While I wait for my artist to finish the cover of Kyron the Swordsman (gggrrr) I thought I’d give you all the benefit of my thoughts on time travel – and the problems therein.
As I see it there are three types of time travel –
1: The easy type where the hero (sic) travels to an alternate reality so he can change the future without any problems of causality. (Arturo is an example of this)
2: Magical time travel where the problems of causality may or may not apply but the magical method of travel gets around the practical problems of mechanical time travel.
3. Mechanical time travel. HG Wells is the father of this sub-genre with the classic story The Time Machine. The problem with the the stories of mechanical time machines is that they almost never address the physical location problem that time travel inherently involves. The only time machine I can think that indirectly address the problem of location is the Tardis.
The problem with most time travel stories is that their machine may well be able to move backwards and even forwards along the time stream but they rarely, if ever, address the issue of physical displacement. If you go backward in time an hour the Earth will be in a different location. The earth is rotating at 460 m/sec and it is revolving around the sun at 30 kilometers per second and around the center of the galaxy at 220 k/sec and our galaxy is moving through space at nearly 1000 k/sec.
so in an hour the earth with have moved roughly 4,503,000 kilometers . This is roughly ten times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
basically it means that unless you have some way of moving your time machine and your self some four and half million kilometers back where the Earth came from your machine will emerge in the vacuum of space.
Go back a day and the distance you need to move is 108 million kilometers. Go back a week and you a most of the way to Jupiter. Travel backwards a year and you are a third of the way to Alpha Centauri.
And so on – This question of the sheer distance the Earth moves through space is almost never addressed in time travel stories. Trying work out where the Earth would be a hundred years ago would need a supercomputer, a big supercomputer!
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rhodanblog 
You say “alternate reality so he can change the future without any problems of causality. (Arturo is an example of this)” – oh, I thought/assumed (opps!) that Arturo’s TL was consistent. So his past is also his future.. n’est pas?
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No – Arturo shuttle’s warp jump while being accelerated by the plasma hit inadvertently caused the Universe to split at the point where he arrived. His old universe didn’t notice the split of course and continued on as it would to reach his time 5,000 years in the future. This is something not addressed in the books until the upcoming book 8 but is mentioned in the Princess books. That is how the Brythons, Kimerians and Iskander peoples began – ships making accidental warp jumps that cause a new universe to come into existence.
Most of the ships that are accelerating or decelerating when they warp jump are either destroyed in the jump due to the vibrations caused by accelerating or decelerating too fast. Otherwise the jumps are very random. The time traveled is totally random but usually between 0 and 10,000 years… and is almost always in one direction. By this I mean that if Arturo tries to return through the same warp point he arrived through then the time component will be forward (the opposite of his arrival) but the distance will be variable on an exponential scale.So if he got the acceleration exactly right (unlikely given it was caused by a hard to duplicate plasma blast) he would likely travel the same distance. Give or take a few light years.
The obvious problem is that the time component is random. He might well (theoretically) return to the same system he left from but only 1000 years in the current future or maybe 8000 years int he future, neither of which are what he wants. The odds of getting the time right are literally 10000 to 1
And there is the problem that the weird warp jumps splits the universe into a new version so unless he lands back almost at his right time everything will be different from the moment he arrives, wherever he arrives due to the butterfly effect.
Just for everybody’s reference. The Princess universe is approximately contemporary with us. The ship crew the Kimerians are descended from jumped back about 3,000 years from roughly a point in time approximately 2200 years in the future. In some universe.
essentially Arturo can never get “home”. The best he can do is land in a newly split universe at some point not too long after he disappeared originally. The ship the Kimerians are from jumped 50,000 light years across the galaxy.which is why they haven’t got anywhere near Earth yet.
Of course there are people who developed ways of moving from one universe to another but none of you have met them yet,
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MacGuffin! – but thanks!
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I don;t see how it is a MacGuffin. It is not an object or device that drives the plot and serves no other purpose. I presume you’re talking about the wonky warp trips?
I have a so far 5 book series about a contemporary wizard who spends his time magically exploring the multiverse that has been created by people (& aliens) doing these wonky warp jumps.
I have the Princess Universe which has people from three different universes in it. And the next book introduces people from a 4th universe.
I have the New Terran Federation universe where the research ship that accidently activated a warp jump while accelerating. in their universe they had developed a FTL Drive so didn’t use the warp jump method of Arturo and the Princess universes so didn’t realize what would happen. They landed in a universe that is predominately inhabited by 6 limbed life forms rather than 4 limbed – has at least one other (alien) group from yet another universe although no one realizes it and they meet humans from another universe the second book…..
They are all inter-related as will become clear later….
