Gordian Protocol Teaser MAJOR spoiler added

There is something odd here. As Dilandu pointed out the divergence point has to be post 1927, but there is a reference to the Imperial German government - and that ended at the end of World War 1, so the divergence should be before 1918 - Me thinks RFC has done something very weird here.

fallsfromtrees wrote:There is something odd here. As Dilandu pointed out the divergence point has to be post 1927, but there is a reference to the Imperial German government - and that ended at the end of World War 1, so the divergence should be before 1918 - Me thinks RFC has done something very weird here.

Well, I'm in Russian alternate history web society since 2006... So, I have some experience in quickly analysing the timelines. Of course, we have only a limited data in that teaser...

And yes, its a bit weird. Especially considering the Soviet Union. This means, that the course of WW1 was at least similar up to early 1918, because the point is - Bolsheviks rise to power was NOT a pre-deternimed event.

And by 1918, there were zero probability of Central Powers victory. Actually, they lost already by 1916. Which led to obvious... contradictions.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

phillies wrote:Perhaps the author is more imaginative than "divergence point". Has the illustrious author #1 ever done anything taht might deceive a reader. No. We even survived Merlin's death in an early book of that other series.

Merlin's death? I don't remember Merlin being "killed" in that other series. I do remember the "mortal" wound of Hector however, which was a clear (and successful) (after the fact) attempt to mislead us.

Merlin and Nimue are, like, the same person using two names, at least until later in the series.

Your approach to alternative history, while legitimate, is in the end in my opinion likely to be rather sterile. There are far more imaginative approaches. I quote from my forthcoming novel Eclipse: The Girl Who Saved the World, the heroine reading a book on the nature of time and the Liouville-Gibbs Paradox:


"The original Gibbs proof about the past and the future was two short paragraphs of which I could make neither head nor tail. The book spent 30 pages breaking the Gibbs proof up into small parts. Each part was supposed to be easy to follow. The fellow who wrote the thirty pages is said to be the greatest science writer since Amizov, Amizov being the muse of clear science writing. Except when I talked about muses with Mum, for Terpsichore Mum had an image of this statue, but for Amizov she remembered fondly this old guy with funny whiskers. I even understood two of the parts that he wrote. It’s just that after you had followed all the small parts you had come a very long way, and you wondered if you had really come all that far or if the wool had been pulled over your eyes.

I skipped to the end. The Forward said it was OK to skip like that. There was an image, translating the forest of derivatives into a simple picture. The picture I understood. I think. The picture is a line of pawns on a huge chessboard. The pawns represent whole worlds where history starts out slightly differently. They start out next to each other, farther away sideways being more different. By the time you get well sideways across the chessboard, history is completely different. The start points are ancient time. The simple view of history is that the pawns all move forward one space at the time, always staying in their own file. Worlds that start very similar to ours end up very similar to ours. Worlds that start out very different end up being very different. The butterflies show that every so often a pawn takes off sideways, so two pawns that start next to each other do not end up that way. The pawn next to ours marches off sideways and ends up halfway across the board. That’s maiasaurs not becoming intelligent.

You might think that would simply leave a gap in the file next to ours. No, there are as many files at the start of history as there are at the end. What Liouville and Gibbs showed, and someday I will understand that part of the book, is that every file was full at the start of time, so when we reach the present every file must still be full, one pawn per file. If the pawn next to us took off and ended up way across the board, there must be another pawn that started off someplace way across the board and ended up at our shoulders. I thought the mirror imaging looked pretty obvious. We’re not someplace special on that chessboard. If some of our nearby-at-start pawns end up someplace else, pawns from someplace else must end up nearby, because if they didn’t we would be at someplace unusual, someplace pawns from far away could not reach. Lots of people get extremely upset with the idea that world history could’ve started off completely different from ours, but when we get to the present the two worlds are almost the same. Liouville’s Butterflies, the forbidden book, is the famous proof that some histories converge. Most of the book is the arguments about what Liouville’s result means. If you were a parallel timeline believer, the “United States of America” Ambassador was proof that you were right. "

Oh, the mysterious ambassador who claimed the America was founded in 1776, not 17AD, heroine Eclispe thinking to herself again:

. For a few moments my memories carried me back to a book I’d read last year, a book on another lunatic, the not-American Ambassador. One fine day, there had appeared in Vienna a man claiming to be the American Ambassador, which he was not. He had an impressive set of papers saying he was the Ambassador not for the American Republic but for a “United States of America”, a country founded in 1776, not 0017, and not to the Empire of the Hapsburgs but to a “Republic of Austria”. The parallel universe crackpots had a field day. Telepathic examination, as a start to curing his delusions, found that he had a full set of wrong memories going back to being a little boy, all memories of a world that does not exist. Particularly alarming were his very detailed memories of ‘the first flight to the moon’, a flight allegedly carried out within the last few decades using, Goddess spare us, a chemical-fueled rocket. The alarm was that he remembered lots of details of the rocket—it had been a boyhood fixation—and careful engineering analysis of this complete bit of absurdity showed that the rocket would have worked, if it hadn’t blown up first. He refused to believe in personas or gifts, even when someone hovered in front of him. He claimed that his “United States” was part of the world’s first technical civilization, that there are no ancient steel and concrete ruins, that writing is not older than homo sapiens, and that Massachusetts had been settled from of all places Britain, in 1600, that being only 20 centuries too late and from the wrong direction. In short, he was stark raving mad.

