What are the various "styles" of time travel in pop culture? Could they co-exist or are they inherently irreconcilable? What is the most "realistic" type of time travel that's been depicted?
I'm not talking about the transport (like the DeLorean in Back to the Future), but rather the "rules" of TT. Like how in "Looper", you could leave notes for your future self by cutting them into your body and letting the scars remain. Which is weird because your future self would have grown up with those scars and had them the whole time.
I think my favorite description of why time travel would not cause a paradox came from Michael Crichton's "Timeline", where you can't accidentally kill your grandfather and prevent yourself from existing because...well...you exist. All of time has already occurred, and you're just a denizen of one fixed point. If you were capable of preventing your birth, it would have already occurred, and you wouldn't be around to even wonder if that were possible.
My favorites simply use parallel universes - alternate realities. You could kill your grandfather, but from that point on, it's a whole new universe. You'll never be born in that one, but it doesn't really change the one you're from. This avoids most paradoxes. Maybe you can get back to your own timeline or maybe you can't. That doesn't matter.
The other is you can't change time - almost as if the universe itself will do whatever it takes to stop you since, if it didn't, you could never have existed to change it. Those are often fun when you learn what you did actually brought about what you were trying to avoid. I recall one (IIRIC) where somebody killed baby Hitler and replaced the baby with an orphan Jewish baby. But it was that Jewish baby that then grew up to be the Hitler we all know and hate.
Stephen King tried the latter with "11/22/63". Apparently, trying to prevent the Kennedy assassination is both a) futile and b) really bad for future events.
It is always fun to see stories where somebody tries to fix something, but they just make it worse. I like a Star Trek: Voyager episode where this one guy kept trying and trying, but he could never quite get it right, and eventually (IIRC) he had to accept the first timeline as the best, despite the unfortunate and personal suffering he had there.
My favorites simply use parallel universes - alternate realities. You could kill your grandfather, but from that point on, it's a whole new universe. You'll never be born in that one, but it doesn't really change the one you're from. This avoids most paradoxes. Maybe you can get back to your own timeline or maybe you can't. That doesn't matter.
The other is you can't change time - almost as if the universe itself will do whatever it takes to stop you since, if it didn't, you could never have existed to change it. Those are often fun when you learn what you did actually brought about what you were trying to avoid. I recall one (IIRIC) where somebody killed baby Hitler and replaced the baby with an orphan Jewish baby. But it was that Jewish baby that then grew up to be the Hitler we all know and hate.
The alternate universes idea probably offers more story possibilities, but I personally prefer the second idea--that time travel can't change history because it is itself a part of history.
Then there's the idea, which you see in stories by Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber, that you CAN change history, but you have to WORK at it. Just stepping on a butterfly or shooting the right person at the right time won't cut it--history is a product of broader forces that have to be nudged into a new path over a period of time in order to make any truly significant long-term changes. You can tell that those authors have done some real thinking about history and how human society works.
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My favorite Star Trek time travel adventure has to be "Yesterday's Enterprise", just because there's no way it could possibly happen. They have to use Guinan, and introduce this idea that something feels "wrong" in the universe in order to get Picard to send a crew from the past back to their certain death. I think that idea works better if it's just Picard making that decision, without Guinan's supernatural influence.
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Bobson Dugnutt wrote:
My favorite Star Trek time travel adventure has to be "Yesterday's Enterprise", just because there's no way it could possibly happen. They have to use Guinan, and introduce this idea that something feels "wrong" in the universe in order to get Picard to send a crew from the past back to their certain death. I think that idea works better if it's just Picard making that decision, without Guinan's supernatural influence.
That episode was just on the other night! It's a great episode. I loved the look of the War Enterprise and crew. It was wonderful to get Denise Crosby back and give her a much more fitting end than she previously got. Which set up the also-great episode with the Romulans and her daughter.
Time travelers need to be careful about trying to "fix history for the better" if they don't understand how their time travel machines work. If you do spawn off a new universe every time you jump back in time, then you could be making many universes full of suffering people before you finally make one you are satisfied with. That just seems to make things bad for a lot more people who continue to exist in those alternate timelines, even though you may be happy in your final version (at least, possibly, until somebody explains to you what you actually did to all those poor bastards).
If you want a situation where there is "only one timeline", then jumping back in time essentially destroys your current universe since it will get rewritten from the point in the past where you appeared. I don't mind if people go back and kill their grandfathers. People ask how you could kill him if you'd never then exist…but I don't think it's a show stopper to have somebody appear with all sorts of information. That information was generated in a now cut-off and destroyed timeline, and the fact that a wad of information suddenly shows up at some point in history just tells you that some time traveler did a universe-destroying jump back. The information didn't just "appear out of nowhere" as it might look.
The stories where (possibly only some) people 'remember' (either completely or vaguely) what had occurred in a different timeline would require either that that other timeline continues to exist (many alternate timelines situation) and that there is some kind of "crosstalk" between the alternate timelines (or possibly only crosstalk from the chopped off parallel line that ends at the point where the time traveler left, if you want only one 'real' timeline)…or it could be that the time traveler jumping back also results in a lot of other information appearing with him in other people's brains…which is very complex and therefore hard for me to swallow.
The Steins;Gate anime was interesting in that they had at least three kinds of "time travel" going on: 1) sending information only in the form of short text messages; 2) sending a huge wad of information to rewrite the brain state of a previous version of the time traveler; and 3) physical traveling of a person back in time…all with supposedly only one 'real' timeline allowed to exist.
As Wo says, you hope the author makes a proper set of rules and sticks to them…but a lot of time travel variations (if not all) may not stand up to too close inspection because our universe might not actually allow time travel, so inconsistencies may arise.
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Was that the "Year of Hell" two-parter? I thought he blew himself and that hit the reset button?
Yeah, a two parter, but I guess I didn't recall the details so well - so he didn't just accept it, flaws and all, but was blown back before his tragedy where his wife (finally, now alive again) convinced him to put his work down (on time travel) and spend more time with her, which he did.
I did like Yesterday's Enterprise despite the Guinan bit, but I more happily accept the strange temporal dimension to her race's character than any other means Yar somehow "knew" her death in the restored timeline would be useless, so a more meaningful death would be preferable. I mean, why else would the captain allow her to go? The whole story line depends on them knowing about another "better" timeline. And her daughter - that was just fun.
Neither did Matt Groening, evidently. The line is "I'm the first non-Brazilian character to travel backwards through time", which was originally mean to be "first non-fictional character..."
Absolutely, a good time travel story doesn't depend on obeying this variant or that variant of time travel, but on remaining consistent to which ever variant they pick or develop.
So, in Star Trek: The Next Generation's finale, All Good Things it was disappointing they messed up. Forgive me if the details are wrong, but in the third (futuremost) timeline, they go to some sector in space looking for a temporal anomaly but can't find it. So they leave. Later Picard realizes their actions of looking for it helped create it so they go back and now find it. WTF? The anomaly grows larger the further back in time one goes, so they should have seen it the first time they went there in that futuremost timeline. Fail. So sad
The anomaly was operating in a linear temporal fashion, it's just that it's version of "linear" was backwards, and within the timeline of the anomaly, it had not been created yet.
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