Sunday 4 January 2015

Time Travel Fiction

Most new time travel fiction is at worst incoherent or at best unoriginal.

Incoherence
I have discussed illogicalities in time travel fiction here, here and here. It is pointless to readdress such issues at length every time they recur. The Mammoth Book Of Time Travel SF contains a four page story which I read to the end only because of its brevity. The surprise ending was that the story described an impossible time travel scenario only because its narrator was insane! Thus, this story is not sf. (But how many of its readers thought that it was making sense?)

If a time traveler departs now to change an event in my past and succeeds, then he generates a divergent timeline in which that event happened differently and in which I now remember it differently but I do not, in the original timeline, continue to remember the first version of the event only to discover that the event has "now" been changed so that it did not occur as I remember it!

Unoriginality
It is insufficient merely to (re)state the circular causality paradox although The Time Traveler's Wife demonstrates that it remains possible to present new and surprising implications of that paradox, as Poul Anderson had done in his three independent time travel novels.

It is necessary to spell out, preferably briefly, precisely which version of a divergent or multiple timelines scenario an author is using but not, of course, to present the mere idea as if it were a novelty. Anderson's Time Patrol series presents an extremely subtle mutable timeline theory which, I think, contains incoherencies as stated by the characters but which nevertheless warrants careful study and also makes for intriguing and haunting stories.

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