3A: Sweeny Timeline Thoughts

But I hide hammers. I have several hammers hidden. A hammer is an advantage that you can use when you are driven into the next-to-final corner. A hammer is a sort of insurance. I make fictions as I am assigned to do, and many others also are carrying out collateral and equally weird fictions. But the others do not seem to play as many tricks as I play, they do not seem to hide as many hammers in their hurdles. I try to insure that the fictions that I am assigned to shall remain fictions. I set tricks into them from the beginning. It is now the case that the catastrophes cannot really happen unless certain other things set into the fabrics of the continuities should also be made to happen. And they cannot happen unless other things are made to unhappen. So long as Hiram Johnson was elected President of the United States in 1912, for instance, the catastrophes cannot happen. And how is he to be unelected now these four years later, or seventy-two years later?

I wasted an entire day on academic administration and thinking about hammers and the Sweeny timeline. One of the weirdest things about the chronology in Section 6 is that presidents usually serve only one term because Sweeny is mucking with the timeline. Early in the book, he describes his interventions in the presidency as his hammers. Why hammers? I haven't been able to work through that yet. But he uses his hammers to avert presidential mistakes that contribute to catastrophe. He keeps turning presidents out of office, though they later run again and return for a second term. Those changes of office reveal a hidden timeline that points to policy that Lafferty disliked. I cribbed this out while thinking about it, with obvious inspiration.