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

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 562, 2025 article 31

438 articles to go to article 1000

[roseembolism]

I've always wondered why, in a time travel bureaucracy, the immediate response to a crisis isn't "Let's wait a moment and let the time travel bureaucracy of the future send someone back to tell us how we fixed the problem."

[(Anonymous)]

A north american story with a time bureau is The Umbrella Academy (graphic novels and TV series).

"The Temps Commission is an organization overseeing, and managing the space-time continuum."

-Awesome Aud

[(Anonymous)]

A possible explanation is that the future doesn't know what you did when you haven't done it yet.

In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - on radio - the last modern male human is rescued from prehistoric Earth (long story) when a flying time ship appears, piloted by Zaphod Beeblebrox as it turns out. Two issues:

1. Arthur and his friend are pursuing an alternative solution to their predicament: they get drunk on homebrew. The time ship actually appears when they decide to stop drinking and take their situation more seriously. And so they decide to have one more drink to celebrate their rescue. The time ship disappears. Dejected, they put the bottle down. The time ship reappears. This goes on for a while...

2. They have no way actually to signal the time ship to land and rescue them, as it isn't really there yet. Discussing the problem of sending a message to the future from a prehistoric and, non spoiler, later demolished planet, they see no solution. So Arthur tries just waving at the ship with his towel. The ship lands, on top of them.

Arthur drops the towel and it gets fossilised in Earth's rocks, then it becomes a meteor when Earth is demolished, and then it is found by Zaphod Beeblebrox in the future, so Zaphod comes to collect Arthur and Ford Prefect, which is the name of Zaphod's semicousin.

So it doesn't just happen, unless it is funny.

Also, why would bureaucrats in the future do the work that their earlier counterparts or selves were meant to do? Though if I could finish today's work next month and send it back in time to myself today, I'd be... in permanent time overdraft, probably. And that's if when they found out, I was even hired in the first place.

And now to read James's new article! Or perhaps tomorrow.

Robert Carnegie

[patrick_morris_miller]

And they're pretty much assholes, at least in the series.

The Marvel Cinetelematic Universe (and probably the comics) has the Time Variance Agency, which doesn't regulate time travel itself so much as prevents history from being changed, by any means necessary. And they're pretty much assholes, at least in the series.

[elysdir]

Hee! I laughed out loud at the velociraptor line. Well done.

[roseembolism]

Well, given history, maintaining it as it is implies a degree of assholery. Of course the opposite, allowing changes to history, creates the genocide of billions. Prevent Columbus from landing, and billions of lives are snuffed out.

[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."