All serious time-travel stories must deal with the logical conundrum inherent in the concept: once you fool with the normal progression of cause and effect, it's hard to keep any action from seeming capricious.
But there is another element: the idea that the dramatic action expresses not just a progression of cause and effect, but a contradiction in the human condition, between the limitlessness of our ambition and the inevitability of our failure to achieve it.
Western novels about women whose lives are denied free exercise of will — Anna Karenina Emma Bovaryy; Lily Bart in "The House of Mirth"; Florence Dowell in "The Good Soldier"; Edna Pontellier in "The Awakening" — have often charted a progression of cause and effect that makes comprehensible, even inevitable, a woman's final, metaphorical flight to the river.
Western novels about women whose lives are denied free exercise of will Anna Karenina; Emma Bovary; Lily Bart in "The House of Mirth"; Florence Dowell in "The Good Soldier"; Edna Pontellier in "The Awakening"—have often charted a progression of cause and effect that makes comprehensible, even inevitable, a woman's final, metaphorical flight to the river.
Alternatively, he's branched out from Ayn Rand, and is now also listening to this guy: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect.
I don't think God has such a linear relationship with time, for one thing, to be bound by the petty progression of cause and effect.
Progression of ET causes both thrombotic and hemorrhagic diathesis.
Collective bargaining is a natural advancement of the modern person, which allows for the progression of ideal causes through pragmatic agendas.
Random variation in the incidence or progression of illnesses causes random fluctuations in health care expenditures.
Proteinuria is a risk factor for progression of diverse causes of CKD that account for two thirds of patient entries into end stage renal disease programs in the US [ 1].
