Subject: Re: |SKML|Re: Past-Future Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 18:16:20 -0500 From: Paul Kemner Reply-To: swatkats@PEAK.ORG To: swatkats@PEAK.ORG Various and sundry time travel effects- bright-shiny-or dull- culled from many decades of sf reading! 1- The time stream is very delicate- Go back to the past to dino-watch. Come back and everything's different. Look down at your boot, and notice that you apparently stepped on a butterfly while you were gawking. 2- Time stream will fix itself (or out of sheer cantankerous, will fix itself in a way you'd like least). Go back and kill Hitler to spare the world the horrors of WWII. When you return, find out that some other Nazi waiting by the sidelines manages to win for Germany, or that Stalin took over everything without the competition. 3- You can't change the past anyway- (variation of #2) Push somebody out of the way of a bullet, and they get hit by a beer truck instead. 4- Universes get created by anything that happens. Drop your toast. There's a universe that is created where the toast lands salmon-side-up, and a 2nd one where it lands salmon-side-down, and maybe a 3rd where Meowth appears and grabs it mid-air. This could be the explanation for "Dark Side of SK" as well- something happened in preschool to sour Chance & Jake. So (back to Bright & Shiny) when the boys return, there will be futures in which Hackle creates the robots, ones where he doesn't and ones where the Manges are angels! 5- When TB & R return, they are able to talk Hackle out of building the robots, or they sabotage them, or thwart Mac, Molly, and the Pastmaster. This "pinches off" that little time loop where they were killed- kind of like an oxbow lake. 6- The Pastmaster offended ( or unbalanced ) the time stream by meddling, and the Swat Kats were thrown in to the future as part of a chaotic correction to set things right. Lots of other seemingly-unrelated things, decades (or centuries) in the past and future happen as part of this "correction" as well. I recently finished reading "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis, so I favor #6 the most, I think. Of course if you get to thinking this way, both the Pastmaster's meddling AND the SK's correction could have been a side-effect from some other timestream fix! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Do not meddle in the affairs of the SWAT Kats, . for they well armed and destined to win. Do not meddle in the affairs of our Commander, . for he has a blaster and knows how to use it.