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a tale of technologically inventive elites, coldly manipulating the credulous masses. You don't reason its craziness out, you sing, it, chant it, farce it out. |
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Justin Leiber, "Fritz Leiber and Eyes," Philosophers Look at Science Fiction, ed. Nicholas D. Smith (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), pp. 18385 |
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Until Leiber began his cycle of stories which came to be known as the Change War series, SF writers had not strayed from the traditional view of time as a fragile, easily-shattered entity. Leiber built an image of time as a strong and inertia-prone progression of events in which a single action would have little effect. All known history could not be wiped out by saving Julius Caesar or Abraham Lincoln, for example. In The Change War, large numbers of alterations are required to produce a significantly different outcome to a single war, let alone the course of civilization's progress. No individual Wellsian Time Traveler could right the wrongs he saw in the future in a Change War tale. Where other authors had written of intrepid inventors working alone, Leiber created armies of time soldiers, each of whom played only a minor role in a drama that required the universe as a stage. |
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The keystone of his series is The Big Time (1961). Using that novel as the centerpiece, he wrote Change War stories for leading SF magazines such as Galaxy between 1958 and 1967. These share an overall background and, in a few instances, the same characters. |
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In "Try and Change the Past" (first published in Astounding Stories in 1958), Leiber has a character attempt to alter his own past in order to save himself from being shot and killed, but to no avail. Even with the gun itself removed from the room at the time of the shooting, a small meteorite makes its way to earth and hits him exactly where the bullet would have and causes the same type and size of hole. As the narrator of the story says: |
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Change one event in the past and you get a brand new future? Erase the conquests of Alexander by nudging a Neolithic pebble? Extirpate America by pulling up a shoot of Sumerian grain? Brother, that isn't the way it works at all! The space-time continuum's built of stubborn stuff and change is anything but a chain-reaction. Change the past and you start a wave of changes moving futurewards, but it damps out mighty fast. Haven't you ever heard of temporal reluctance, or of the Law of Conservation of Reality? |
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