Air Raid
- Silver Medal Eloi
- by John Varley
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Air Raid” by John Varley, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spring 1977.
Mandy snatches doomed people from the past in order to populate her war-decimated time.
—none
I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,” things can get out of hand.
Tags
(12)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1970 to 1999: Sun-Belt Airlines flight 128, Miami to New York, September 15, 1979
- Unspecified Future Year
- Timeline Models
- Resilient Timeline: it can stretch a little
- Single Consistent Timeline: With help from a sort of chronology protection mechanism, the timeline always remains unchanged.
- Time Travel Methods
- Themes
- Cheating History: The grabbed people are replaced with dead bodies, so that the universe doesn’t complain: I don’t know sludge about time theory, but I know the practical angles. We can do things in the past only at times and in places where it won’t make any difference. We have to cover our tracks. There’s flexibility; once a Snatcher left her gun behind and it went with the plane. Nobody found it, or if they did they didn’t have the snoggiest idea of what it was, so we were okay.
- Chronology Protection Conjecture: Sometimes it turns out it didn’t happen. You come back and find out all the goats in the holding pen have softly and suddenly vanished away because the continuum won’t tolerate the changes and paradoxes you’ve put into it.
- Grabbing or Affecting Someone Right before Death: So as not to affect the timeline, the Snatchers grab only people who are doomed to die anyway.
- Synchronized Time: Time runs at different rates on each side of the gate, though it’s always sequential, past to future. Here, in 1979, we had a rigid ninety-four minutes to get everything done.
- Real-World Tags
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “Air Raid” by John Varley, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spring 1977.