So what was the deal with Thomas Kirkland?   "I've come back through time to make sure the Next Men don't kill President Hilltop, and in order to stop them, I've got this huge bomb strapped to myself!"  Huh?   

Clearly Kirkland was telling some fibs about why he was there.   And he knew that Hilltop and Sathanas were the same person due to the DNA comparison he was talking about.   So, basically, he was trying to kill Sathanas and prevent the future evils of 2112?

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Can't it?

I too used to think time was immutable on the Next Men world, but then I re-read the story so far and came to a different conclusion.

Thomas Kirkland told Jane Bowman that, according to the science from 2115, any change on time would require a force from outside the natural stream but that he was going to try to change it anyway. Later, he told the Next Men that his contemporary scientists swore up and down that time was immutable until they found out a trans-temporal wave effect that might indicate a possible alteration of the time stream.

So basically, my interpretation is that just because Kirkland apparently wasn’t successful on his mission doesn’t mean time can’t be changed in the world of Next Men. There's always that "force from outside the natural time stream" to consider and also the "trans-temporal wave effect", whatever those things might be. 

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Hmm.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Suppose you were reading a novel in which someone from the Future traveled back and changed the Past. The first few chapters of the novel give a detailed description of life in the Future, many elements of which are directly the result of things in the Past that the characters want to change. When those characters successfully travel back and change those things, have the first chapters of the novel become "obsolete", or is it all part of one big story?

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That's not quite what I said.

2112 began as an entity entirely unconnected to the Next Men, or anything else I was working on. Bits and pieces of a lot of ideas floating around in my head, until I one day found a place to put them all. Subsequently, I started on NEXT MEN and realized that 2112 could function as a prequel/sequel to this new series.

Once I thought of this, it seemed likely that Hilltop and Sathanas would be one and the same, but I made no decision one way or the other, until Matt Webb, the colorist on the original series, guessed the connection. Then I realized that the clues were already there, implanted more or less unconsciously by me. So I went ahead with that thread.

The fact that this allowed me to create all kinds of twists, turns, and even "paradoxes" in my timestream was icing on the cake!

This is my other question.  How does Cornelius Van Damme know that Thomas Kirkland is coming from the future with a bomb to blow up the White House in an attempt on Sathanas's life, creating the perfect opportunity for him to step in at precisely the right moment in Mark Ivey's body and take over the Presidency?

Is it possible that Kirkland's Uncle Silas found a way to feed information back through time to Cornelius, who is either his ancestor/relative or his earlier self?