Novikov Self-consistency Principle - Pre-Novikov Examples

Pre-Novikov Examples

Claims, arguments, or philosophical principles logically equivalent to the Novikov self-consistency principle have been published before Novikov's own publication. This makes the principle an example of Stigler's law of eponymy.

• Something resembling the idea can be found in Greek mythology, in the story of Cassandra. Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo but also cursed such that no one would believe her predictions. This left her unable to avert any of the disastrous events she foresaw. The metaphor has been adopted in modern times into the notion of a "Cassandra Complex".
• H. P. Lovecraft discussed this idea of time travel in a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith, where he wrote: Your idea for a time-voyaging machine is ideal—for in spite of Wells, no really satisfactory thing of this sort has ever been written. The weakness of most tales with this theme is they do not provide for the recording, in history, of those inexplicable events in the past which were caused by the backward time-voyagings of persons of the present and future. It must be remembered that if a man of 1930 travels back to B.C. 400, the strange phenomenon of his appearance actually occurred in B.C. 400, and must have excited notice wherever it took place. Of course, the way to get around this is to have the voyager conceal himself when he reaches the past, conscious of what an abnormality he must seem. Or rather, he ought simply to conceal his identity—hiding the evidences of his "futurity" and mingling with the ancients as best he can on their own plane. It would be excellent to have him know to some extent of his past appearance before making the voyage. Let him, for example, encounter some private document of the past in which a record of the advent of a mysterious stranger—unmistakably himself—is made. This might be the provocation for his voyage—that is, the conscious provocation.
• In "Via the Time Accelerator" by F. J. Bridge (a pseudonym of Francis J. Brueckel), from the January 1931 issue of Amazing Stories, a time traveler in 1930 wonders if he should travel to the future, and then he sees himself returning from the future, which reassures him about the success of his voyage. Later, in a situation where he finds himself in danger, he tells himself "I would escape ... It was so decreed. Had I not, with my own eyes, seen myself appear out of the fourth dimension back there in the Twentieth Century, and glide down to my landing-field? Surely, then, I was destined to return to my own age safe and sound." The time traveler eventually arrives in a ruined city in A.D. 1,001,930, where he is met by an old man who claims to be the Last Man still alive, and who says he knew the time traveler was coming because he read in an ancient history book that he himself (the Last Man) had arrived from the future in A.D. 502,101 in the same time machine the time traveler was using. When the time traveler goes to sleep, the Last Man does indeed take the time machine back to A.D. 502,101, leaving the time traveler stranded. The time traveler then wanders around the ruined city until he finds a museum, where preserved in a glass case is his time machine, which had been put there after it had appeared in A.D. 502,101. The time traveler adds some oil to its engine, and uses it to travel back to 1930, arriving there just as he had seen himself do.
• Robert A. Heinlein's By His Bootstraps (1941) features a plot in which a man interacts with different older versions of himself that travel by way of a "Time Gate", with all the interactions revisited later in the story from the perspective of the now-older man, everything being tied together in a completely self-consistent way. Heinlein later revisited a similar theme in his 1958 story —All You Zombies—, in which the main character's interactions with sex-changed versions of himself/herself at various points in his/her life result in a bizarre version of the ontological paradox in which the character becomes his/her own mother and father.
• In Chris Marker's film La jetée (1962) the protagonist remembers, when he was a child, seeing a man killed at an airport jetty. He later travels back in time and is killed at the same airport jetty, and realizes that, as a child, he had seen his future selfbeing killed.
• In Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine (1967), main characters go back in time to shoot a movie about founding a Viking colony in North America, only to discover to their surprise that the colony they founded turned out to be written into the history as the original Viking colony in North America—and some of them are even featured in Norse sagas.
• In Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (1969), a time traveler goes back to 28 A.D. in hopes of meeting Jesus, only to end up playing the role of Jesus himself, just as described in the Bible.
• Science fiction author Larry Niven called this idea the "law of conservation of history" in an essay titled "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel," which was published in his book "All the Myriad Ways" in 1971.