From "Silence of the Night",
Feb. 22nd, 2015 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynwhich is the third of the four stories in John C. Wright's Awake In The Night Land, an element which I don't think I've ever seen in other stories dealing with time loops or prescience or what have you:
(Aeneas the protagonist has been talking to a man from fifty thousand years in the future, who has warned him about many horrible things, and who has also told him that the reason he is projecting his mind backwards in time to Aeneas' day is to make these things not happen and buy humanity several thousand more years of life and sanity.)
I was speechless with dread for a full minute, oppressed by the vision of destruction.
“These things must come to pass?”
“Soon or late. Because I speak, I hope to add thousands of years, not centuries, to the lifespan of mankind, and delay this death by an aeon.”
My next words crackled with anger, “And are all your people slain by your act? All your ancestors back through countless years?”
He was solemn. His eyes seemed not to see me. “Every man and woman and child ever born across the fifty thousand years of aborted time has been consulted, directly or by proxy, and all consent. Our race is weaker than your own, lesser in number by an order of magnitude, and yet we are not so weak as ancient men once were. No one lives in this pyramid, the mighty home of Man, who does not stand ready to sacrifice himself that others may live, or to slay their loved ones, that others may die wholesome deaths, and escape destruction.”
---
Seriously, has anyone reading this ever encountered a time travel story or a story involving prescience, prophecy, whatever, where the people engineering the change in fate actually get that kind of consent from the affected? Everyone in the past who's going to be overwritten, not just the three or four people whose names show up on the front cover of the comic?
(Aeneas the protagonist has been talking to a man from fifty thousand years in the future, who has warned him about many horrible things, and who has also told him that the reason he is projecting his mind backwards in time to Aeneas' day is to make these things not happen and buy humanity several thousand more years of life and sanity.)
I was speechless with dread for a full minute, oppressed by the vision of destruction.
“These things must come to pass?”
“Soon or late. Because I speak, I hope to add thousands of years, not centuries, to the lifespan of mankind, and delay this death by an aeon.”
My next words crackled with anger, “And are all your people slain by your act? All your ancestors back through countless years?”
He was solemn. His eyes seemed not to see me. “Every man and woman and child ever born across the fifty thousand years of aborted time has been consulted, directly or by proxy, and all consent. Our race is weaker than your own, lesser in number by an order of magnitude, and yet we are not so weak as ancient men once were. No one lives in this pyramid, the mighty home of Man, who does not stand ready to sacrifice himself that others may live, or to slay their loved ones, that others may die wholesome deaths, and escape destruction.”
---
Seriously, has anyone reading this ever encountered a time travel story or a story involving prescience, prophecy, whatever, where the people engineering the change in fate actually get that kind of consent from the affected? Everyone in the past who's going to be overwritten, not just the three or four people whose names show up on the front cover of the comic?
