Self-Resolving Paradoxes
by Lord Hydronium
My theory is the self-resolving paradox. It goes something like this: Suppose I go back in time and kill myself as a kid. This creates a paradox. By the self-resolving paradox idea, I'm eliminated entirely from the timeline. I never existed, therefore there was no paradox and there's no problem.
There's one timeline where I exist in this scenario - the previous "reality". This timeline ends at the paradox. There's another timeline where I never existed, in which case there is no possibility of a paradox. It is identical in every other respect. So, the paradox universe ends, while the other one survives. You have to think in more than 4 dimensions here to picture an alternate timeline.
Which leads to an interesting conclusion - causality paradoxes can never happen, because the universe will automatically eliminate them and fix itself. Which means any concept that would be perfectly feasible except for the fact that it can cause a paradox is in fact possible. In other words, time travel and faster than light travel could happen in theory, if you could solve the practical aspects of them (energy required, mass increase, required technology, etc)
Self-Resolving Paradoxes and how they relate to the Art
There are an infinite number of universes, which are basically the same as timelines - different patterns of events. In a certain number of them, someone might create a causality paradox. Since at the moment an incident becomes paradoxical and denies its own existence the universe ends, that means that every "faulty" universe (universes with paradoxes occuring in them) will be eliminated eventually. In fact, every possible universe that could form a paradox would be eliminated. In my example, not only would the universe I described be eliminated, but every other universe with the pattern of events in it that lead up to me killing my past self. So the universes with me might not all be eliminated, but many will. In the end, the only ones that continue to survive are "perfect" universes - ones with no flaws that lead to their destruction. All others end eventually, but may survive for quite a long time.
When you write a Descriptive book, you are desribing the qualities of a universe that you want to link to. Not only that, but you also describe how you want the universe to flow, to change through time. If in some way you contradict yourself, you create an unstable age. What if an unstable age is a flawed world? A world with a paradox that's not one of causality? If you write a world with two contradictory things, that's the same as if someone kills their past self to create two contradictory facts. The universe, in order to resolve the paradox, ends, to be replaced by a universe without the contradiction. No one is the wiser. But this would have to be such a minor change, in the quantum range. Larger ones lead to greater problems.
Gehn's ages had two major problems - stupid, shortsighted blunders (making the water warm, putting the moon too close), and age destroying paradoxes. His first were the most noticiable - the phrases in his books, working together, often created results he could not predict, and the harmful ones were noticed the easiest. But the second kind was the kind that destroyed Riven completely. The problems with Riven's moon and the fact that Riven was floating on an unstable layer of magma were Gehn's first problem, and were noticed. The second kind wasn't noticed until the very end.
The general area of the tree of probability known as Riven consisted of only so many universes. The original flaws that Gehn wrote into the books only allowed the book to link to a finite section of that. For example, somewhere in the multiverse is a Riven where there were no problems, and the age continued to live as long as would normally be expected. The original phrases Gehn wrote prevented the book from linking to any one of them. Instead, as each universe in the section limited to the book was destroyed, there became fewer and fewer universes to link to. Atrus' corrections were keeping the book in an area where there were more universes to connect to, but the choices were still limited. When Atrus quit writing to come and rescue you, the book was no longer able to change to another area of the multiverse, and was caught in an ever-shrinking selection of collapsing universes. Finally, the link connected to the last few ones, and as their paradoxes destroyed them, the book ceased to link to Riven. There was nothing that fit the description of the book, and so Riven died. That's why the linking book in Tomahna is so weird - it's connecting to nothing. You can't link to it because there's nothing to link to.