Robert Heinlein
(1907-1988)
"... The classic argument
against time-travel is that it would allow a man to go back into the past
and to kill one of his direct ancestors, thus making himself - and probably
a considerable fraction of the human race - non-existent.
Some ingenious authors (notably
Robert Heinlein and Fritz Leiber) have accepted this challenge and said,
in effect: "Very well - suppose such paradoxes do occur. What then?
One of their answers is the concept of parallel time-tracks. They assume
that the past is not immutable - that one could, for instance, go back
to 1865 and deflect the aim of John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre. But
by so doing, one would abolish our world and create another, whose history
would diverge so much from ours that it would eventually become wholly
different.
Perhaps in a sense all possible
universes have an existence, like the tracks in an infinite marshalling
yard, but we merely move along one set of rails at a time. If we could
travel backwards, and change some key event in the past, all that we would
really be doing would be going back to a switch-point and setting off on
another time-track..."
(Arthur C. Clarke: About Time,
from "Profiles of the Future",
London, Pan Books 1973)
Robert Anson Heinlein was born
on July 7th, 1907 and his first story was "Life-Line" (in April
1939 submitted to
John W. Campbell's Astounding
Science Fiction). Campbell bought this story at one cent per word,
or $70. Robert Heinlein belongs to the legendary sci-fi authors.
He received 4 Hugos for: Double Star (1956 Novel); Starship Troopers
(1960 Novel); Stranger in a Strange Land (1962 Novel); and, The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1967 Novel). The SFWA's 1974 Grand Master
Award and a 1998 inductee into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of
Fame.
a short story from the Golden
Age of science-fiction about mind-bending time-travel: "By His Bootstraps"
(ASF, October, 1941, as by Anson MacDonald, in Menace)
a quotation from Heinlein's "Elsewhen":
"Jenkins said: 'But that is
impossible, Professor. You aren't built to observe two time dimensions.'
'Easy , there...,' answered
Frost. 'I am built to percieve them one at a time - and so are you.
I'll tell you about it, but before I do so, I must explain the theory of
time I was forced to evolve in order to account for my experience. Most
people think of time as a track that they run on from birth to death as
inexorably as a train follows its rails - they feel instinctively that
time follows a straight line, the past lying behind, the future lying in
front. Now I have reason to believe - to know - that time is analagous
to a surface rather than a line, and a rolling hilly surface at that. Think
of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut
through hill. Every little way the road branches and the branches follow
side canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take
place. You can turn right or left into entirely different futures. Occasionally
there is a switchback where one can scramble up or down a bank and skip
over a few thousand or million years - if you don't have your eyes so fixed
on the road that you miss the short-cut...
...if you have the necessary
intellectual strength and courage, you may leave the roads, or paths of
high probability, and strike out over the hills of possible time, cutting
through the roads as you come to them, following them for a little while,
even following them backwards, with the past ahead of you, and the future
behind you. Or you might roam around the hilltops doing nothing but the
extremely improbable. I cannot imagine what it would be like - perhaps
a bit like Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass.'"
(Professor Arthur Frost in Robert Heinlein's short story "Elsewhen",
published as "Elsewhere"
in "Assignment in Eternity", 1953)
