(Spoilers here for various decades-old time-travel stories.)<\/p>\r\n
One of my favorite sf stories when I was a kid was Lester del Rey\u2019s 1951 \u201c\u2026And It Comes Out Here,\u201d in which a time traveler goes forward in time and steals a device (from a museum, I think) in the future, then comes back to the present and presents the device as his own invention; the device he brought back with him eventually gets put in a museum (iIrc), where it sits until the time traveler comes and steals it and takes it back in time, completing the time loop. So it\u2019s unclear where the device came from; nobody created it for the first time, it just exists in a loop in time.<\/p>\r\n
I just found out that that trope also appeared in P. Schuyler Miller\u2019s 1944 story \u201cAs Never Was\u201d: A mysterious high-tech item is taken from the future by a time traveler and brought back to the present, and then that same item exists in ordinary time until the future time when it\u2019s taken by a time traveler and brought back.<\/p>\r\n
In both stories, the time loop\/time paradox is of a very specific kind: it involves a specific high-tech physical object that was never created by anyone, and that exists entirely in the context of its time loop.<\/p>\r\n
(Neither one is a great story, alas. But I\u2019m still intrigued by that trope.)<\/p>\r\n
Other authors have played with related ideas. For example, in Heinlein\u2019s 1941 \u201cBy His Bootstraps,\u201d there\u2019s a notebook containing a sort of translation-dictionary that turns out never to have been compiled by anyone. (But the physical notebook itself does have a point of origin.) In Philip K. Dick\u2019s 1954 \u201cMeddler,\u201d the time loop involves savage intelligent tool-using butterflies, rather than a specific high-tech object per se. And in Anne Lear\u2019s 1978 \u201cThe Adventure of the Global Traveler or: The Global Consequences of How the Reichenbach Falls into the Wells of Iniquitie,\u201d Shakespeare is inspired to write some lines in one of his plays by hearing a time-traveling actor recite them (from memory of a Shakespeare play). (I think something similar happened with Shakespeare in a Dr Who<\/cite> episode, and probably dozens of other stories. I suspect that the trope of an idea or phrase coming from a time loop like this is very common, which is why I\u2019m focusing specifically on physical objects.)<\/p>\r\n And in Terminator 2<\/cite>, reverse-engineered future tech becomes part of present tech; that\u2019s not quite a single object existing only in a time loop (I feel like it\u2019s more like the \u201cBy His Bootstraps\u201d notebook, where it\u2019s the information that has no point of origin, not the object), but it\u2019s related. (And there may be other examples in the Terminator<\/cite> movies that I\u2019m not thinking of.)<\/p>\r\n And in Heinlein\u2019s 1959 \u201cAll You Zombies\u2026,\u201d an entire person exists only in a time loop. (I\u2019m being intentionally vague here.)<\/p>\r\n But the only other example I can think of offhand, of a specific high-tech physical object that has no creator and exists in a time loop, is the Timebelt from David Gerrold\u2019s 1974 novel The Man Who Folded Himself<\/cite> (which I haven\u2019t read, but it looks interesting).<\/p>\r\n So I\u2019m curious: Do any of you know of other examples of this very specific trope?<\/p>\r\n Again, I\u2019m not looking for time loops in general or time paradoxes in general or self-fulfilling prophecies; I\u2019m looking specifically for works where a specific high-tech physical object was never created by anyone, just exists in a time loop\u2014it\u2019s taken from the future, brought back to the past or present, and then exists in ordinary time until it\u2019s time for it to be taken from the future again. (Or the loop can be more complicated than that, as long as there\u2019s no point of origin for the object.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18812"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18814,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18812\/revisions\/18814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}