Time travel in fiction

Time travel is a common theme in fiction and has been depicted in a variety of media, such as literature, television and advertisements.[1][2]

Overview

H. G. Wells' 1895 story, The Time Machine, popularized the concept of time travel by mechanical means.[3] Time travel stories in general focus on the consequences of travelling into the past or the future.[3][4][5] The central premise for time travel stories is changing history, either intentionally or by accident, and how altering the past changes the future and creates an altered present or future for the time traveler when they return home.[3][5] As an extension of this, some time travel stories focus only on the paradoxes and alternate timelines that come with time travel, rather than time travelling itself.[4] Sean Redmond regards time travel as providing a "necessary distancing effect" that allows science fiction to address contemporary issues in metaphorical ways.[6]

Time travel in modern fiction is sometimes achieved by space and time warps which stem from the scientific theory of general relativity.[7] Stories of time travel from antiquity featured time travel into the future through time slip brought on by travelling or sleeping, and time travel into the past through supernatural means, for example brought on by angels.[8]

Time travel themes

Changing the past

The idea of changing the past is logically contradictory.[9] Paul J. Nahin, who has written extensively on the topic of time travel in fiction, states that "[e]ven though the consensus today is that the past cannot be changed, science fiction writers have used the idea of changing the past for good story effect".[1]:267

Alternate future

An alternative future or alternate future is a possible future that never comes to pass, typically when someone travels back into the past and alters it so that the events of the alternative future cannot occur,[10] or when a communication from the future to the past effected a change that alters the future.[1]:165

Communication from the future

Communication from the future as a plot device is encountered in various science fiction and fantasy stories. Forrest J. Ackerman noted in his 1973 anthology of the best fiction of the year that "[t]he theme of getting hold of tomorrow's newspaper is a recurrent one".[11] An early example of this device can be found in the H.G. Wells 1932 short story "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper",[11][12] which tells the tale of a man who receives such a paper from 40 years in the future. The 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow also employs this device,[11] with the protagonist receiving the next day's newspaper from an elderly colleague (who is possibly a ghost). Ackerman's anthology also highlights a short story by Robert Silverberg, "What We Learned From This Morning's Newspaper".[11] In that story, a block of homeowners wake to discover that on November 22, they have received the New York Times for the coming December 1.[1]:38 As characters learn of future events affecting them through a newspaper delivered a week early, the ultimate effect is that this "so upsets the future that spacetime is destroyed".[1]:165 The television series Early Edition, inspired by the film It Happened Tomorrow,[13] also revolved around a character who daily received the next day's newspaper,[1]:235 and sought to change some event therein forecast to happen.

A newspaper from the future can be a fictional edition of a real newspaper, or an entirely fictional newspaper. John Buchan's novel The Gap in the Curtain, is similarly premised on a group of people being enabled to see, for a moment, an item in Times newspaper from one year in the future. During the Swedish general election of 2006, the Swedish liberal party used election posters which looked like news items, called Framtidens nyheter ("News of the future"), featuring things that Sweden in the future had become what the party wanted.[14]

A communication from the future raises questions about the ability of humans to control their destiny.[1]:165 If the recipient is allowed to presume that the future is malleable, and if the future forecast affects them in some way, then this device serves as a convenient explanation of their motivations. In It Happened Tomorrow, the events that are described in the newspaper do come to pass, and the protagonist's efforts to avoid those events set up circumstances which instead cause them to come about. By contrast, in Early Edition, the protagonist is able to successfully prevent catastrophes predicted in the newspaper (although, if the protagonist does nothing, these catastrophes do come about).

Where such a device is used, the source of the future news may not be explained, leaving it open to the reader or watcher to imagine that it might be technology, magic, an act of a god etc. In the H.G. Wells story, the author writes of the newspaper that "apparently it had been delivered not by the postman, but by some other hand". As in It Happened Tomorrow and Early Edition, no explanation is offered for the source of the future news. Ackerman suggests that "[t]he longer that authors mush on with the tale of... the next-week's-newspaper-now, the more difficult it becomes to pull a new rarebit out of the hat".[11]

Time loop

A "time loop" or "temporal loop" is a plot device in which periods of time are repeated and re-experienced by the characters, and there is often some hope of breaking out of the cycle of repetition.[15] Time loop is sometimes used to refer to a causal loop.[15][16] Stories with time loops commonly center on the character learning from each successive loop through time.[15]

