Looping Through Time

I love Don’s football analogy of how the time continuum thing got started. I didn’t realize that it was first conceived of by Poe. For some reason, I think of him as only a macabre writer (not one of my favorites, probably because he comes a little too close to home – he was the original Alfred Hitchcock for psyco-thrillers).

Some of our biggest movies and novels are based around “alt history”: Fatherland by Robert Harris and the movies The Terminator, Back to the Future and the most recent, Looper (which I haven’t seen.) Apparently, the formula is to change one or two events in the past, causing the present to become very different.

Zack Varvel has been playing with this concept in his Captain Jackson series. Currently his characters are 21^st Century marines caught in the Middle Ages. Zack has not been forth coming about whether or not they change time. You’d think he’d be willing to share that with his editor! Guess I’ll just have to wait like everyone else.

One of the things I read, and I can’t for the life of me remember from where, states that you can’t go back and change time. Even if you had the opportunity to say kill Hitler before he became the monster, because time is already set, you would never be able to change the course of history. Of course, this becomes one of the big plot drivers for the Sci-fi series, Eureka. I think that Dr. Who, especially this latest Dr. Who, discusses “fixed time” a lot. In fact, he lost my favorite characters, the Ponds, to fixed time. If I think about it further, The ghosts of Christmas Past and Future (Christmas Carole) don’t’ allow Scrooge to change time, but the Ghost of the Present embraces change and, depending on the version, actually encourages Scrooge to change – there-by changing time. Many a story has been built around the idea of layers of time rubbing up against each other. I wonder, can we actually exist in several time frames at the same time? And we are propelled into one or another depending on our decisions?

So, if I can’t change time big time, is there one small thing that I might do that would alter time just a little bit? The Butterfly wing effect. What would I do to change history – just one small thing… I often wonder what would happen if someone was not born, or maybe someone is born and they shouldn’t be. Can one person change history? I guess this is where I travel with an open mind and the realization that with every decision, I am changing time. How about you?

One of my favorite Star Treks was the "City on the Edge of Forever". Another one, with Captain Picard and crew, is the Star Trek version of Ground Hog Day called “Cause and Effect”. 

Carolyn

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