I saw in the news that Patrick Stewart is going to act in a new Star Trek series that will follow Captain Picard in his later years. I always thought he was the quintessential Starfleet captain, unlike Kirk, who was just a loose cannon most of the time. However, I just watched (how many times now?) Star Trek IV, arguably the best whale movie ever made (sure beats the hell out of Moby Dick, that boring and awful treatise on how to turn whale blubber into lamp oil). Kirk and his minions were a lot of fun in that Star Trek movie, and it speaks to one of my pet issues, species extinction caused by human beings.

The movie also contains the franchise’s version of time travel—something about going Warp 10 around the sun, playing on McCoy’s challenge to Spock to make a guess on how to control the target time (Sheldon’s not around to explain, physicist to ex-physicist, just how this works!). That gets the crew from the 23^rd century to the 20^th in a Klingon vessel that can cloak, which is convenient for their landing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Probably the best Star Trek movie made so far (the redux versions suffer from Hollywood thriller bloat, although they have their moments).

I’ve also finished the bio of Alan Turing, learning a bit more about his ideas for AI that were far ahead of his time. He was also associated with the Brits actually beating the Americans in making the first functional computer, although the Brits should be prouder of him and more indebted to him for saving their butts in WWII for breaking the Enigma code (Great Britain might be a Third Reich province otherwise). They unfairly rewarded him for that, if you can call what they did a reward, basically forcing him to commit suicide because he was gay (LGBT rights were a longtime coming to Great Britain).

At any rate, I was happy to see that my ideas about digitizing a human mind in Survivors of the Chaos (the second edition is now included in the bundle The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection) might have appealed to the famous mathematician Alan Turing. Two characters’ minds become digitized, and they catch a ride aboard an ET starship, only to reappear in Sing a Zamba Galactica (#2 in the trilogy), where they become human beings again centuries later after they disappeared (they go on to play important roles in all that follows). That’s like a Star Trek transporter operating in slo-mo. (As a matter of fact, why transport the body with the mind when you can just digitize the mind?).

Besides my forced nexus between these two stories thanks to the Star Trek franchise, why in the world (or in the near-Earth regions of the Galaxy) would I consider these disparate tales? Simple! I’ve shied away from time travel in my sci-fi writing (OK, I have a few short stories about the subject, but no novels) because I avoid paradoxes. Time travel can lead to them—the story of the time traveler who steps on a butterfly and changes the future, or another fellow killing his grandfather before he or his father was born, are examples.

James Hogan in The Proteus Operation avoids these types of paradoxes by appealing to the “many worlds of quantum mechanics,” an interpretation of quantum mechanics defined in a Princeton thesis by Hugh Everett III (his adviser, John Wheeler, was also Richard Feynman’s adviser) that works much better for me than Niels Bohr’s bat-mad “collapse of the wave packet” AKA Copenhagen interpretation. The Bohr Institute is still in Copenhagen. By the way, Bohr had to flee from the Nazis, and Hogan’s story is about killing Hitler, so if that Proteus Operation succeeds (were to succeed? succeeded?), Bohr wouldn’t have had to flee, and maybe Turing could have solved other outstanding problems in abstract mathematics instead of being distracted by war research…or British homophobia!

As I said, Hogan’s story avoids the paradoxes; it’s just about the only time-travel story that does! But I find it unsatisfying, because, if I’m going to travel in time, I’d want to stick to my own worldline, thank you, and not jump to some other Steve Moore’s, or have one of them take over the one I’m now on.

So, I come full circle (and covering both sides of a Mobius strip in time?) to my new solution to time-travel paradoxes. As Jenny Wong and Henry Posada show in Surivivors of the Chaos (my two characters previously mentioned–the second edition is contained in the bundle advertised belos), would-be time travelers can all digitize themselves and hop around their worldlines all they want—they’re all identical computer files, so when they reassemble in my slo-mo version of Star Trek’s transporter as human beings, everything has to be the same!

Aha, I see a flaw! While all those files are exact replicas, where they come from and go to are all different. Maybe we have to turn everyone into computer files and go through the process? Maybe the whole Universe? This also makes me wonder how many George and Gracie copies there are (were?), going where no whales have gone before!

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection is on sale now at Smashwords—last few days for 50% off! Readers can go from a dystopian Earth to the far reaches of the Galaxy in this epic sci-fi trilogy. As Scotty would say to Kirk, “There be ETs here, Captain!” in contrast to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (his time-travel novel, The End of Eternity, explains how this came to be). For the Collection, use the code on checkout to get the reduced price from Smashwords. Or you can buy the bundle on Amazon if that floats your boat (starship?).

In libris libertas!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2018 at 3:30 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.