Among physicists, the most favored resolution to time-travel paradoxes is a world of one
fixed landscape of time and its events. Time travel may be possible, but if so, the Karma
will conspire to have only those events that have been written into the landscape to occur.
Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—” may be the pinnacle of such stories, but Farley’s
is the earliest case that I’ve read to present a clear deterministic time loop along these
lines. In the story, Boston stock broker Dick Withrick is on a 1935 tiger hunt in Cambodia
when he runs into a strangely familiar (and slightly older) man who warns him, “As you
value your freedom, do not touch the machine—” And yet, he does touch the machine, taking
him back to 1925 so he (in the company of his Buddhist Abbot host) can relive the decade of
financial turmoil.
“It cannot be,” the Abbot asserted suavely. “The years from 1925 to 1935 happen
only once in the whole course of eternity. You are not now living through a repetition of
those ten years. Rather it is those same ten years. The events which you remember as
having happened back in Boston, and the events which are happening here today, are
happening simultaneously. Your ten years in Boston from 1925 to 1935, are one and the
same ten years. It is only an illusion of your mind that they seem to be successive,
rather than concurrent. And this illusion is not so different from the illusion of all
mankind with respect to the flow of timel for Brahm, the Creator, sees all time and all
space as once complete instantaneous event.”
DEBUT
“The Man Who Met Himself,” in Top-Notch,August 1935.
VARIANTS
Debut. “The Man Who Met Himself,” in Top-Notch,August 1935.
“It cannot be,” the Abbot asserted suavely. “The years from 1925 to 1935 happen
only once in the whole course of eternity. You are not now living through a repetition of
those ten years. Rather it is those same ten years. The events which you remember as
having happened back in Boston, and the events which are happening here today, are
happening simultaneously. Your ten years in Boston from 1925 to 1935, are one and the
same ten years. It is only an illusion of your mind that they seem to be successive,
rather than concurrent. And this illusion is not so different from the illusion of all
mankind with respect to the flow of timel for Brahm, the Creator, sees all time and all
space as once complete instantaneous event.”
1 English variant