h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the context of time travel, I'm reminded of this monster of a novel I read called "Ash".

It's way over a thousand pages long, (I think the author is called Mary Gentle)and it has two stories travelling in parrellel. One is about a group of mediaeval mercenaries led by a woman called Ash; the second intertwined tale is about a group of modern archaeologists who begin to find VERY strange things in North Africa that contradict everything we've hitherto believed about human history after the downfall of the Roman Empire.

As more and more strange things come out of a part of North Africa not hitherto renowned for being histirically significant - in fact as a whole new past emerges that overturns everything the human race used to beleive about it - the more "now" warps to take into account a whole new past that may never have existed until human observers started looking closely at it.

This also has a "ripple effect" into the past which is felt most closely by Ash and her adventurers - their "present" is changed because of seismic changes in her "future" (ie, our now).

Eventually the pressure becomes so great that some sort of "deus ex machina" has to intervene to prevent the timeline and historical continuity from breaking down altogether - kind of like the way Terry Pratchett's Monks of Time have to intervene in the Discworld, but always leave clues and anomolies for those who know where to look.

Ash and the lads are flicked forward into OUR time, and end up as United Nations peacekeepers - ie, still a highly evolved form of condottieri.

And the author said her "cue" for all this was the observed historical anomoly of Burgundy.

What happened to this mediaeval state - in its day ten times more powerful than France and twenty or thirty times richer and more powerful than England?

This mediaeval superpower dissappears, suddenly and completely, from history in the middle 1400's, virtually overnight, with no sign of cataclysm or economic collapse or famine or war or any of the other reasons that fell superpowers. Had it not been sso, our second-nearest European neighbour would be called Burgundie or something, and not France - France merely stepped in and filled the power-vacuum after the Burgundian collapse and snapped up the remnant.

So not unreasonably, the question asked in "Ash" is - where did Burgundy go? Is this evidence of "interference", benign or otherwise, ibn our timeline? Has history been changed and Burgundy left as a clue for people to follow and work out why?

How *interesting*.....!

s off to Amazon....

Thanks for reading, and thanks for posting.

Ben