Time Travel in fiction

Cafe Society
141

…so I’m writing a time-travel story. A script, actually. I’m probably never going to finish, not in this lifetime and it will almost certainly never get filmed, but I’m writing it for myself.

But it started with a thought experiment: what if there was only a single timeline?

When you travel back or forward in time you don’t create a new timeline: you just change the current timeline.

That could mean that multiple versions of the time-traveller could exist in the same universe. And that if time-travel was ubiquitous enough, then the universe would constantly be in flux.

So I started to just play out what the consequences of that were, and I had to set up a set of rules. Because my first problem was…what is the present?

We are all living in the “present” now. Our consciousness, our thoughts, all moving forward in linear time. But what if I jumped back 24 hours and ran into another version of me? I’m still in my present. But what about the universe? What about the other me? What is going on in their brain? They will also perceive this moment as the “present.” But how does that work? Does their brain just magically start thinking and existing in this new present?

It’s something I’m kinda just hand-waving away at the moment. My mantra is, “time isn’t universal, it’s personal.” Its subjective. It’s kinda like the observer effect.

Basically, once you start time travelling, you perceive the world and the universe differently. “Normies”, people that haven’t travelled in time, won’t notice anything. But time-travellers do. So if Nigel travels backwards in time and sets up a chain of events that changes the colour of the sky from blue to red…for the time-traveller, when the sky turns red they will perceive it in their present. People would constantly wink in and out of existence. Landscapes would change. It would drive most time-travellers mad.

But normies wouldn’t notice anything.

There are a number of other rules as well. Time travel is complicated. And I started to imagine the utter chaos that would develop in such a universe…and imagined what it would take to bring it under control.

And I imagined great time wars. Civilisations rising and falling. The universe restarting over and over again. So I began to play out the mechanics of a “temporal war.” What would that mean? Who would the players be? How did it end?

And I decided that it would end with a bureaucracy. The eventual winners of the temporal wars put in a set of rules, laws and regulations that governed time-travel, then ruthlessly enforced it.

Which is where the story opens, in a rough approximation of our own universe, where things are basically stable, because anyone (outside of those who have authorisation) who attempts to travel in time are detected, tracked down, and taken care of. Against this backdrop of crazy temporal mechanics, I’m focusing on telling a much smaller story

So that’s the set-up. I’m still gaming the setup and still working through the outline. But its fun. And its a nice distraction from the realities of life at the moment. I just know that I’m never ever going to finish it LOL.

142

OK, so imagine for the sake of the argument time travel was possible. Which only gets interesting assuming you can travel backwards, into the past. Because time travel into the future is trivial: we do it all the time, and doing it faster just means exploiting relativity. Move at the speed of light, and you travel instantly into any future you want (if you can slow down again: but if you were able to accelerate, you should be fine with decelerating. Just an additional assumption).
So backwards we go. Fine. But how far into the past? Could you go back to the very beginning, the Big Bang itself? Change something then, you might change everything. Change the fundamental constants even? That changes physics. Maybe time travel is then no longer possible, and you are stuck at the beginning of time in the new real you have created. Too bad an habitable Earth will not exist for many billion years yet. You are doomed. Nice try.

Maybe you have already finished it in another time line. The LOL’s on you!

What is the difference between time travel and magic? Oh, I so want to believe in magic! But, alas…

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Time travel is much better defined than magic, and there’s room in the known laws of physics for it.

Which by the way is a good reason to look into it. The fact that it keeps popping up in theories despite all the problems it being real would cause indicates that either it’s possible, or it’s not possible and we’re missing some law(s) of physics that forbid it. Worthwhile knowledge either way.

144

It is also a plot element in Gibson’s The Peripheral. Well, kind of, except— and this is important— he never uses the words “time travel”. (However, “quantum” does occur.)

145

I do not remember the name of the specific novel I have in mind (the notion is pretty classic, in any case), but there was the idea that the time-traveller still does experience time, except it is, as you put it, a personal experience, in that he or she can say that first they were in 3210, and later at 2123, and maybe even later in 1234.

