The Problem With Predestination

It's important to establish limitations for oneself. If everything is valid, the scope of potential choices can become dizzying, and you can easily find yourself making no progress at all. That's why, when I'm writing and establishing my setting, I so far have two rules that I stick by.

• No magic artificial gravity; and
  
• NO TIME TRAVEL.

The second of those two is, in my mind, the most important. Whereas magic artificial gravity (that is, gravity produced by anything other than mass, acceleration, or rotation) merely gives the laws of physics a few swirlies, time travel can - and, in fictional depictions, frequently does - shake the foundations of all reality. The most disturbing example of this is the predestination paradox: to put it simply, this is a form of time travel where the act of intervening in history changes nothing about the present, for the simple reason that the intervention had always been part of history. I've mentioned my dislike of predestination paradoxes earlier.

The reason I don't like the idea is a very straightforward one - when first examined, it completely negates the concept of free will. Though this question does crop up for the time travellers involved directly in "making history," I'm thinking more in the grand scheme. While the time travellers may question whether or not they're just the instruments of history, a predestination paradox effectively reduces everyone else to deterministic automatons.

This aspect may not be immediately obvious - it took me years to realize the implications, but the implications do nonetheless exist. The people other than the time travellers, from the moment they arrive in the past to the instant they depart the future, must not have any free will - because, otherwise, the time travellers might never have the opportunity to travel through time in the first place. Choices deep in history resonate chaotically, and an innocuous decision made in the past could prevent the time travellers from ever being born. Entire lifetimes could easily be spent within the "locked-down zone" between future and past, billions of people following a script they can never see, to ensure that history unfolds as it needs to, and no one would really be responsible for their actions - after all, they didn't have a choice.

I find it rather disturbing, personally. I don't plan right now to do any time travel-related work, but if I did, I would do what I could to get around the question of predestination. The idea of the observer effect has a particular appeal to me - rather than get all caught up in the issues of the absence of free will, I'd rather explore the implications of time, from a non-linear and non-subjective viewpoint, actually unfolding in anachronic order. Time travellers from 2050 going back to 1750 wouldn't, in this case, worry about creating three hundred years of determination, because technically speaking 1750 hadn't happened yet.

It's just an idea that comes with plenty of headaches - so well fitted, I think, for something to do with time travel.

Thoughts on a Suburban Walkabout

Last night I raced a streetcar on foot and won. In its defense, though, it was a race through the Entertainment District on the first day of a long weekend, and the first warm day of the year at that. After it had sat at the Spadina intersection for four or five traffic light cycles because the cars kept inching past it into the crammed lanes beyond, refusing to allow it an opportunity to continue, I decided to take my destiny into my own hands and walk. On reaching Bathurst Street, where the Entertainment District and Fashion District traffic thankfully peters out, I waited a few minutes and boarded the same streetcar I had left behind at Spadina. It might've been easier to just stay on the streetcar - but I didn't have a seat and didn't feel like standing around. At least the way I did it, I got a walk out of it.

Past Bathurst the streetcar really moved, as they are wont to do, and it gave me a chance to reflect. I can't imagine myself as having done that when I was younger, but what I've come to realize is the sheer weight of the habits that are formed in early childhood and just endure. My current project to photograph every streetcar operated by the Toronto Transit Commission shouldn't come as a surprise, I think, from someone who always dashed to the train set for free play in kindergarten. But I never just walked when I was a kid, the way I do now. My question is simple - why? My potential answer - environment.

To put it simply, I have to wonder if the difference between urban and suburban development is prominent in how those exploratory urges are expressed.

I grew up in Barrie which, although outside the Greater Toronto Area, is a sprawling city with quick links to Toronto thanks to Highway 400 passing through it. Today, it's surrounded by vast tracts of residential subdivisions scattered over what was good agricultural land ten years ago, but even in the 1990s it wasn't exactly a model of New Urbanism. Neighborhoods tended to bleed together, the only real difference being in the design of the houses that lined the streets. Whenever I ended up going downtown on my own without taking Barrie Transit, I would take my bike - at least it was faster.

I think that suburbs are designed in such a way that walking from place to place is subconsciously discouraged - not that this was an intentional introduction by the people who built them, but a result of optimizing them for automobile journeys. When I walked along Sheppard Avenue East a few weeks ago, I felt like I'd covered a lot of ground by the time I reached Kennedy - ultimately, it ended up being only 3.5 kilometers. I'd recently done a wandering walk from my apartment to Yonge and Dundas, weaving and wandering through dense downtown neighborhoods, hardly feeling tired at all.

It's the scale, I think, that discourages. In dense areas like downtown Toronto, the cityscape around you is always changing, and things are tight-packed and clustered together. Sometimes the suburbs, by contrast, feel like they've been built for giants - buildings are far back from the road and widely separated from each other, there aren't nearly as many people on the sidewalks, and the cityscape seems unchanging - just the same houses or apartment blocks between the major intersections, and the same shopping plazas with gas stations and convenience stores at those intersections. In a dense community, exploration is rewarded almost immediately, which can distract from the length of the journey - but in more sparsely-built suburbs, the journey is harder to ignore.

At least, that's a possibility. I'd be interested in hearing how off-base you think I am.

Ethics at Eighty-Eight Miles Per Hour

Again and again, people keep coming back to time travel. Stories involving time travel are popular because, in part, they tap into our common desire to fix the mistakes of our past, to take what we know now and get 100% completion. The TV series Quantum Leap, where Scott Bakula leapt from life to life striving to set right what once went wrong, is a sterling example of this. The Back to the Future trilogy leans more toward the temptations and dangers inherent in that premise. Yesterday, I saw the trailers for a new time travel movie, Hot Tub Time Machine, which - and I know this will shock you - is about a hot tub that is also a time machine.

