Seemingly true

Isaac Asimov

One reason I loved the robot stories written by Isaac Asimov was his Three Laws of Robotics. Here they are:

1. A robot must not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's stories are based on these laws and possible dilemmas that could result despite them or because of them. As a teenager reading these stories I wondered if the Three Laws were truth, not fiction. Shouldn't they be true? Decades later, now that robots and artificial intelligence have become a reality, they seem more and more like a good idea.

Kate Mascarenhas does something similar in her much more recent sci-fi novel, The Psychology of Time Travel. Throughout the novel and in a glossary in an appendix she creates time-travel terminology that  carries the ring of truth. If time travel ever becomes real, these seem like words time travelers might actually use. Here are some of them:

Completion — To live an incident you've already read or heard about.

Common chronology — The sequence of events experienced by non-time travelers.

Echoing — Returning to an incident you've already experienced.

Emus — People who don't time travel, and thus pass through time in a single direction. Emus are unable to walk backwards. Such people are also called Plodders.

Silver-me — A time traveler's older self. (As opposed to the younger self, Green-me.)

If Mascarenhas writes other time-travel novels using the same terminology, she may approach Asimov's accomplishment of creating an invented reality that seems, at least to readers, like truth.