“I Ruined Two Birthday Parties and Learned the Limits of Psychology”

[Jersey Girl]

He didn't write the music. You should probably be more offended that his voice offends me.

Get away from me, sick puppy!

[Father Francis]

Sorry you hate the truth, but Elvis stole music and I am not impressed by his vocal range. he's only slightly worse than Roy Orbison but has 10000x the fame. Not to mention his touring guitarist demanded he stop trying to play the guitar live. The guy had charisma and a baritone reaching into tenor. The artists that he inspired did so much more than he could have comprehended. Kind of like Lou Reed which is another horrible "artist" that would survive my time travel quest to eliminate popular artists due to the Elvis Rule.

Still, he's no Freddy Mercury. Freddy knew how to play multiple instruments. Freddy wrote a song that was one of the most complicated and difficult to record to date. Had an insane range. Was scientifically proven to have vibrato better than any opera artist ever recorded. He was certainly influenced by Elvis, but didn't steal music. He was also charismatic.

[Jersey Girl]

Sorry you hate the truth, but Elvis stole music and I am not impressed by his vocal range. he's only slightly worse than Roy Orbison but has 10000x the fame. Not to mention his touring guitarist demanded he stop trying to play the guitar live. The guy had charisma and a baritone reaching into tenor. The artists that he inspired did so much more than he could have comprehended. Kind of like Lou Reed which is another horrible "artist" that would survive my time travel quest to eliminate popular artists due to the Elvis Rule.

Still, he's no Freddy Mercury. Freddy knew how to play multiple instruments. Freddy wrote a song that was one of the most complicated and difficult to record to date. Had an insane range. Was scientifically proven to have vibrato better than any opera artist ever recorded. He was certainly influenced by Elvis, but didn't steal music. He was also charismatic.

Seek healing.

[Marcus]

Someday maybe I'll get around to writing a near-future novel about short-term time travel, in which a secret agency sends people back in time by just a couple of days, to try to correct catastrophes. They rely on vast amounts of surveillance information, hypothetically available in the near future, to calculate as best they can what they need to do to fix the problem without causing anything worse. They have to hurry because they can only reach back those few days; they generally don't have enough time to be completely sure of their plans before they have to execute them.

They stiffen their moral courage to act in this violent way, going back in time to un-do things even though it might lead to something bad, by recognising that just acting in the present, normally, is also liable to have unforeseen consequences—and our plans for actions in the present are based on less information.

(My idea is that it all basically works, though not perfectly; they can and do change things. I'm not going to have "the time-line protect itself" or anything. Within the story, the real world will be like a story, with a plot that always runs forwards in time but that can get revised in multiple drafts. I'm most looking forward to writing the lines,

You're from the future?
Yes, I'm from Thursday.

Have you seen Deja Vu and Tenet?

The sci fi movie world owes much to Philip Dick.

[huckelberry]

There is a possibility that Physics Guy's aim is comic.

[Physics Guy]

No, I haven't seen Tenet or Deja Vu, though I can't rule out that somebody told me the plot of Deja Vu at some point and I forgot about it. Tenet seems to be further away from my goal, in getting wildly confusing. I think I was probably more directly inspired by Source Code than by either of those other movies. It was one of the few movies that I somehow happened to see.

What I'd like to do is take time travel seriously in a way that makes it seem practical rather than magical—like one of those heist movies in which an intricate plan all has to come together, just with the plan being made with the benefit of a few days of hindsight. The first disaster doesn't get averted by killing or saving anyone, but by something like creating a traffic jam at the right moment to derail the bad guys' intricate plan. That's supposed to be the normal goal for these missions, though sometimes they get messier.

With the emphasis on intricate planning, I'd try to focus as much on the planners as on the agents. The day the planners spend planning each mission is a day they expect will be erased. They won't die; their lives from before the disaster will resume without it having occurred; still that day will just end, and so in a way they will all die, and they know it. Each time when that day of planning comes, the planners will call the day Yesterday, even as they live through it. It's a pretty existentialist existence with a guarantee that your whole world will end in twenty-four hours, even as you're saving the world.

I'm not particularly planning to make the story a comedy, though it should have some funny moments. It's not really clear to me that it will be possible to write a coherent story with this premise, but my basic idea is that you can get away with a lot in fiction by just controlling the viewpoint. Tricky details can happen offstage between chapters. Could the real world conceivably work that way, too? Most of the time, it actually does, as far as human perception goes. It might not be so easy for my characters to figure out what is really happening.

Anyway my hope is that I could exploit the loopholes inherent in fiction enough to make the story fly, and have its interest come not from made-up mumbo-jumbo about time travel but from the completely real question of how one decides what to do in any moment. I want to see if time travel can work as a metaphor for decision-making in real time.

[huckelberry]

.......
Anyway my hope is that I could exploit the loopholes inherent in fiction enough to make the story fly, and have its interest come not from made-up mumbo-jumbo about time travel but from the completely real question of how one decides what to do in any moment. I want to see if time travel can work as a metaphor for decision-making in real time.

So you aim at substance, it sounds like it could be interesting. Best wishes and pardon my suspecting only a moment of droll humor.

[Father Francis]

Sorry you hate the truth, but Elvis stole music and I am not impressed by his vocal range. he's only slightly worse than Roy Orbison but has 10000x the fame. Not to mention his touring guitarist demanded he stop trying to play the guitar live. The guy had charisma and a baritone reaching into tenor. The artists that he inspired did so much more than he could have comprehended. Kind of like Lou Reed which is another horrible "artist" that would survive my time travel quest to eliminate popular artists due to the Elvis Rule.

Still, he's no Freddy Mercury. Freddy knew how to play multiple instruments. Freddy wrote a song that was one of the most complicated and difficult to record to date. Had an insane range. Was scientifically proven to have vibrato better than any opera artist ever recorded. He was certainly influenced by Elvis, but didn't steal music. He was also charismatic.

Seek healing.

You converted me to the Stones, but I will never love Elvis.

[Jersey Girl]

Seek healing.

You converted me to the Stones, but I will never love Elvis.

You're sick.

[Father Francis]

You converted me to the Stones, but I will never love Elvis.

You're sick.

I disagree. Chuck Berry was the true King of Rock!