolls back the Present Moment, or it can. Of course, that's arguing that something like the Edge of the Future aka the Present exists in a time travel story.
The Edge of the Future did exist in the time-travelling witch story.
With Chekhov's shotgun, yeah, I didn't deal with it, but yeah I thought she'd probably play a role somewhere. She probably becomes the leader of the corruptive forces.
I've already had him leap back in a person...I could still use the lifespan thing.
The hero is supposed to leap back in a person, control them utterly, and do a simple mission. But because he leaps back slightly wrong, he is a not really in control visitor in the back of the target's mind that can influence the target. And I planned on having him bounce from mind to mind. It would be neat to have him bounce to a parrot and actually take over the parrot for a while.
The limit on time jumping back is because this is a story about abortion. The child prodigy gets aborted in timeline one. I can't go back further than before legal abortion.
The child prodigy is the sort of person who knows their life's work by the time they are three years old, and by nineteen graduates summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School. I might have to come up with some other reasons to shave the time. One thing is that the cure can be an experiment, and the hero's child is entered into the Human Phase Experiment Trials of this new treatment.
My solution to your information problem is that the scientists of the late 21st Century overthrew what is later known as the Materialist Superstition. By the time of the 2217 Jump Project, scientifically studied prayer is a valid if somewhat on the cutting edge of science method to get information. This overthrowing enables among other things, time travel, and a great flowering of science.
And continuing to delve into the story further, for some reason as yet unfigured out, I thought I'd have the child of the hero be also a prodigy to come, and his abilities are essential to the future. So the future wants the hero to save the girl who will save the boy who will save the future. The hero doesn't know that part.
There were abortions before they were legal, you know. But I can see wanting to frame it within the context of a legal abortion.
I like the notion of overthrowing the Materialist Superstition, but it might be a hard sell in the sci-fi market. Of course, it might make a much better story, too, and it would explain how future researchers can know what someone never born would have done.
It leads into a sovereignty paradox, though: it suggests that something in the world could have happened otherwise than fit God's plan, and God is going to allow time travel to correct it. That was probably the premise in Quantum Leap, so it's well-traveled ground, but it's still a sticky issue.
--M. J. Young
I know, but as you can see, it makes for a stronger story.
Yeah, this is a straightforward anti-abortion arguement. Just how many Einsteins and Tellers and Gates have we slaughtered, and how much better off would we be if we had not? Perhaps cancer would be cured, and we'd have a lunar moonbase and fusion reactors by now.
I was at a sf con recently, and I heard some lady on a panel say that Christianity and SF did not mix. She was not challenged. I've seldom heard so stupid a statement. In other words, yeah, its hard, but we need to throw down the strongholds of the enemy, and win back the imagination. Its said that Tolkien destroyed Wagner's ring of power. I'd like to take WAW: Tadeusz and destroy Elric of Melniborne among other things, and do what else I can to pull the SF field from its banality and lopsidedness.
God has a variety of plans. If you chose Option A, the best, then...if on the other hand, you have to be persuaded, then Option B. If like many humans you choose Option Z instead...
Father Andrew Greely talked about this in 'Contract With An Angel', about God having stories He or She wanted told, but changing the planned story when the person in the story changed to another story. Of course, God knows beforehand how the stories are going to be ultimately laid out. In the novel, the hero is offered a choice...Heaven now which seems pretty sweet, or he could go back to Earth and help raise ?grandkids? or kids who would be pretty great in the overall Plan. But the decision is up to the guy. He argues back with God that its not really a free choice because he knows what God prefers and since one always wants to please a loved one, he has to go back to Earth. God just smiles like the guy has a point.
This is kinda like what you talk about with 'advising God'.
I read George Gilder who explained that you can learn about a computer from the bottom up, or from the top-down. The top-down method is more useful. The lower categories of the computer are constrained by the higher categories. Most of the computer he argued was immaterial, and that the Universe was like that computer. This line of thinking I think may lead to the overthrowing of the Materialist Superstition. Denyse O'Leary of Post-Darwinist has a set of articles by Gilder on this idea on her blog. It was pretty good, I think. And Gilder is moderately famous and has been so for a long time. He wrote 'Men and Marriage' which was a lightbulb book for me. It got me to write one of my few poems as well which I think I've lost.
I want to track down the story about the spirit timejumper that I started working on. I'm not sure its on this site, or in the articles. Unlike MJ, my paper-covered desk with things stacked on top of things is not material, but in cyberspace. But its still sometimes hard to find things.
I must have more junk than you--I've got both.
I don't recall that particular story, but I'll admit that I've read so many stories in the past few years that I can't remember them all even when I'm looking at the covers of the books.
--M. J. Young