currently reading "outlander" by diana gabaldon. i'm a bit late to the party, the book having published 25 years ago, but hell, better late than never, am i right?
outlander is a story about a woman who steps through a stone circle and is transported from 1945 scotland to 1743 scotland. it's exciting enough and all, but i'm not here to talk about outlander. i'm here to talk about time travel.
whenever someone goes back in time -- e.g., every freaking story ever written about going back in time -- the time travelers are explicitly warned by whatever expert gave them the spell, charm, potion, hex, talisman, ring, powder, amulet, or incantation to NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN THE PAST. they are so terrifically, frighteningly, precisely, plainly, unequivocally warned that the fact that we are to NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN THE PAST whenever we visit the past is common knowledge. i mean, it's knowledge so common that babies are born knowing it.
so.
DO NOT CHANGE THE PAST.
except, in outlander. apparently, no one told li'l claire beauchamp not to change the past, because she never considers this as she merrily tromps through the mid-eighteenth century. i mean, at the rate she is going, there's an excellent chance that she is going to do something that will result in her never having been born.
and what then? if she does something in the 200-year past that precludes her birth, does she spontaneously disappear from the past? or, is her extant self somehow retained, in its past incarnation?
while we're at it, if she changes something in the past, wouldn't the residual ripples of change result in a changed 1945 that is not experienced as "changed" at all by anyone in 1945 because the change occurred 200 years previously?
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