Confessions of an Armchair Time-Traveller

Spoiler Alert — Ashton Kutcher got it right!

In response to my first science fiction short story in a while, Daniel Goldman kindly pointed out the problem with my use of “another dimension” to mean a place that you can travel to. In all likelihood I was meaning “a parallel world” or something equally vague, but it set me to wondering about some of the practicalities of other scifi scenarios, and in particular time travel, which has always been my favourite branch of speculative fiction.

I have some personal credentials in the time travel department. If I take a nap in my chair I can easily shoot forward one or two hours into the future. The rest of the time I settle for going back through my personal history looking at life through the eyes of my 7-year-old or teenage self and then coming back to tell the tales. I’m all back story at this stage, so raking over the coals of the past is one of the more entertaining ways to pass a Sunday afternoon.

What? You want to know about “real” time travel? Well, here’s what I’ve gleaned from the movies, novels and TV series.

First off, I have a bit of a problem with any time machine that just transports you bodily to the past or future in your current location. For practical purposes any time machine has to be a time and space machine, given the way the world turns on its axis and rotates around the Sun. Otherwise you are likely to re-materialise embedded in a mountain or, more likely, losing your lungs to the vacuum of space.

Nonetheless, and let’s assume they compensate for physical co-ordinates, most time travel stories go the bodily transfer route. What’s more, they assume you jump back to an earlier point on your current timeline, with the ability to interact with people there and affect the future. Think Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, Back to the Future or Twelve Monkeys.

This tinkering with the past is seldom straightforward, even if you avoid killing your grandparents and vanishing in the blink of an eye. Twelve Monkeys (the TV version) and other stories construct rules about the terrible things that happen if a time-travelled object or person comes into contact with their earlier version. However, the attraction of the do-over challenge is most of the appeal of these stories and the plot can become wonderfully convoluted. If anyone has a good diagram to untangle the TV Twelve Monkeys plot, I would dearly love to study it.

Most physical transfer stories are not too strong on the practicalities. The Time Traveller’s Wife addresses them better than most, with the hero learning over time to fight clinically and effectively, find clothes wherever he lands (he always transfers naked) and generally acquire a doctorate in survival. James Cole from Twelve Monkeys, on the other hand, just turns up in the past in the same leather jacket and boots in which he climbed into the machine!

More satisfying, because of seeming more feasible, are the stories which focus on transfer only of the traveller’s consciousness across the years.

The TV series Travelers came up with a neat idea, which was to capitalise on the precise moment of death of people in the past, transferring a new consciousness into them at that very instant (and hopefully avoiding the imminent death of the host).

This seems both ethical (the hosts were about to die in any case) and pragmatic (previous Travelers were always on hand to help with orientation in relation to the host’s ongoing responsibilities). Unfortunately, when the hosts’ loved ones found out about the new consciousness in their partners and children, they took a different view on the ethics of the situation.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake novel had, in some ways, the most chilling premise. There, the consciousness of the whole population slipped backwards a year, without the ability to say or do anything different than the first time around. An interesting thought-experiment, but maybe a little overstretched over the course of a full-length novel.

Ashton Kutcher’s character Evan, in The Butterfly Effect, benefited from (to my mind) the best time travel plot trick of all, coming firmly within the thought transfer model. Plagued throughout his life by blackouts and lost time (and who hasn’t had those occasionally?), he would regain consciousness with no recollection of what he had been up to during the time out. Only with hindsight (in the movie and in his character’s mind) is it clear that the blackouts represented a trip back from his future self, to right a wrong or make a needed adjustment in the past.

There’s nothing in this plot device which seems unreasonable to me, or contradicts my view of the possible interconnection between different points of consciousness.

But, as I mentioned, I’m just an armchair pundit.

I’m open to the possibility that real time travellers are already living among us (good luck with that future-changing thing!). If so, where else but Medium would they spend their leisure time, given the preponderance here of all things techie and futuristic?

So — future people — feel free to let me know via the comments if I’m getting warm or whether, after all, it’s going to take a souped-up DeLorean to make that trip.

Many thanks for reading!

For more random musings on topics of interest (to me) please see these: