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... and, by extension, of all the rest of the Willis time travel series, in an attempt to explain (away) the research issues plus the idiot plot characteristics.
In the grand tradition of New Readings for Old Plays, I suggest that the books reflect a late stage in the process of a universe which has been so fsck'd by a combination of time travel and a process which preserves core elements of the timestream that
(1) There are many, many divergences in detail between its timeline and ours: like a Jubilee Line which commemorates either Victoria or George V, or a complete absence of cell phones in the future.
(2) There is pressure the universe itself applies to agents who interact with the time travel system, either directly or at one remove, which has the visible effect of reducing the effective intelligence (or memory capabilities) of the agent when necessary to achieve a required end.
(3) The agency in the universe is either enamoured of Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson mechanisms or follows unknown constraints which prevent it from effecting direct and simple adjustments to preserve its sanity (Niven's position that where time travel is possible and can change the past, time travel will not be developed is obviously right out).
(4) Because of the tendency for (some major) traits of the time stream to be preserved, enough of history is preserved that it can be difficult to determine at a macro level that this is an alternate history universe. It's sort of the opposite of Jo Walton's Small Change universe: no matter how much the historians do to the time stream it keeps looking similar at a large scale to the way it used to, and in particular, the Axis always loses WWII.
(5) Leibniz rules in this version of the Universe.
In the grand tradition of New Readings for Old Plays, I suggest that the books reflect a late stage in the process of a universe which has been so fsck'd by a combination of time travel and a process which preserves core elements of the timestream that
(1) There are many, many divergences in detail between its timeline and ours: like a Jubilee Line which commemorates either Victoria or George V, or a complete absence of cell phones in the future.
(2) There is pressure the universe itself applies to agents who interact with the time travel system, either directly or at one remove, which has the visible effect of reducing the effective intelligence (or memory capabilities) of the agent when necessary to achieve a required end.
(3) The agency in the universe is either enamoured of Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson mechanisms or follows unknown constraints which prevent it from effecting direct and simple adjustments to preserve its sanity (Niven's position that where time travel is possible and can change the past, time travel will not be developed is obviously right out).
(4) Because of the tendency for (some major) traits of the time stream to be preserved, enough of history is preserved that it can be difficult to determine at a macro level that this is an alternate history universe. It's sort of the opposite of Jo Walton's Small Change universe: no matter how much the historians do to the time stream it keeps looking similar at a large scale to the way it used to, and in particular, the Axis always loses WWII.
(5) Leibniz rules in this version of the Universe.
