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by Rick Norwood
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SF on TV | |
The on-going story arc in Enterprise is about a "temporal cold-war". What, exactly, do they mean by that?
The best of many SF novels on this theme is the Hugo Award winning The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber,
a masterpiece in which the entire story takes place inside a single room. Poul Anderson's
The Time Patrol series and H. Beam Piper's The Complete Paratime cover the same ground on
a more epic scale. I think all three are available from SF Book Club. Tell 'em SF Site sent you.
So, how does Enterprise stack up against these classics? Hard to tell yet, since there have been only two
episodes in this story arc so far: the pilot "Broken Bow" (dumb title) and the much better recent episode "Cold Front"
by new writers Steve Beck and Tim Finch. "Cold Front" manages to capture some of the awe that a time war invokes.
In order to makes sense of this story arc, we need to have some idea of the Star Trek future history, and
for that we naturally turn to The Star Trek Encyclopedia by Denise and Michael Okuda. Here are the essentials:
There are three main views of time travel. In the first view, there is only one real time line. Changing the past
destroys the present and changes the future. Clearly, this is not Star Trek. A second view is that
everything that can happen does, as in Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways". This is not Star Trek,
either. In Star Trek, some time lines survive, others are destroyed. There are multiple universes, but not myriad universes.
How are we to make sense of a temporal cold-war? At some unknown point in Captain Archer's future, a Time Lord with
the ability to communicate through time but not travel through time, is attempting to change his past. Is he safe in
some alternate time line, that has already branched off from the prime time line? Or is he willing to cause his own
non-existence by changing his own past? The Time Lord must be either one individual or a small secret society, because
even the agents from the far future do not know when he is located.
It will be interesting to see if Enterprise can come up with a way to avoid the many plot pitfalls
associated with time travel. One thing they need to establish is what causes time lines to branch. I, for one,
would like to witness the moment when the Mirror Universe splits off from our own.
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Rick Norwood is a mathematician and writer whose small press publishing house, Manuscript Press, has published books by Hal Clement, R.A. Lafferty, and Hal Foster. He is also the editor of Comics Revue Monthly, which publishes such classic comic strips as Flash Gordon, Sky Masters, Modesty Blaise, Tarzan, Odd Bodkins, Casey Ruggles, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Barnaby, Buz Sawyer, and Steve Canyon. |
1969: Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon
 
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