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rfmcdonaldI've already mentioned that one excellent and realistic piece of time-travel alternate history fiction on the Internet is Dragan Antulov's Just Another September 1939 ISOT, concerning a Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that was transported back in time from 1985 to the first day of the Second World War. Perhaps the best unrealistic piece of time-travel alternate history on the Internet is James Nicoll's "There's Something About Titan" [1, 2, 3].
As I wrote in the previous posting on Mr. Antulov's story, the in-the-sea-of-time subgenre of alternate history has the inherent risk of becoming a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy, when people represetning your preferred nation and/or ideology come back and remake the contemporary world as you think it should be remade. This makes for unsatisfying stories: If an American-libertarian Mars, or a European-social democratic Eurasia, or an aggressively transhumanist South Atlantic federation, comes back in time with technologies and militaries decades if not centuries ahead of the rest of the world, who can doubt the eventual outcome?
James Nicoll is well-known on soc.history.what-if for his well-thought astronomical alternate-history questions--what if Mars was covered by an ocean as proportionally dense as Europa's? what if Venus was tide-locked to the Sun and had a quasi-habitable darkside? what if Sol had a binary companion? He had the genius to realize that if one's destroying the contemporary world and reorganizing it along the lines of an unstoppable import from the future, one can be imaginative and propose a very foreign culture. So it is that on New Year's Day in the year 2000, astronomers on Earth notice that Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan has undergone radical changes:
Who arrives? Emissaries of a 26th century Titan home to a half-billion people with an incredibly advanced technology who speak a French-Tahitian creole that is the 26th century's world language, as the world wars of the 21st and 22nd centuries caused the extinction of the languages of English, Spanish, and Chinese. Oh: They're also all comparatively kinky lesbians, and they really don't like misogynists. (The Taliban is informed that its members can expect to experience ten special pain units for an extended period of time until things change, for instance.)
In "There's Something About Titan," Nicoll demonstrates in witty, scientifically-grounded fiction that our contemporary world is completely vulnerable to alien incursions, whether from the depths of interstellar space or from our far future. There will be no Independence Day-style rally to drive off the invaders; there would be little possibility of compromise; there would be, in all likelihood, relatively little that we'd like about the models we would be forced to accept, and little correspondence with our current social or political goals. There would only be the reality of radical change, and the hope that our descendants would accept it.
Anyway, go read. I promise you that you'll like it.
As I wrote in the previous posting on Mr. Antulov's story, the in-the-sea-of-time subgenre of alternate history has the inherent risk of becoming a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy, when people represetning your preferred nation and/or ideology come back and remake the contemporary world as you think it should be remade. This makes for unsatisfying stories: If an American-libertarian Mars, or a European-social democratic Eurasia, or an aggressively transhumanist South Atlantic federation, comes back in time with technologies and militaries decades if not centuries ahead of the rest of the world, who can doubt the eventual outcome?
James Nicoll is well-known on soc.history.what-if for his well-thought astronomical alternate-history questions--what if Mars was covered by an ocean as proportionally dense as Europa's? what if Venus was tide-locked to the Sun and had a quasi-habitable darkside? what if Sol had a binary companion? He had the genius to realize that if one's destroying the contemporary world and reorganizing it along the lines of an unstoppable import from the future, one can be imaginative and propose a very foreign culture. So it is that on New Year's Day in the year 2000, astronomers on Earth notice that Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan has undergone radical changes:
There's no Y2K disaster (except at Canada's Royal Ballet, where the computer tech decided to handle the problem by taking the last two weeks of 1999 and the first of 2000 off, insert sound of networks crashing here). There is, however, a stunning display of pretty lights out by Saturn which goes unnoticed by pretty much everyone except a few amateur astronomers. The news makes the rounds in the astronomy field within hours, thanks to the internet, but the event is transient. It doesn't take a super-genius to realise that Titan has changed its appearance and in a few hours there's a significant amount of commentary about the odd blue colour of Titan. There's also what seems to be two bright objects at the Saturn-Titan L4 and L5 (Although the angles involved prevent Earth from realising just how bright they are) while Titan itself is much brighter than it should be.
A first suggestion is that the entire atmosphere of Titan has undergone some sort of phase change. This is a little alarming since Titan's atmosphere is roughly comparable in mass to Earth and if one of them can suddenly change its properties... However spectroscopic analysis soons shows the transformation is more dramatic. Where there was a 1600 millibar nitrogen atmosphere at some ungodly cold temperature, now there is
a 1000 millibar 280 K atmosphere, still mostly nitrogen but with 20% O2. Somehow Titan has become human habitable, or so it would appear.
It takes some time to get the Hubble to have a look (It's booked years in advance and senior astronomers get cranky when you take their observation time away from them). The Hubble's field of view is narrow enough that it misses the bright sparks heading away from Saturn's system at 1 m/s/s but it clearly shows the L4 and L5 structures as artificial and on the thin wedge of the nightside which is visible from Earth what appear to be city lights are visible.
Roughly speaking Saturn is about 1.5x10^12 meters from Earth. The bright sparks take 28 days to get from Saturn to Earth. For the deceleration period of the trip, they are clearly visible from Earth and it's trivial to calculate that the sparks represent more power generation capability than the entire industrial might of the Earth all together. It is also trivial to calculate what would happen to a city if the rocket hovered over one. There's a certain amount of tension for the last two weeks of January 2000 but aside from the riots and mobilizations, not much happens.
Who arrives? Emissaries of a 26th century Titan home to a half-billion people with an incredibly advanced technology who speak a French-Tahitian creole that is the 26th century's world language, as the world wars of the 21st and 22nd centuries caused the extinction of the languages of English, Spanish, and Chinese. Oh: They're also all comparatively kinky lesbians, and they really don't like misogynists. (The Taliban is informed that its members can expect to experience ten special pain units for an extended period of time until things change, for instance.)
In "There's Something About Titan," Nicoll demonstrates in witty, scientifically-grounded fiction that our contemporary world is completely vulnerable to alien incursions, whether from the depths of interstellar space or from our far future. There will be no Independence Day-style rally to drive off the invaders; there would be little possibility of compromise; there would be, in all likelihood, relatively little that we'd like about the models we would be forced to accept, and little correspondence with our current social or political goals. There would only be the reality of radical change, and the hope that our descendants would accept it.
Anyway, go read. I promise you that you'll like it.
