Even when I was heavily reading science fiction, I tended to avoid time travel books.
Look, I can buy robots and space travel and even teleportation, in terms of suspension of disbelief, time travel was just a parsec too far. All the classic so-called conundrums and paradoxes of time travel seemed absurd, and merely proved that the whole concept wasn’t just impossible, it went against the fabric of the universe.
Standard Hollywood time travel is often of the back-to-the-future variety: the protagonist travels backward to change a key event in the past. In the case of Back to the Future, Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) visits an eccentric professor, accidentally travels back in time, and stops his parents from meeting each other. Oops! But with the professor’s help, he might be able to travel back again and undo the mistake before he ceases to exist.
In The Terminator, instead of the good guys it’s the bad guys who travel back, to send a robot assassin – a “terminator” – back in time to kill resistance leader John Connor’s mother, Sarah, before she can give birth to the future leader. Sarah is relentlessly pursued by an indestructible robot, saved at every turn in the nick of time by the resourceful Reese. Unfortunately the two sequels have exactly the same plot as the original, with the “twist” being that Arnold Schwarzenegger gets to play the good guy.
These kind of plots, though well worn, are okay for a pop-corn film but are really too silly to invest in a whole book.
The “go into the past to change the present” concept was also employed in at least two Star Trek movies (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: First Contact), and has made numerous other appearances on the large and small screen. It was boredom with this conceit that put me off time travel. But then I discovered that some of the classic “golden age” authors such as Clifford Simak, Brian Aldiss, and others, had given the topic a much more diverse treatment than the hackneyed go-back-to-save-the-present plots might have indicated.
For instance, in Cryptozoic, by Aldiss, humans can go back in time, but only as observers. They can see events unfold around them but they cannot alter them. They can also see and interact with other time travelers. The book is about an artist who has traveled back to the cryptozoic era for inspiration, but has spent so much time in time travel that he is going mad. There is also a sinister sub-plot about him being chased by agents of a shadowy organization (or is that just his brain-addled fantasy?).
In Simak’s Tomorrow’s People, portals open from the future and people start walking out in the thousands. They are escaping from an apocalyptic confrontation with aliens that are all-powerful and bent on wiping out humanity. There is no hope, so they escape into the past… literally. They stop by in the present on their way back to a distant past millions of years ago, long before the advent of humans.
Phillip K Dick’s Now Wait for Last Year involves a drug that can allow you to travel backwards and forwards through time. However the drug is very addictive, and may send you insane. Now wait for last year explores numerous permutations of time-travel problems, from meeting oneself, through to changing the past and the future, and encountering numerous paradoxes.
But the whole idea of “visiting the past” or the future shows a lack of understanding of what the past and future are. The past is fixed, and the future doesn’t exist. There’s no future to travel into because it hasn’t been created yet. We don’t live in a deterministic universe, where the future is a road, all nicely laid out for us, and all we have to do is drive the thing. It’s more like the road is getting built as we drive. Determinism died with quantum mechanics. Even if you know everything there is to know, any event is still probabilistic. Those uncertainties add up over lots of events, so that in the end, all that is ahead is unknown.
Science fiction that acknowledges this, such as Aldiss’ Cryptozoic, can actually be more surprising and thought-provoking than stories that do not. Ignore these fundamental truths about time and you end up with contradictions, paradoxes, and hopelessly messy plots. Such stories may be fun, but they are based on a misunderstanding about how time works, and therefore they’re ultimately, unsatisfying. Time travel is a fantasy. It’s not science fiction.