So we write about time travel to the past, but not all of us
do it the same way. You see, time travel creates logic problems called time
paradoxes. We all know the famous ones, which are related to the idea of
killing someone necessary for our own existence. Kill your virginal
grandparent, and you can’t exist, but if you don’t exist, who killed the
grandparent? And what about all the other people whose lives change because
gramps is no longer around? Your one action prevents a growing chain of events,
each of which spreads out into a web of others.
So then what?
In fiction, a time travel plot comes from the way a past
action can change the future. In some stories, it does. In others, the characters
try to prevent it. In yet others, they try to redirect events to produce a more
desirable history. All these stories are potentially interesting if they are
done properly. Let’s get into some examples.
Classic time travel stories can be found in Star Trek: The Original Series. These are aimed at using
the characters’ ingenuity to preserve the timeline. “Tomorrow is Yesterday”
follows the classic pattern. The Enterprise crew is thrown back in time to 1969
and accidentally captures a pilot who has a crucial role to play in earth
history. Once they are returning back to their original time, they use the
transporter to put him back in place in a way that prevents his ever having
come aboard. This isn’t fully logical (sorry, Spock!) because if the pilot
never came aboard Enterprise, then no one should remember, but our heroes do.
This is a fun story and a great episode, however. In “Assignment: Earth,” a
kind of sequel, the ship returns on purpose to 1968 to conduct historical
research, only to get sucked into the activities of characters from a failed
attempt to launch another show and wind up having to do the best they can to
avoid disrupting a timeline even though they don’t fully understand it. This
is, again, logically silly, but entertaining, and worth watching also for an
early-career appearance of actress Teri Garr, who in my opinion is totally
dreamy.
The best, by popular consensus, of the ST:TOS time travel
stories is “City on the Edge of Forever,” credited to Harlan Ellison although
his idea was almost completely dismantled by four other writers. The story won
numerous awards, deservingly so on the whole. An alien technology throws Kirk,
Spock, and McCoy into 20th century New York, where Kirk must
sacrifice his love affair with a social worker, Edith Keeler. Kirk allows
Edith, played by soap opera star Joan Collins, to die so that history can work
out properly. This story of nobility and tragedy is generally considered the
best episode of the original series. (You can see Edith, recast, interacting
with Kirk years later in the Star Trek Continues episode “Divided We Stand.”)
Although it is a must-seek if you like Star Trek, even “City” is logically
flawed, because, like many other stories of its type, it assumes that only
great people matter to the course of events. But really, anything can matter.
This is called the butterfly effect, name courtesy of
scientist Edward Lorenz. Lorenz wrote:
“One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct,
one flap of a sea gull’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the
weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent
evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.” In other words, any tiny change in the known course of the
past can change anything.
Stories based on the butterfly effect can be very
entertaining, but they are usually full of logic holes. The most entertaining
examples are to be found in the first two Back to the Future movies, in
which every action in the romantic and sporting lives of the characters changes
the timeline, over and over. Marty McFly and Doc Brown focus not on restoring
the proper timeline, though (which would cause Doc Brown to be dead) but on
creating one more favorable to them, with the right love affairs in place and
the villains in the down position. They have no sense of the integrity of the
timeline, or the effect of their changes upon people other than themselves, but
are focused on self-preservation and their own betterment.
Another such story of seeking a favorable future is found in
the first two Terminator movies. In The Terminator, the villainous killer robot
tries to prevent a present outcome by killing someone in the past. In the
sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, this
effort is repeated, but the second time around, the heroes use a pre-emptive
strategy and try to prevent the creation of the killer robots in the first
place. Illogically, they seemingly succeed, but the heroic killer robot is
still around at the conclusion, when it should have been erased. While T2 is
one of my favorite movies of all time, that is so only because I ignore the
time paradox to focus on the character relationships and the action. The
Terminator franchise gets dumb in the third movie in many ways (although
somewhat redeemed by the chance to watch Kristanna Lokken in action) but its
time travel aspect makes more sense than one might think. The good terminator
explains, "Judgment Day is inevitable." This makes sense, because it,
albeit only just barely, denies the possibility of a time paradox. Sorry,
guys: you CAN'T change the future. Que
sera, sera. Time can't be effed with. (As for the other two movies in the
franchise, there is no time travel in the fourth, and the fifth, despite the
compelling presence of Emilia Clarke, makes no goddamn sense at all, time-travel-wise.)
