The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
Proof that Time Travel Harry did not fix Little Chicago?? (CD Spoilers)
Griffyn612:
--- Quote from: Ms Duck on February 12, 2013, 06:15:16 PM ---couple of issues: you are assuming maeve and lilly created the time warp, and the weapons. I find that assumption dubious; Maeve was the bait, not the mastermind. She was standing at ground zero for crying out loud.
HHWx , who is in Mab's power level is to my mind a far more likely suspect.
second, your concept of time travel is more of the liberal rts type then the hard sci fi type; which works well for some worlds but not as well for Jim's. Conservation of energy exists; its not just the change you have to account for, its the sending the person back to make the change in the first place.
What Odin is saying the farther you send someone back, the more power it takes, and he's also saying its so dang expensive that even people like Mab don't do it- that's why she uses precog instead, where she looks into possible futures and makes changes in the now to make those futures more likely.
which is why Rashid and Mab are far more likely suspects; both can see the possible future, and both had access to the now that was required.
;)
--- End quote ---
Now you're just being contrary.
First, I'm not just assuming Maeve and Lily created the time warp. Maeve created a time-dilation field in PG, when working with Lily. Then it occurs again in CD, when Maeve and Lily are working together to attack DR across time. When Harry asks who could have done it, Odin Claus says that Harry has encountered this before. Harry then replies that it's one of the Queens, or someone on their level. All of that works together. Or... we can assume that one of the Walkers, who haven't shown any time-dilation ability, can do it as well. Which is a more reasonable assumption?
Second, I'll admit I'm not as up to snuff on the science fiction protocols on time-travel. But we've seen at least 4 instances of time manipulation. One is mostly mental (Lash in WN), two are distortions (Maeve-Lily in PG/CD), and Uriel being all anti-linear in GS. There was no apparent cost to Uriel's stepping out of linear time in GS; at his level, the power required probably is negligible.
So far, you haven't provided anything about Merlin's time manipulation to create the prison. All you've said is that it isn't possible. But since it clearly happened, it must be possible, at least in the Dresdenverse. The Erlking himself admits in CD that time "is a massive force, all but beyond even our control." But by Odin's definition, the high energy requirement is to CHANGE the past. What I'm proposing isn't CHANGING the past; it's fulfilling what will be because it was always meant to be. Someone had a plan for the prison, and Merlin was the tool (as you like to look at it). Merlin cast the wards, but someone else was probably involved in the time aspects of the creation.
In the argument for TTH, the proposal is that Harry could travel back in time by using a time-nexus-bridge-within-a-pocket-dimension on DR. For that argument, it already happened because the two times are the same, allowing him to go back. Therefore there wouldn't need to be a huge expenditure to CHANGE the past. There would merely be the expenditure to create the time-nexus-bridge-within-a-pocket-dimension to begin with. And since it's happened before, in the Dresdenverse, it could happen again, if the NEED were great enough.
Cenphx:
But then why did Odin tell Harry about the temporal echoes from changing the past at all? If the echoes from Maeve and Lily at DR werent from them changing the past, then when did Odin give Harry that part of the explanation, which was both useless and wrong? I could see Odin giving Harry info he would also need for a different situation later on, but the way you've theorized time travel, none of the potential examples we have in the books are actually changing time, so no temporal echoes, and Odin's info again applies to nothing. I dont think Odin or Jim gave us the explanation of the way those echoes work not to have it apply somewhere in TDF.
Cenphx:
@ neurovore -- re: having a universe in which both closed time travel loops and altering the past are possible even though they appear, to our ability to understand, mutually exclusive. The way I understand what you are saying, tell me if I am wrong, is kind of how light is both a wave and a particle, which I know to be true but cannot grasp how it is both at the same time. Or thay schrodingers cat thing. Sometimes I have to accept that my mind cant make paradoxes fit together understandably and the aforementioned time travel paradox might be one. The problem is, this is a work of fiction, which in a lot of ways, has to be *more understandable* than the universe for a reader to follow the action and for the action to be believable. You could write a book where the in-unverse rules were the craziness of quantum particles, but it would be so foreign that it would hardly be storytelling, I would think.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Cenphx on February 12, 2013, 07:28:38 PM ---@ neurovore -- re: having a universe in which both closed time travel loops and altering the past are possible even though they appear, to our ability to understand, mutually exclusive. The way I understand what you are saying, tell me if I am wrong, is kind of how light is both a wave and a particle, which I know to be true but cannot grasp how it is both at the same time.
--- End quote ---
Not really. I am positing that a universe (real or fictional) could exist such that some modes of time travel, or behaviours while travelling in time, lead to a closed loop, and other modes of time travel, or behaviour while time-travelling lead to changing the past.
--- Quote --- Or thay schrodingers cat thing. Sometimes I have to accept that my mind cant make paradoxes fit together understandably and the aforementioned time travel paradox might be one. The problem is, this is a work of fiction, which in a lot of ways, has to be *more understandable* than the universe for a reader to follow the action and for the action to be believable. You could write a book where the in-unverse rules were the craziness of quantum particles, but it would be so foreign that it would hardly be storytelling, I would think.
--- End quote ---
I am pretty sure Greg Egan has done exactly that, fwiw, in several short stories and the novel Quarantine, and while they are fairly intellectual stories they still work. I'd also note that Homestuck appears to be successful for of the order of a million readers, with a plot that has both closed-loop time-travel and alternate-world versions happening to an extent to make a Doctor Who season finale look like a game of tic-tac-toe, so it's possible for a good storyteller to make very complex time-travel work in a popular-fiction mode (even one whose primary audience is young teens), and Jim's definitely a good storyteller in a popular-fiction mode.
Griffyn612:
--- Quote from: Cenphx on February 12, 2013, 07:19:20 PM ---But then why did Odin tell Harry about the temporal echoes from changing the past at all? If the echoes from Maeve and Lily at DR werent from them changing the past, then when did Odin give Harry that part of the explanation, which was both useless and wrong? I could see Odin giving Harry info he would also need for a different situation later on, but the way you've theorized time travel, none of the potential examples we have in the books are actually changing time, so no temporal echoes, and Odin's info again applies to nothing. I dont think Odin or Jim gave us the explanation of the way those echoes work not to have it apply somewhere in TDF.
--- End quote ---
I think JB was using that opportunity to establish the idea of parallel alternate timelines in the Dresdenverse. My guess is that someone will use time-travel to change something, or they already have, and JB is going to go the parallel-time-line route rather than the traditional time-travel route. I don't see JB doing both a TT-back story and a TT-parallel story in the remaining 6 books before the BAT. And since he's already shown enthusiasm for a Mirror Mirror story, the TT-back plot is probably out.
And I seriously doubt that Harry will time-travel back to PG to do anything, even if a TT-back plot were introduced. But my point is that he could, and it would explain some things. Pretty much all the other theories are easier, and infintely more likely. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't happen.
Put simply, the TTH theory doesn't offer any solutions that can't be reached by other theories; it simply opens the door for another layer to the pre-existing story of PG, making it more complex.
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