The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
Discontinuity = clue? [GS sample ch spoilers]
Ziggelly:
Nevermind... I answered my own question.
Nothing to see here.
Barzai:
--- Quote from: knnn on July 18, 2011, 05:35:27 PM ---Thing is, it's more than just forgotten memories. If you look at Serack's OP, you'll find that Mort had moved away from his California-style house by the beginning of DB. So either Mort moved back so the place he had previously sold - just in time for Harry to go there (remember he writes down a specific address, not just "take me to Morty"), or *something else* is going on.
My current take on things is that's it's an "Enterprise C" sort of scenario, i.e. Harry has been transported to a sort of alternate universe where "history" is different:
effects so far:
1) Mort never moved.
2) He's known about his grandfather/daughter for a while.
3) His hand never got burned.
Following this logic down a rabbit hole, all this suggests that the point of change took place between chapter 10 of Dead Beat (when he visits Mort) and the story of Death Masks (when Maggie is conceived).
So why?
- One possibility is that the "timeline shift" is actually an attempt by Uriel et al. to help Harry (i.e. make it easier for him to solve his murder and thereby get back).
- The other possibility I am currently playing with is that the murder weapon itself was a sort of Entropy Curse (possibly pointing toward Lord Raith as the culprit - which matches the timeline):
Consider that a turkey falling out of an airplane flying at 30,000 feet can take around a minute to hit the ground. This means that in order for a falling turkey hit a moving target (especially when the target gets changed at the last moment), you need to somehow know in advance where your target will be standing. Assuming we accept this, it means that an entropy curse can somehow reach back in time to achieve the currently desired effects. Yadda Yadda.
--- End quote ---
Wait (if this has been brought up, I apologize - I haven't gotten to the end of the thread before posting):
What if the discrepancies are because Harry died before he was able to time travel in a later book. As in, somewhere in the future, he would be going back and meddling in various ways (or he would send someone else back). Therefore, he remembers certain things, but not others - and changes he would have gone back and done have been undone...
Ok - that all hurts. The paradox, it burns...
[attempt to edit for clarity - capitalizing Changes in the second to last sentence was a cute play on book names, but really confusing.]
Serack:
--- Quote from: Barzai on July 18, 2011, 09:58:41 PM ---Wait (if this has been brought up, I apologize - I haven't gotten to the end of the thread before posting):
What if the discrepancies are because Harry died before he was able to time travel in a later book. As in, somewhere in the future, he would be going back and meddling in various ways (or he would send someone else back). Therefore, he remembers certain things, but not others - and changes he would have gone back and done have been undone...
Ok - that all hurts. The paradox, it burns...
[attempt to edit for clarity - capitalizing Changes in the second to last sentence was a cute play on book names, but really confusing.]
--- End quote ---
Oooh, oooh...
Here's what it might be. Harry, as dead Harry, is living in a world where time is a different mechanism. In the series up to Ghost Story, things have been effected by something that time traveler Harry from the future (likely within the story of Ghost Story) did. Now, having died, time isn't effecting him in the normal "stream" and that timeline shift is no longer effecting him, and he is experiencing things as if that change had never happened. He can't know about it, or paradoxageddon...
So Harry at some point in Ghost Story is likely to go back and do something that effects where Mort lives, so that he ends up moving out of the California import, and moves to the duplex, rectifying the timeline he is currently experiencing, back into the one he has experienced up to this point...
Or something like that.
taishojojo:
I get that Harry will break all the laws... yadda yadda.
There's a thematic difference in going back in time to say... the dawn of time and say somewheres in your own lifespan +\- 100 years.
This whole time-y whime-y wibbly-wobbly is disturbing.
Serack:
--- Quote from: taishojojo on July 19, 2011, 01:01:12 PM ---I get that Harry will break all the laws... yadda yadda.
There's a thematic difference in going back in time to say... the dawn of time and say somewheres in your own lifespan +\- 100 years.
This whole time-y whime-y wibbly-wobbly is disturbing.
--- End quote ---
Yah, I'm always very skeptical of any theory based off of time travel (including this one). Because I usually think they are cheap, and are likely to introduce more problems in the story than they fix.
However, as the title implies, there is a serious, almost blatant discontinuity here.
On top of that we have the author strongly implying that Harry will break the law on time travel at some point in the series. There is also a seperate comment comparing the opening timeline of this book to the first scene of BTTF2... which might be a big flashing arrow to time travel being the culprit for the discontinuity as well.
Speaking of magical solutions creating more problems than they fix. I haven't plugged Brandon Sanderson's First Law of magic in a while. It basically states that if a writer is writing a book with magic, that magic's ability to solve problems in the book has to be proportional to how well the readers understand how it works.
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