Time paradox

Further information: Temporal paradox

Many time travel works explore the topic of disrupting causality leading to time paradoxes. One of the most commonly referred to in time travel literature is known as the grandfather paradox. Many works of fiction explore what would happen if a time traveller went back in time and changed the past, for example if they killed their own grandparents.[17]

Time slip

Main article: Time slip

A time slip is a plot device used in fantasy and science fiction in which a person, or group of people, seem to travel through time by unknown means for a period of time.[18][19]

Time war

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes a time war as a fictional war that is "fought across time, usually with each side knowingly using time travel ... in an attempt to establish the ascendancy of one or another version of history". Time wars are also known as "change wars" and "temporal wars".[20]

Nahin compiles a variety of examples of fictional works that raise issues framed as arising in a time war:

Consider this passage from The Fall of Chronopolis (Bayley), a novel about a "time-war." Just after the detection of temporal invaders, we read of them that "They had come in from the future at high speed, too fast for defensive time-blocks to be set up, and had only been detected by ground-based stations deep in historical territory. If the target was to alter past events— the usual strategy in a time-war— then the empire's chronocontinuity would be significantly interfered with." And in Time of the Fox (Costello), American physicists battle KGB physicists in a war of time travelers in the past, each side attempting to change history to its advantage. In this novel the history changers isolate themselves from all the alterations taking place outside of their Time Lab, and they compare their stored historical records with those of external libraries. That allows the staff historian to adjust for each new round of changes. As the historian explains, outside of the Time Lab "History might change, but here [in the Time Lab] the past lives on."

In a novel of a galaxy-wide confrontation between humans and androids — Time and Again (Simak) — the use of time travel to alter history is central: "A war in time . . . would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which would not even know that there was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines of Athens, to the horse and chariot of Thut- mosis III, to the sailing of Columbus. ... It would twist the fabric of the past."[1]:267

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Nahin, Paul J. (1999). Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (2nd ed.). New York, NY [u.a.]: Springer [u.a.] ISBN 9780387985718.
  2. ↑ Nahin, Paul J. (2011). Time Travel: A Writer's Guide to the Real Science of Plausible Time Travel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. ix. ISBN 1421401207.
  3. 1 2 3 Sterling, Bruce (2014-08-27). "science fiction | literature and performance :: Major science fiction themes". Britannica.com. Retrieved 2015-11-27.
  4. 1 2 Sterling, Bruce (2014-08-27). "science fiction | literature and performance :: Major science fiction themes". Britannica.com. Retrieved 2015-11-27.
  5. 1 2 Alison Flood (2011-09-23). "Time travel in fiction: why authors return to it time and time again | Science". The Guardian. Retrieved 2015-11-29.
  6. ↑ Redmond, Sean (2014). Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 114. ISBN 0231501846. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
  7. ↑ Stephen Hawking (1999). "Space and Time Warps". Retrieved February 20, 2016.
  8. ↑ Alkon, Paul K. (1987). Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. pp. 95–96. ISBN 082030932X.
  9. ↑ Norman Swartz (1993). "Time Travel: Visiting the Past". Sfu.ca. Retrieved February 20, 2016.
  10. ↑ Prucher, Jeffrey; Wolfe, Gene (2007). Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9780195305678. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 Forrest J. Ackerman, ed., Best Science Fiction for 1973 (1973), p. 36.
  12. ↑ "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper". Gutenberg.net.au. 1971-11-10. Retrieved 2015-12-24.
  13. ↑ Young, R.G. (1997). The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film: Ali Baba to Zombies. New York: Applause. p. 318. ISBN 1557832692.
  14. ↑ Gunnar Jonsson (29 June 2006). "Fp satsar på löpsedlar som valaffischer" (in Swedish). Dagens nyheter. Retrieved 9 September 2015.
  15. 1 2 3 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. "Themes : Time Loop : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia". Sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2015-10-18.
  16. ↑ Klosterman, Chuck (2009). Eating the Dinosaur (1st Scribner hardcover ed.). New York: Scribner. p. 60. ISBN 9781439168486. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
  17. ↑ Langford, David. "Themes : Time Paradoxes : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia". Sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 30 November 2015.
  18. ↑ Charlie Jane Anders (2009-06-12). "Timeslip romance". io9. Retrieved 2015-08-27.
  19. ↑ Palmer, Christopher (2007). Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Repr. ed.). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. p. 146. ISBN 978-0-85323-618-4.
  20. ↑ Langford, David. "Changewar". sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved November 17, 2015.

Further reading

External links

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