Future Past

Sending signals through time is a popular science fiction idea. Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness movie combines the tachyon pulse signal idea from Benford’s Timescape with some green-vomit+zombies horrorism.

Wilson’s Chronoliths has an interesting approach to the subjective perception of temporal paradoxes. In this case, the “message” is engraved in huge stone obelisks that are quite destructive. Like many sensawunda SF books, the ending is flat but some of the psychology is good.

Asimov also wrote some good ancient SF that played with retro-temporal signalling using thiotimoline.

Kind of the reverse of retro-temporality, Irish SF writer Bob Shaw used a magical substance called “slow glass” to send signals from the present into the future at dramatically altered rates. He teased out the implications of trans-temporal signalling combined with nanotech into some quite evocative speculations, including a vision of a rather maudlin, thoroughly mediated, panopticonised surveillance society.

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