The authors describe a time-based approach to distributed concurrency control and recovery that alleviates the high cost of optimistic methods by combining the solutions to concurrency control, recovery management, and localized control into a single flexible yet powerful and efficient mechanism. The approach adapts the object-oriented Timewarp mechanism to handle competing processes rather than the cooperating processes for which it was originally intended. The result is a completely decentralized, nonblocking concurrency and recovery protocol that supports more general features of other desirable aspects of distributed applications, such as versioning and active objects.>