He also spoke neither Modern English nor Ancient English. His ‘Standard Edited English’ was close to real English, but he would say ‘perhaps’ not ‘mayhaps’, ‘Ayup’ not ‘OK’, and would split infinitives as the correct way to talk. More peculiarly, part of his mind was not there. He would talk about how his country was governed, and every so often his thoughts would vanish. Moments later he would be talking again, but there would be mysterious gaps in his logic, as though he could think and say things, but no one else could be aware of them. He was under very close observation when he suddenly disappeared, every atom in his body vanishing at the same moment.

Dilandu wrote:

phillies wrote:Perhaps the author is more imaginative than "divergence point". Has the illustrious author #1 ever done anything taht might deceive a reader. No. We even survived Merlin's death in an early book of that other series.

The divergence points are the Alpha and Omega of alternate history fiction. They determine what could be, and what couldn't or at least very improbable. Basically, they allowed to made the internal logic of the timeline.

phillies wrote:Your approach to alternative history, while legitimate, is in the end in my opinion likely to be rather sterile. There are far more imaginative approaches. I quote from my forthcoming novel Eclipse: The Girl Who Saved the World, the heroine reading a book on the nature of time and the Liouville-Gibbs Paradox:

Well, for me this sound like "your approach to mathematics, like two plus two is four, while legitimate, is so sterile, there are far more imaginative approaches". Sorry.

For the purpose of cause & effect logic that humans used, the time is anisotropic dimension. The velocity of movement in it could be regulated, but not the direction. Now, if we include time travel, we could go around that, but the problem is, the "classical" time travel are just a matter of moving some parts of the cause before the effect. Basically, the classic time travel is a paradox machine, nothing more; it does NOT affect causation of greater scale, because within the timeline the cause and effect would still be on their places before and after the glitch.

To truly mess with cause & effect, we should introduce something like contra-motion (term coined by Strugatsky brothers) - the ability to move constantly against the flow of time. Now this would really mess the cause and effect, because we would have two opposite "causation flows". Problem is, on the matter level, the contra-motion matter would be the close equivalent of constant faster-than-light collision effects. Strygatskye went around this introducing fragmentary contramotion, but this basically was the constant micro time-travels at the end of each 24 hours right into the start of yesterday.

fallsfromtrees wrote:There is something odd here. As Dilandu pointed out the divergence point has to be post 1927, but there is a reference to the Imperial German government - and that ended at the end of World War 1, so the divergence should be before 1918 - Me thinks RFC has done something very weird here.

Not necessarily all that weird. An accumulation of small changes, instead of one major point of divergence.

Also, since there is apparently a multiverse element, it could be references to different timelines, rather than one the Imperial German Government and Chinese Communists both exist.

Weird Harold wrote:
Not necessarily all that weird. An accumulation of small changes, instead of one major point of divergence.

There is no difference between "accumulation of small changes" and "one major point of divergence". The accumulation of small changes is known as "butterfly effect", and it is unavoidable consequence of divergence point. The scale of divergence just determine the speed of butterfly effect, and this is non-linear.

Dilandu wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:
Not necessarily all that weird. An accumulation of small changes, instead of one major point of divergence.

There is no difference between "accumulation of small changes" and "one major point of divergence". The accumulation of small changes is known as "butterfly effect", and it is unavoidable consequence of divergence point. The scale of divergence just determine the speed of butterfly effect, and this is non-linear.

hmmmmm - not sure that our knowledge of such things is so certain in the real world, let alone RFC's new world!

By that I mean that the physics [if that is the correct science] of such divergences between timelines is not [and maybe cannot] be known, so there is plenty of scope for different models.

The way around the "time travel paradox" is that when you travel back in time, any change you make forks a new time line - i.e, there are now two time lines - your original, and the one created by your actions, and they will continue to diverge based on that change. RFC has used this in several previous books - "The Apocalypse Troll" jumps immediately to mind.

All of this is very much in keeping with the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics - where every quantum event causes a fork - wherein the wave function collapses to all possible outcomes, each causing a new universe to arise.

The other odd thing is that Operation Yellow Brick was launched from "occupied Japan" - which implies that World War II was fought but WWII probably doesn't happen without the rise of Hitler in Germany - which requires the extinction of the German Empire. There is definitely something odd in the timeline.