I also have 2 other hard sci-fi books that don;t use the warp jump method so are unrelated and a story about the development of a time travel device that worked but didn’t do those that developed it in part because they didn’t allow for that stuff in the main article – and where they did their calculation devices were inadequate….. the story is called Time’s Bell…… mostly only in outline at present.
for those that are interested I have a story I’m writing set in Pam Uphoff’s Wine of the Gods multiverse which I am thinking about serializing here at some point.
And other partially outlined story ideas.
I also have a sort of LitRPG book I am slowly writing, and another which is a human uber alles type book in mold of Wolfling, Hour of the Horde, the Napoleons of Eridanus and The Last Starfighter.
I even started a 1632 book that I haven’t made a lot of progress with.
then there is the Ithria fantasy novels – Taroniah’s arc, Kyron’s arc, the servant arc, the fantasy romances arc…..
but I digress…..
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Thanks –
Didn’t realise you had so many books out – I look fwd tor reading some more of them. Arturo is a great read.
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well – there are 7 Arturo 3 Princess & 1 ithria out with the second Ithria due out any day now..
Arturo 8 (the last Arturo in the Roman Empire) will be out in July followed by Taronia at War and then Kyron the Swordsman…. which will take us up to Xmas
I am still trying to find a publisher for my multidimensional contemporary wizard – if anyone has a suggestion I’ll be happy to submit the first book.
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No matter where you are in the observable universe, you’re in the exact* center. There is the Cosmic Background Radiation in every direction. It’s the same temperature (distance) in every direction. We’re not special. Someone in the Andromeda galaxy will see exactly the same thing. The only differentiation will be the size (age) of the universe. This means that space opera FTL travel is the same thing as time travel. [Waaa, no Honor Harrington] We can get around this if one really travels across multiverse rather within our universe. Star system travel or time travel. It also solves time travel paradoxes. Kill your grandfather? You just have a different grandfather. The multiverse is plastic, but still elastic. We can change it, but aspects of an observable reality tends back to an expected order. Honor only thinks she travels to the same Basilisk Station. As far as any observer can tell, it’s always consistent.
The problem is solved time travel and FTL travel are the same thing. Rotational speeds about the earth, solar system, galaxy, galactic cluster, supercluster, … Anyway you can measure speed is just part of what happens.
On to antigravity. If you were suddenly weightless, you’d continue going on a straight line. Even those the reset of the earth continues to rotate with the earth. It’s hard to image a case where you don’t go splat. Create a device that provides a weightless environment for you to experience. To survive, it needs to provide the illusion of an inertial reference. The device stays on the earth & maintains angular momentum. As long as you’re in contained within the bounds of the device, you just think you’re in zero gravity. We’re in luck, we solved that problem. If we go back to Honor’s multi-hundred story admiral headquarters, the device can’t keep adding another hundred floors. Unless it handles all aspects of a non-inertial reference phenomena. We really do need that intertidal sump. A place to dump all of that inconvenient stuff. In that case, we have hundreds of independent hundred floor buildings. Each dumping parts of what we don’t want. Dumping somewhere.
But where does it dump it? Another universe in the multiverse, naturally. Presuming any single universe has a set of meta verses, each universe can be structured on a mix-in set of meta verses. Our local cluster of universes can deal with time-travel, FTL, antigravity, and inertial compensation. There’s also something between the traditional meta/instance universe. To maintain the elasticity of experience across all of those things, there must be a meta verse that provides a number of expected outcomes. Each observer’s universe tends to that somewhat-meta verse. After killing your grandfather, that somewhat-meta verse brings your universe into line. You just end up with a different grandfather.
Worry about it a little bit, but’s that all.
p.s. It might be an Asimov story. After all of these decades, I can’t remember. There’s a story where some guy invents what’s appears to be free energy. Everything is converted to use it. Cars end up with twisty antenna that pick up this free energy to all them to move. Unfortunately, we’re still stuck with the first law of thermodynamics. And dG=dH-dS. In order to use that free energy, we need to change the energy potential and entropy of the multiverse. This earth civilization is killing another universe by polluting it with our entropy and stealing it’s energy potentials. So there’s no free lunch. To pull any of this stuff off, we’re probably destroying another universe. Luckily, we have those something-metaverses. There must be some metaverses that tends to distraction by our own actions. Even if we tried to save them, they’d still tend back to an early death.
I recommend reading Jean Johnson’s A Soldier’s Duty series.
* Let’s skip quantum fluctuations in the first moments of the universe.
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I’m not sure I can follow all that – or agree with the parts that I could follow, but it is interesting. I can remember reading that story as well. I’ve got the Jean Johnson books in my library and enjoyed reading them.
Have you ever read Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer?
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