This movie, incidentally, looks like it will be worth seeing, if only for the time travel and massive '80s-retro factor. Nevertheless, I can't help but ignore that with the trailer taglines "forget the present, change the future," it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Whether it's the guys of Hot Tub Time Machine ("We could combine Viagra with Twitter! Twittagra!"), Marty McFly with Gray's Sports Almanac in hand, the heroes of Chrono Trigger fighting to save the world from Lavos across sixty-five million years, or the time traveller of the day simply resolving to take advantage of future knowledge to reshape the way it all unfolds, all too often there's a massive elephant in the room that the writers either don't notice or refuse to address.

There are two fundamental theories for how time travel could work. The first, which is my personal preference, is that time travel would create a branching of timelines; at the point the time travellers arrived, a new timeline would split off from the one they left, allowing them to manipulate history and the future to their heart's content while their original timeline goes chugging on. The second, which was explicitly used in Back to the Future, postulates one single timeline. In this theory, time travellers actually enter their own history, and in so doing put themselves in a positions where their actions could delete their present and replace it with another, stemming from their actions in the changed past.

Where the elephant comes into play is that, if the second theory is the one that's used in the story, through the act of changing history the time traveller will effectively become history's worst mass murderer. The actions of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all the rest are nothing compared to what one guy with a time machine in a single-timeline universe could do without even realizing it. Sometimes, of course, the time travellers do realize this - thus making this the Time Traveller's Dilemma.

Maybe it's because I don't put any stock in the concept of a "soul" that this rubs me the wrong way so much. Ultimately, though, I think this is a function of a rational outlook on the universe. Take even a situation where time travel is utterly necessary - say, without going back a few decades for some reason, the universe will be destroyed. In a single-timeline world, everyone but the time travellers would be killed regardless of whether they are successful - the only difference would be if they're killed by the event the time travel was meant to avert, or killed when the successful temporal intervention removes them from time.

The fact of the matter is, time travel is not only dangerous, it can easily cause headaches. For the good of everything, it's best to leave the time circuits off and to keep the flux capacitor from fluxing. Besides, if you're a really unlucky time traveller, you might avoid changing the future by stumbling into something that's far, far worse...

...a predestination paradox. I hate predestination paradoxes.

The Fulcrum That Walked Like A Man

There's an old theory that the tides of history ebb and flow from the influence of Great Men. This theory, popular in the 19th century but today unwelcome in the halls of academe, is based upon the degree to which the actions of singular influential "historical heroes" determine how events played out. Going by it, the American Revolution was won by the skill and fortitude of George Washington rather than the logistical and strategic challenges which the American environment posed to a military accustomed to Old World combat. I can see, in some respects, why its fall from grace took place. Individual actors are not the only ingredient in the grand scope of history, and in many cases it doesn't make an incredible difference who's running the show.

This is one of the most critical considerations for any aspiring author of alternate history.

On the battlefields of the First World War, say, individual generals can be seen as caught up in the current of history and the dominating philosophy of the times, which reduced soldiers to so many pawns thrown away for little or no gain.

And yet, even then, there were individuals that nudged things the other way. Witness Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps in 1917 and architect of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. If someone like Field Marshal Haig was in charge instead, I find it distinctly implausible that a more traditional British general would have taken the steps that won Vimy Ridge for Canada.

GURPS Infinite Worlds is probably one of the most dedicated sourcebooks on alternate history we'll get for a while, and it includes three lenses for game masters building their own parallel worlds. The first is that of the Great Man, as above. The second is the Great Moment, which gives the most weight to greater social forces - the example it provides is that if Adolf Hitler had died in a 1917 gas attack, say, the postwar situation of Germany was such that "Julius Streicher or Joseph Goebbels or some unknown street fighter might have become dictator and launched World War II and the Final Solution." The third is the Great Motherland theory, which draws a great deal of inspiration from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, where history is based primarily on geographic factors and environmental adaptation.

Nevertheless, the Great Motherland theory is a blunt instrument if there ever was one, and is best suited for exploring the Grand Sweep of history; any closer, and it's like using a telescope for reading glasses. Bear in mind that a world in which western Eurasian civilization is dominant would, under this theory, describe our world and one in which Nazi Germany rules Europe equally well.

In my own opinion, all three lenses work, but at different resolutions of history. Right now, I'm working on an alternate history short where Pierre Trudeau was killed in 1968, jumping off the point of divergence I looked at in "To the Gallows" in January, and the question of how one man's absence would alter history is weighing heavily on my mind.

It wouldn't destroy Canada. Neither would it make it a utopia. Countries are bigger than individuals, even when those individuals lead them, and from a distance a Trudeau-less Canada in 2009 would likely be broadly similar to our 2009 in terms of population, wealth, industries and so on.

Getting closer, though, Trudeau shaped Canadian society to an extent that few others have, before or since. It was Trudeau that pushed through official, nationwide bilingualism and the National Energy Program - two moves that other Prime Ministers in his place might not have done. The culture of an Alberta that never asked for those Eastern bastards to freeze in the dark would, again, be broadly similar to our Alberta - it would take something on the order of global thermonuclear war to keep people from exploiting the tar sands - but would likely be noticeably different.

Furthermore, there's the issue of Quebec. There's no telling how a different Prime Minister in 1970 would have dealt with the October Crisis. The world is a fundamentally chaotic system, and from time to time individuals do have a long enough lever to move the world.

You may notice I used a lot of words like "possibly" and "likely" and so on in this post. For that, I only have recourse to S.M. Stirling, who quite rightly observed at a recent Worldcon panel that "alternate history is the ultimate non-falsifiable hypothesis."