We are better off, in our time travel stories, if we assume
that paradoxes are impossible. It just WILL work out. As an author, you can
achieve this in two ways:
The most interesting is the classic Marvel Universe method.
It says that time is linked to an infinitely expanding multiverse (complex of
universes), and that when anyone time travels to the future, that time travel
creates a new timeline. So if Captain America goes back in time and slays Adolf
Hitler on a WWI battlefield, and then returns to his own time, he finds that
where he comes from, nothing has changed. The Hitler he slew was a different
Hitler, so though he may have prevented the Nazi regime in some universe, his
own is the same as he remembers it being before he left.
Marvel sometimes tried to get around its own rules -- for
example, stupidly using Mephisto, a Satan analogue, to erase Spider-Man's past
-- but has also gotten great stories out of those rules. One Marvel movie does
not follow the rules, which is X-Men:
Days of Future Past. This is the superhero equivalent of Back to the
Future II, letting the characters time-travel to create a more desirable future
for themselves, with only a precious few who were involved recalling what
happened before. Their efforts changed the world for the better.
The multiverse rule set makes for good stories involving
parallel versions of characters, controlling authorities who can influence all
the timelines, invasion from a parallel-universe stories, and more. It worked
well for the original, printed Days of Future Past story as well as for the
cross-time epic Avengers Forever.
If you aren't using the concept of a multiverse, then you
have to go in a different direction to prevent paradoxes. I prefer this one for
my own writing, and I think my best-selling colleague, Georgina Young-Ellis,
does as well, although she is less explicit than I. According to this version,
things just naturally work out so that whatever the time-traveler does, history
doesn't change. The time-traveler's actions turn out to be part of the pattern
of the universe all along. The prototype of this, for me, is a Robert Heinlein
story called "By His Bootstraps," summarized at http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/works/shortstories/byhisbootstraps.html,
in which a character repeatedly meets versions of himself.
In my first novel to involve time-travel, 2010's The Ghost in the Crystal, which is now in its revised second edition eBook,
the story relies upon a stable chronology for the universe. My young hero has
named himself Simon Magus, after the Biblical magician and villain. As a
result, a ghost from that time period confuses him with the "real"
Simon Magus. He then travels in time to occupy the role. In this way, events in
2001, when the book mainly take place, cause events nearly 2000 years before.
Is our Simon the "real" Simon Magus? Probably not, but there may not
be a real one, or there may be many. It all works out: Simon interacts with historical figures, but
history doesn't change; rather, he was part of that story all along.
Georgina is a lot more subtle about these things. Her
time-travelers do their utmost to avoid culturally contaminating their
ancestors, or they are supposed to, at least. When they return, they find their
actions reflected in the historical record, but there is no butterfly effect.
Their timeline is entirely unchanged.
The same idea of time-travel can be found in one of the most
well-known books of all time, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban. Hermione and the boys use the time-turner to revisit a scene of their
failure and replay it, but when they do, their actions only create events that
they remember the first time. Most notably, Harry's patronus charm, done on the
second visit to the lake, is seen as a mysterious spell during his first visit.
Nothing changed: the second visit
explains, not changes, but the initial events. If you try to create a time paradox in this schema, it just
doesn't work. You CANNOT kill your virginal grandparent, or a young Hitler.
Something will prevent your actions. History will not change; no butterfly
effect exists; you were always there; or, alternately, when you are about to do
it, there is a snap and you are back in your original chronology.
I hope you enjoyed this quick survey of how time travel
stories are constructed. If you did, please visit Amazon today and take a look
at The Ghost in the Crystal, now in its second edition as I said earlier, with
a new cover and several new sequences. It's magic in the real world, with a
great cast of characters. I believe you will enjoy it even more than my essay.
Matt's Books: http://schooloftheages.webs.com
