Time After Time After Time...

Kris Weberg | October 15, 2004
Share your ideas and paradoxes on time travel or your favorite time-travel lit and films here.

As I was saying below, Twelve Monkeys is brilliant at dealing with the consequences of time travel in a single-timeline concept, mainly int he way that the hero's actions are not only always-already there, but in the way that, by meeting Jeffrey Goines, Cole gives Goines the idea for the plague that Cole's bent sent back to learn about (and believes he can stop) -- an idea that Goines' father's assistant picks up and implements.

There's a similar solution tot he old 'Grandfather paradox" -- the question, 'Could you go back in time and kill your own grandfather before your father was born?"

Version one, a single-timeline idea, suggests that some force would stop you; that time would prevent its own violation. There's an old Superman comic wherein, battling through time, Superman and Luthor wind up as witnesses to the murder of Abraham Lincoln. Superman tries to stop it, but a weapon used by Luthor at another "time" has weakened him too much, and history marches on. Even Luthor expresses some regret t this turn of events.

Version two of single-timeline says, like the movie, that you already did so; either he wasn't your grandfather, or you grew up wondering who killed him only to wind up doing it yourself, and so on. Futurama had an especially warped take on this that involved Fry accidentally becoming his own grandfather.

Multiple-timeline theories basically suggest that any action would just split off a new timeline at the point of divergence. This would also suggest that, even without timew travel, every possibility gets its own universe, that there are literally infinite possible universes branching away from one another. In Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways," the discovery that this model is true provokes a rash of suicides, with the victims reasoning that their suicide will also create a new universe where they didn't kill themselves, so there's not as much moral or personal constraint against it.

Anna Gregoline | October 15, 2004
Ok, all way over my head.

Kris Weberg | October 15, 2004
How so?

Scott Hardie | October 16, 2004
When I happen to involve time travel in some story or role-playing game, I always seem to encounter a reader or player whose concept of time travel seems betrothed to "Back to the Future," as though it was the definitive demonstration of how time travel worked. "How could this character meet herself? The universe would end!" Yes, that's right; you can walk behind yourself, but if you walked in front of yourself it would suddenly end all existence. It's called a plot contrivance, folks. And don't even get me started on the fading body parts in the photograph. (I enjoyed the "Back to the Future" films -- well, the first and the third, anyway -- I just don't like the grip they have on some people.)

Because conventional time travel has been covered so well in popular fiction, I usually try to find other ways to explore it. In one fantasy rpg, the characters were met by an alien race of time travelers who had discovered that time was circular, not linear. Events occurred only because they had set themselves up in the past, like self-fulfilling prophecies that happened only because somebody thought they would happen. Rather than get into the details of this faith-driven philoso-babble, instead I wove it into the overarcing plot of the game, so that events towards the end of the campaign really did cause events near the beginning of the campaign, which naturally brought about those same events at the end. How did it work? The aliens themselves caused the circular nature of time, by transporting the characters around and affecting events, so naturally the aliens tended to observe that time was circular. (I'm all about omniscient entities getting proven wrong by game's end.)

I'm planning a time-traveling campaign for next year to replace TWC, a sort of "time cops" game with the characters chasing criminals that have escaped into historical time periods from a prison in the future. I do want to force consequences on the characters if they do something to alter the future, so how do I avoid paradox? I simply declare that the same technology that allows them to travel in time also shields them from its changes. As long as they're in their protective suits (or whatever), the whole world can shift around them and they'll stand witness to it, remembering history the way it was. I look forward to a campaign in which history gets more and more convoluted, as every attempt to correct it makes things worse than before, and the characters are treated like crazy people for claiming the world is not supposed to be that way.

If time travel happens in FIN (not likely), it won't involve the year 2004 or present equivalent, and it won't involve paradoxes; I'll find a similar way to disregard them and get to the more interesting dilemmas.

Scott Hardie | October 16, 2004
Incidentally, I believe that time travel fiction often suffers the same problem that ghost fiction does: The paranormal event occurs for the sole purpose of happening. In other words, ghosts in fiction rarely transcend the fact that they're ghosts! ghosts right there in front of us! And in movies like "Back to the Future," the time travel is often treated as the primary or sole point of the story, not the setup to anything more meaningful or interesting.

Jackie Mason | October 16, 2004
[hidden by request]

Kris Weberg | October 16, 2004
I enjoy discussing time paradoxes -- obviously :) -- but no, they don't usually make for good narratives in and of themselves, nor of good games, with the exception of mysteries built around single-timeline theories. (i.e., If you travel to the past, you end up either learning or actually creating the "clues" or the mystery that sent you tripping through time in themselves.)

But get away from that, and it's just too much of a "do anything" risk to make good stories or play. If you can rewrite history, no action or game decision need be permanent; if you can split off an alternate universe whenever you like, there's also less of a sense of meaningful consequences (hence my enjoyment of "Myriad Ways," which makes just this point).

There are totally fanciful such things that I do enjoy, though -- "mirror universes" are guilty, good fun, though it's unlikely that a universe of such radically different behavior could really "parallel" another one for the length of time necessary to make "mirror universes" work logically. But then, the "Mirror, Mirror" idea isn't about temporal or causal logic, but storytelling and game logic; by showing characters opposed to but seemingly exactly opposed to our own protagonists orr game characters, we can flesh out and test them all the more.

Scott Hardie | October 17, 2004
So, somewhere out there is a goateed Charles Collins who is trying to tell his friends that the supernatural exists and they all listen to him and take him very seriously? :-) I also imagine he can kick serious ass in a fight.

Kris Weberg | October 17, 2004
Ha! And he's very, very lucky. Wins the lottery every other day.

Now, Mirror-Nigel Harrington, being a tongue-tied Trappist monk, that guy never seems to get a break. :)