cool

Glad you liked it.

This is a gem... there's too few short-shorts in the world.

Thank you! And thanks for the fave too.

Quite an interesting idea, all things considered.

Thank you!

As you can probably tell, I've been obsessed with the problems with time travel lately. Mainly because it has removed any relevance from the drama in too many science fiction stories. If something goes wrong in the Doctor Who or Star Trek universes, don't worry about it, because the writers will always (eventually) have The 39th Doctor or Spock from The Alternate Future bop back in time to fixy fixy. I began to get a bit sour after The Doctor went through a moral crisis about causing the extinction of the Daleks _YET AGAIN_, but two episodes later they're reincarnated _YET AGAIN_... good gods, when it comes to writing, time travel can fix and thereby ruin everything!

'Course I'm as bad as anyone. My minim opus (if I ever actually start posting it here) relies rather heavily on time travel. But it's a peculiar sort of time travel that only happens FROM certain times and places TO certain times and places, with history marching onward at both ends. Hopefully that avoids any temptation on my part to go back and fix the horrible things I put the characters through.

Don't a lot of people wonder about what could have been different if a future self could show up and say "Don't worry about this, it will turn out all right. I'll help you."

I've often thought about that. But imagine the dangers. I know a bit about WWII, for example. Suppose I bop back in time and warn them it starts July 7, 1937 (as it did; it was going in China for over two years before September 1, 1939, something I like to bring up to annoy my European friends who accuse us Americans of being so insular because we think it started December 7, 1941.) And I give them the basics of who did what when, what commanders screwed up, what weapons systems had major faults, the Manhattan Project, all of it.

If I kept quiet I know "we" would win, because we DID win. But if I speak up nothing is certain. With my help the war should be over more quickly with less casualties-- but would it?

For example, for all the horror of the nuclear bombing of Japan, it could have been worse. By coincidence I knew two people (both gone now) who were supposed to be on the front line for the Invasion of Japan; an uncle who would have been a US Marine in the first landing wave, and a woman who at that time was a 14-year-old who was supposed to fight him back--with a pointed stick. A spear. No joke. Now, if the War in the Pacific had gone so well that it came to the invasion a year or two earlier, millions more might have died.

Or perhaps with different information and my "advice" we'd have lost the whole thing. Without my help I know they win. With it.. everybody could die.