 Fantasy: March 16, 2016 Issue [#7532] |
  Fantasy
This week: Out of Time Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system.
-Alexandra Adornetto
Time travel is such a magic concept.
-Matt Smith
Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.
-Stephen Hawking
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Time Travel, Part I
I've been thinking for a while about doing an editorial on time travel, and then my future self showed up and said "No! Whatever you do, don't do an editorial on time travel!" So I'm going to do three editorials on time travel.
While time travel is often considered the realm of science fiction, it has its place in fantasy stories as well. And since to the best of our scientific understanding right now, time travel is not within the realm of possibility, we as authors get to make up our own rules about it. However, as with any other magic or technological plot device, it's important that you set up rules about the process that are self-consistent, and then stick to them.
In any discussion of time travel, though, we run into a problem with language. English and other human languages are limited by our own experience, which usually doesn't include time travel, and does include the concept of shared time - the idea that we all pass through time at the same rate, for example. So tenses like past, present, and future can be confusing when discussing time travel. I want to emphasize here that this is a limitation of language, not of the possibility of time travel. There's no easy way to resolve this, even with diagrams and sketches, and it would take a much more creative mind than mine to come up with new tenses for verbs; however, at a minimum, we'll consider two timelines: that of the time traveler, and that of everyone else.
So. You want to have a character travel into the past. This is nothing new in storytelling, and it's been handled in different ways, most of which conflict with each other. As I noted above, you'll want to think about it for yourself, not just copy whatever you've seen on Back to the Future or Doctor Who or Star Trek or Quantum Leap. And the main reason you want to think about it is to determine how to resolve apparent paradoxes.
The first question to resolve: Can your time traveler influence the events of the past, or not? If not, if the purpose of time travel is merely information-gathering or observation (and I'll call this "past-viewing" to distinguish it from physical transportation of a time traveler to the past), then it's likely that no paradoxes result from this. In fact, it's something we do quite often, when watching old movies or TV shows, albeit in a limited sense. And yet, according to one interpretation of quantum theory, it's not possible to observe an event without affecting it - at least on the quantum scale. Still, I think that for the purpose of this discussion, we can say we're not worried about past-viewing.
If your time traveler can influence the events of the past, then you've got more questions to answer.
For example: Your time traveler meets her own grandfather when he was a young boy, and inadvertently kills him or renders him sterile.
Possible resolutions:
a) Time traveler immediately blinks out of existence, having never been born. Well, that was a short story, wasn't it?
b) Time traveler continues to exist, but the time when she comes from does not include her.
c) Oops, it turns out the person she thought was her grandfather was not. No paradox ensues.
d) Her grandmother met someone else and still produced the time traveler (this being highly unlikely, considering the way genetics works)
e) The timeline splits off at that moment, producing both the universe where the time traveler is born and steps into a time machine, and a universe where the time traveler is never born. Both universes are equally "real." The time traveler can then return to her original timeline, negating what she just did, or perhaps there's a way for her to follow the new one, in which case, she's in a universe where she never existed. You figure out how to explain that one; I'm moving on.
f) I'm sure you can imagine a few others.
Here's another, more extreme example: Your time traveler goes back to when he was a baby for the purpose of killing his own infant self.
a) WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
b) Many of the same issues as above.
c) Something - some force or basic law of the universe - prevents this from happening (this doesn't just skirt the question of whether there's a "god" or not; it stomps right into it).
Another possibility is that no matter what the time traveler does, events unfold as they unfolded in the shared past of the original departure time - which, again, raises issues of free will, predestination, and just how much of a trickster God really is.
Now, those examples are in-your-face obvious, but as anyone who's read Ray Bradbury's excellent short story A Sound of Thunder might suspect, even a tiny, seemingly insignificant change to the past can have far-reaching and unpredictable outcomes. This is termed "the butterfly effect" and is a known aspect of chaos theory. Interestingly enough, although a butterfly figures prominently (and anachronistically) in the aforementioned short story, the chaos theory term has an entirely different source, thus illustrating how random factors can converge as well as diverge.
So... there are issues with the concept of time travel. As a writer, you need to be aware of what these issues may be, and have plausible, consistent resolutions to them. This editorial has focused on travel into the past, but we also have present (alternate timeline) travel and future travel to consider - which, unless I forget or become distracted or get a lot of negative feedback about this one, will be in my next two newsletters.
After all, the future is notoriously hard to predict. |
Some fantasy for your enjoyment.
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Last time, in "Comic Books" , I had some things to say about comic book adaptations
Jeff  : What's truly amazing to see is how the cinematic universe of the movies (especially Marvel) is not just borrowing from past comics, but developing their own continuity based on events in previous movies. It was amazing to see them pull AVENGERS together after the solo title lead-ins... and CIVIL WAR looks to take that integration one step further with the introduction of new characters who will get their own movies after CIVIL WAR. 
Yep, which is something I'm looking forward to. Historically, movies based on comics have been all over the map - from horrible to excellent and everything in between. I think they finally figured out how to combine the action and fantasy of a comic book story with good movie-making skills. And it turns out that continuity - in any form - is something audiences crave.
Quick-Quill  : I loved Comic books as they were a visual to my imagination. They literally were short stories in pictures. Today video games serve the same purpose. They have the advantage and challenge to keep the reader or player interested in the storyline to keep going on the quest. Much harder than in the old days
I've done editorials about video games, too. Storytelling is key to a game's success as well - not the only factor, but an important one. All the special effects in Hollywood won't save a movie if it has unrelatable characters and a crappy plot. Yet another reason why writers rule the world, right?
scooter  : love, love, LOVE jessica jones! it is excellent!
True, though it's still hard to watch anything with David Tennant without expecting the TARDIS to show up.
So that's it for me for March - see you next month! Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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