Five Stories About Time Travel and Bureaucracy

[james_davis_nicoll]

What's the fun of time travel without a regulatory body to enforce the rules?

Five Stories About Time Travel and Bureaucracy

Comments

[scott_sanford]

The Doyle explanation is that the author needs to keep the story moving, and the Watson explanation is that the people on the scene are on-site right there and right now.

This does happen once in Spider Robinson's Lifehouse series. People in the present need to find someone, try various things, and eventually run out of leads. So they suck it up and call headquarters, saying in effect, "Please pull the report on this case and let us know where we're going to say we found this guy."