"... 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)
Nebula for "Gonna Roll the
Bones" (1967 Novelette). Hugos for The Big Time (1958 Novel);
The
Wanderer (1965 novel); and "Ship of Shadows" (1970 Novella).
Hugos and Nebulas for "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1971 Novella); and
"Catch That Zeppelin!" (1976 Short Story). The 1975 Gandalf Award
for Grandmaster, The 1976 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement,
1976 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, "Belsen Express"; 1978 World
Fantasy Award for Best Novel, Our Lady of Darkness; and the 1981
SFWA's award for Grand Master. Fritz Leiber dealt sometimes
with time paradoxes as in the short story The Man Who Never Grew Young
concerning a reverse flow of time; publ in Night's Black Agents, Arkham,
1947). The most important work on parallel worlds is certainly his The
Big Time (Galaxy March/April 1958; Ace 1961; Hugo-Award winning novel) Originally released with The
Mind Spider and Other Stories. The Big Time is part of the Changewar,
a series of stories written by Leiber charting the various battles of the
Snakes and the Spiders, two sides fighting a war across time. It was performed
as a play at the Babcock Theatre in Salt Lake City in 1982. "The Big Time, few comparable
tour de force exist anywhere in literature...being such a virtuoso performance
it doesn't seem to have had any followers. I admit to keeping it in mind
while writing my own 'A Midsummer Tempest', but cannot claim that that
employs the dramatic unities as the former book did. Evidently nobody in
our field can match Fritz Leiber here."