Vaguely vaguely reminds me of the computer game Old Skies; IMO worth playing at least once!

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Other examples of temporal bureaucracies include the Time Variance Authority from the MCU, the Time Service from Robert Siverberg’s Up the Line, and Eternity from Asimov’s The End of Eternity. A whole page of Time police here. Time Police - TV Tropes

These are the tropes you might want to avoid if you want to be original.

147

Kage Baker’s Company series had an interesting take- history is immutable, but who says what history is? Time agents can do anything they like so long as recorded events aren’t affected. They build bases in prehistory near volcanoes that will eventually erupt and destroy them completely. Most of their work involves taking historical objects that went missing and moving them to where history says they will eventually be found.

148

I always like the idea of Time Travel in Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks.

The novel postulates a road that travels through time, with a nexus placed every few years, where a handful of specially gifted people are able to enter and exit.

The central theme of the novel is time travel, using a highway that links all times and all possible histories. Exits from the highway lead to different times and places. Changing events in the past cause some exits further up the road, in the future, to become overgrown and inaccessible and new exits to appear, leading to different alternative futures.

There’s also a suggestion that the people using the Road can affect how the various branches act. If enough people take a new exit, it gets larger and more established, and if they stop taking an exit, it tends to wither away. So “Popular” versions of history are easier to find. There’s a brief scene with Hitler where someone remarks that he’s “Still trying to find the branch in which he won”, for example.

149

Steins Gate is one of my favorites and has strong ties into the story of John Titor. In the Steins Gate universe any changes made in the past during time travel result in the previous past’s differences being forgotten by everyone (even by the traveler who made them). And so John Titor wasn’t a fraud, he simply completed his mission and the horrible future never came to pass. And now he’s completely forgotten he’s done it.

150

Talk about an unsung hero!

151

Reminds me of Recluse’s Victory, from the video game City of Heroes. One of the nefarious plans of the evil Lord Recluse to conquer the world was to open a portal to a possible future where (by means unstated) he already had, and then to deploy comic-book-tech timey-wimey mumbo-jumbo to “stabilize” that potential future. Which of course draws the heroes to open a portal to that same future, so they can try to deactivate the timey-wimey tech.

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Lawrence Watt-Evans story “Real Time” turns that trope on its’ head quite effectively.

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Was there a Heinlein story in which somebody experienced time travel the hard way, by having an atom bomb go off on top of him?

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Farnham’s Freehold

Definitely one of RAH more cringy books. Overtly racist and sexist to a remarkable degree.

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Charles Harness built a novel around what I thought was an interesting take.

(Uh, spoilers? Or is this not that kind of thread?)

Anyway, as the plot unfolds, we eventually realize it’s the result of history-is-immutable time travel: the enigmatic character has been doing all sorts of stuff in the context of the finishing touches getting put on the world’s first working time machine, which his younger self will — again? — use to travel back to the events on the first page: as that enigmatic character, busily plugging away at that exact same stuff in said context, like I was just saying.

This of course raises the question: so, what’s he plugging away at? And the answer is: doing some pioneering work in the interesting new field of history-is-not-immutable time travel…

156

He was trying to show off how ridiculous racism was by portraying a society where blacks were on top, and whites were discriminated against. But yeah, it didn’t work as well as he intended.

157

I will fully admit that I have read all of RAH’s work, but not deeply studied the commentary about it. Is there some evidence that he was doing this or is post-hoc justification?

And I’m truly asking…

158

Well, I thought it was obvious, but…

159

The best thing about that episode is that they drive around 1954 Berlin, and you see all the lots which are still filled with rubble. I showed it to my German son-in-law who was fascinated.

160

I’m sure this has been addressed: at the end of BTTF, Doc drives up to Marty in the driveway in a panic. Why would there be such an urgency to get back to the future right then when you have a time machine? I think this has been a scenario in other time travel movies.