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From: nep.pgelhausen@ames-vmsb.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: small essay on time and it's aspects....
Message-ID: <3983@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Thu, 10-Oct-85 21:43:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3983
Posted: Thu Oct 10 21:43:24 1985
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: nep.pgelhausen@ames-vmsb.ARPA

Startup on a new (for the recent past on SF-L) topic:
   Time Travel

Re-reading _The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat_ (the original
trilogy in one volume) I come across an aspect of time travel that
I have thought about before, but never quite seen addressed.  That there
are really THREE types of time involved when dealing w/ time travel.

Objective time is the standard time around now....and what we are
traveling IN.

Subjective time is your personal history.

Meta time involves time-travel events.

To elucidate: 
Pierre Boulle (in his story Time Out of Mind) covers subjective time 
fairly well:    Person A kills Person B somewhere in
the past....then Person A continues to the future, where he is killed
by (you guessed it) Person B, who then continues back the past where
he is killed by Person A.  Each Person kills the other before he is killed
by them (subjectively).

Meta time travel involves things like "Time Barriers", in The Stainless
Steel Rat Saves the World, (the third book), he cannot travel back before
1807 (or so) because The Enemy has set up a time barrier.  Thus he cannot
travel back to 1800 or so, arriving before the Enemy does, and defeat him
that way.  The Meta aspect is:  At some "time" there was
no barrier to travel before 1807, and at some "future" time there will
again be no barrier.  HOWEVER, for the (meta)duration of the barriers
existance, NO ONE may travel back before 1807 regardless of whether
they are (objective) 100 years or 30,000 years in the future.

The "duration" of the existance of the barrier is an instance of
"Meta time".  

Has anyone any thoughts on these three distinctions?  Has anyone seen
a story where all three are brought into play?  (Objective and Subjective
time are dealt with frequently, but Meta time seems to be ignored (and
rightly so...it would be a difficult concept....can you now imagine
traveling in Meta time??? You could travel to (objective) 1800 by FIRST
traveling back a month in Meta time, to "before" the barrier was put up...))

			-Richard Hartman
			max.hartman@ames-vmsb
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