I just finished a short Heinlein novel called Time for the Stars. Not being a huge Heinlein fan, I wasn’t expecting much, but it was actually pretty good.
I had to forgive one small scientific error that Heinlein, surprisingly, promulgated. He said communication with spaceships going away from Earth at velocities close to the speed of light would be difficult, not only because they would be so far away from Earth, but also because the light waves emitted from the spaceship toward Earth would be moving so slowly. Of course light waves move at the same speed, no matter the velocity of the emitter.
I also had to swallow the idea that certain people (mostly certain pairs of twins) can communicate by telepathy if properly trained. There is absolutely no evidence for that. Furthermore, the basis of the story is that such communication is instantaneous and strong, no matter how far the communicators are from one another. To his credit, he wrote that the scientists in his story were incredulous that such could be true.
The main plot device of the story involves a pair of twins used to communicate between a ship exploring the stars and Earth. One brother is on the ship, one is left behind. The problem is, of course, that time passes at different rates in an accelerating frame of reference and a stationary (or technically constant-velocity) frame of reference. Thus what was a few years for the twin on the ship was decades for the other twin. Of course the twins have a reunion after the voyage, one now in his twenties, the other in his eighties, very poignant. Meetings between people when the difference between their ages has changed dramatically? Sounds familiar…..
After Time for the Stars, I started reading Philip K. Dick’s anthology Paycheck. (Jeff gave me the book which he had finished reading in Japan – thanks, Jeff!) The very first story, “Stability”, involved - you guessed it – time travel! Is the island controlling what I read??? The story is brilliant. A man is directed to a patent office he has never visited where he is presented with a device he has never seen and told that it is an invention he himself submitted to the office. The patent is denied, so he takes it home and tries it. It sends him back in time, for it is indeed a time machine. In the past he picks up a mysterious container that talks to him. He then uses the time machine to return to the present, except he arrives a few days before he picked up the device. At the direction of the container, he proceeds to the patent office where he submits the device for a patent. (In case you haven’t read Dick, his stories are brilliant but very strange.)
