Do you want to travel back in time?

Fine old dog we rode horses with last summer.

September 21, 2015

I feel giddy, but I don’t know why. Fall equinox? I washed our sheets and hung them out to dry? Worked on framing the darkroom? All are true. I just feel giddy.
I think I feel elated because I bought some baby back ribs for supper, along with corn in their husks. I gonna put them on the grill, which is heating up. Outdoors, of course! Wait! Strike that “of course,” because I think I’ve been somewhere or other where they can barbecue indoors. No matter.
Maybe I feel giddy because I’ve finished four short stories about time travel.
I’m always interested to know how it works. I want to meet my uncle Carl, killed in WW II before I was born. That’s all.
Is time travel possible? Harry Houdini, about whom I know a great deal, would say not.
One could simply point out that we are not inundated with people from the future, interfering with things. Are we? I assume such folks from the future would be here, wanting to do something good to change a future lousy outcome. What if they were here to test the time-travel paradox. You know the one I mean. The one where you kill your grandpa, and so on.
Are the people from the future Republicans? Think about that for a minute. Go ahead.
What if people of the future look like horses? My angry neighbor across the street would like that! She loves her horse. She posts pictures of her murmuring endearments. I mean, people of the future may evolve into animals who know how to get along with each other.
However, none of these themes have come up in my reading.
The first story, written long ago, had the inevitable silver bullet spaceship. Arriving on planet X, the space men (and they were men) found a wrecked spaceship, their own, complete with bodies, their own. The trouble with spaceships, well, they are spaceships. Far too expensive for most, but not all.
The last one I read told about a telephone system, one using electrons and positrons to achieve instantaneous communications, faster than light. The author gave a section of his narrative to explain how such time travel via phone would work. In Wikipedia, under “time travel,” the anonymous author explains that the general theory of relativity includes a mathematical expression that allows for time loops, in which a person may travel backward or forward.
I think the telephone time machine story included some of that.
I especially liked the second story about time travel. The author, Mr. Silverman, I think, or was it Sterling? Anyhow, his story delved into the real nuts and bolts of time travel. What if a time traveler could go back in time and keep his ex-wife or ex-girlfriend from marrying another? In his story, the protagonist is the one who married the desirable woman. His nemesis, the ex-boyfriend, is the one trying to go back in time.
Ursula K. LeGuinn wrote a story with characters and situations so pleasing that I wanted to live in her world forever. No jealousy. Day people and night people intermarry so that each person has several compatible partners. Ahhh. Unfortunately, I was trying to read in an environment with a noisy bunch of actors! I didn’t want to taint my pleasure, so I abandoned her story until later.