{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1465",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1465,
    "subject": "Time and Fate",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-04-01T01:01:19+00:00",
    "last": "1999-04-01T01:01:19+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0024-0120@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Roy C. Lackey",
        "address": "rclackey at stic.net"
      },
      "date": "1999-04-01T01:01:19+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Time and Fate",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "    I knew better than to bring up time-travel paradoxes; it's an argument\nthat isn't winnable by anyone, yet I still maintain what I wrote earlier.\nBut, because time travel _isn't_ possible--other than in the personal,\npoetic, linear-future sense that John Bishop alluded to--I can't go back and\nchange it. It is precisely _because_ time-travel stories necessarily involve\nparadoxes that some authors attempt to circumvent them by various plot\ndevices; time travel only in one direction, one-time-only time travel,\nalternate timelines, limited time-travel duration, etc. Once unlimited time\ntravel is postulated then most anything is possible, given enough time. <g>\n\n    The only continuity there can be, from the point of view of the time\ntraveler, is in memory, which, by definition, is always of the personal\npast. Thus John Bishop's Dr. Parah, having published the purloined books,\nbecomes, for their readers, their author. Dr. Parah knows better. Sev, when\nCanog overhears him, is relating the plot of Dr. Talos's play, not events\nfrom his memory. Without resorting to the time-travel-paradox-dodging\ngimmicks mentioned above, one is left with such paradoxes.\n\n    When the entire universe--Urth's universe--can be traversed, spatially\nand temporally, from beginning to end, by a ship such as Tzadkiel's, then\nany possible outcome one desires can be achieved. Just keep doing it over\nand over again until you get it right, or cause it not to have happened in\nthe first place. All crises are false. There is no freewill; all is\npredetermined by whomever/whatever gets to make the rules. The game is\nfixed, and for all the myriad pawns--who are legion--that's just too damned\nbad.\n\n    When Tzadkiel, at the Brook Madregot, tells Sev that he could not have\ndied before his test, nor die before he brings the New Sun, then that is\npredestination. Whether Sev is aware or not at any point in his life of this\nis irrelevant; his \"free will\" is an illusion. He can not act differently\nbecause he did not act differently--in the future. This is not my opinion;\nthis is what the text says, chapter XL of _Urth_. Also there:\n\n    \"It must have appeared to Agilus and Typhon, and to many of the others\nwho struggled against you, that the fight was an unequal one. If they had\nbeen wise, they would have known the fight was over already, some where and\nsome time; but if they had been wise, they would have known you for our\nservant and not fought against you at all.\"\n\n    For all the unwashed masses, now washed in the New Flood of the New\nSun's coming, who had no part in old Sol's death agonies and resurrection,\nbut who had their personal time machines--their lives--snuffed out because\nof it, it must have come as no small satisfaction, as their lives flashed\nbefore their eyes, that their deaths were just \"collateral damage\" in a\ncosmic game that needn't have been played at all, or, if played, might just\nas well have been played by other rules on another board with different\npieces.\n\nRoy"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}