ATD: unanswered questions #2

[bandwraith at aol.com]

>If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a
>minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one
>of the main purposes of fiction



"Well, yeah, bizness as usual to you—listen to the characters in the
novel talk about light..."

I've been listening to p talk about light and time for awhile:

  Oughtn't he be doing something...get on to the
  operations room at Stanmore, they must have it
  on the Channel radars-no: no time, really. Less
  than five minutes Hague to here (time it takes
  to walk down to the teashop on the corner...
  for light to reach the planet of love...no time at
  all). GR (Bantam)p.7

Can't really talk about light without talking about
time. It's relative. I love that "no time at all." For
the photons- it is instantaneous. So, I agree. If the
lighting was adjusted there must have been a time
change, but that's not exactly what I was asking.

I was thinking more about the excerpt which the
auto-blurb seemeded to reference. Both were viralling
around the net around the same time, pre-release.The
excerpt described a more concrete example of adjustment:

  "I can fix that," offered Willis...
  "just watch where you're putting them
  lilywhites now...-yaaagghh-I mean, huh?"
  "Feel Better?"
  "Obliged," Jimmy guessed, sliding his pistol
  back in its holster. (atd p.310)


I expected in my mind, perhaps incorrectly, the author

somehow reaching back to an earlier, critical point in
history, and adjusting things in some way- throwing a
temporal switch- that might, at least, offer a way out,
or back, to "the road not taken."