Musings on Time Travel #1
A myriad of tales have been told with this concept at their heart. Some provide a well-thought-out rationale or justification for the underlying time-folding mechanism, others treat it as a given in their interconnected realms, focussing purely on the characters’ responses/ actions to their jaunts across time. A constant in these speculative fiction tales is the attempt to avoid jarring inconsistencies, either subtle or horrendously misplayed, that jolt the reader out of the story. Avoiding those wrenches, those triggered spasms of doubt in the reader, is the hard-fought goal of the writer.
Now an aside. Whenever referencing speculative fiction, I’m reminded of Ursula Le Guin’s words in the introduction to her wonderful collection of short stories in The Unreal & The Real Volume 2: ‘Outer Space, Inner Lands’. She wrote this introduction in 2012 at the age of 82. On fantasy, she wrote: "Nobody – for good reason – has ever been able to say exactly where 'fantasy' begins and ends. It is immensely larger than the current commercial category of books labelled Fantasy." On sci-fi: "Sci fi can be seen as a brilliant modern development of fantasy to use the imagination within the parameters of the rationally possible, or at least plausible." And on genre: "… a concept which could have served as a useful distinction of various kinds of fiction, but has been degraded into a disguise for mere value-judgement. The various 'genres' are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers, lazy critics, and the Sales Departments of publishers." No punches pulled on the last one!!
My reason for referencing this is that these thoughts ring true for me. I didn’t attempt to write a fantasy or a sci-fi story per se. I started with a character who found the words “No one knows but i who wrote this here and y” and then followed him and all those he encountered within a speculative tale. That tale unfolded between the present day and an age 13000 years ago. I didn’t start out to incorporate time travel as I did, but that’s what happened. And it happened in a way that mimicked the story as a whole, blending both fantasy and sci-fi elements. For example, in ARRIVAL, Part One of the trilogy, which leans more to fantasy, the time shift to 13000 years ago is little understood by the protagonists or the reader. But by Part Three, LIFE, elements more recognisable as sci-fi enter the scene, and there is a nod to how the ‘time traveling’ might be possible.
Why did I introduce a glimpse of a time travel ‘explanation’? Why not leave that as a fantastical given, as it is in many successful tales? Hmm … Probably because I’m a geologist who studied physics and other sciences at school/ university. So, behind the creative writing side of me, there’s a critical part seeking to evaluate phenomena and understand why they are so. So, when approaching the writing of a story that unfolds between the ‘present day’ and an age 13000 years past – and later touches on an embryonic earth and a dying earth – I found myself considering the question that most of us have asked: ‘Is time travel possible?’
My thoughts in this regard wandered along the following path – a path not of theoretical physics, just the path of a curious mind! If I can travel back to an age some 13000 years ago, then there must be some form of world to go back to. Else I would go nowhere, or emerge floating in some undefined void. Whether that world of 13000 years ago is a physical reality of matter or some alternate energy replication of the world doesn’t matter in my mind; if actual time travel is real and not some imagined travel of the mind, then there must be something tangible to go back to. Now take this a step further. If time travel is possible across all the ages of the Earth, then I could choose to travel back 14000 years, or 20000 years, or 250000 years. Or whatever random time I choose. In each of these cases, if I truly am to travel back in time and walk the land of that age, there must be some form of Earth to go back to, some form of reality to interact with. And it should be a past reality that is consistent with the reality of my ‘own age’, the ‘present day’ – if I visit a past age, then head back ‘home’, I’d expect my own time to still be there, broadly similar to that which I left. I’ll leave the discussion of what impact my visiting a past age might have on other ages for another blog – if we’re discussing that aspect, then we’ve already made the assumption that time travel is possible. The main point I want to make here is that if I can time travel to a past age, then that world must exist in some tangible form that replicates its state at that very moment in its long existence. And far more than that, if I can travel to any age I choose, then my world must exist – or must be capable of being recreated exactly – at every moment of its existence. Think about that. It must be physically – or some energy equivalent of it must – be capable of being fully formed and present at every moment of its existence. If not, then I have nothing to travel back to.
The analogy this conjured for me was a computer model of Earth with the entirety of Earth’s history contained in that model. A version of it today. A version yesterday. A version one hundred years ago. A version … You get the picture. If that computer model existed, then I could revisit that digital version of Earth at any age I chose. If that complex model existed, I could choose any random time and place and examine the details of any landform, any life-form, any sea state, any aspect of my world that I wanted to see, at any time I wanted to see it. Now scale this computer model up. Scale it up, and up, and up. Scale it up into some vast, ‘beyond-our-ken’ system that could somehow record/ preserve each spectacular moment of the Earth’s history: genesis, mass extinctions, first plants, hurricanes, civilisations, bushfires, earthquakes, mountain building … Because that’s what’s needed to enable time travel. Because, as I repeat yet again, if our world through time doesn’t exist in some tangible form somewhere, somewhen, I can’t go back there.
To get another sense of the challenge, consider yourself standing on a small stretch of a shingled beach within a narrow cove on a 400km coastline. A beach pounded by storm-driven waves. Take a snapshot of that scene. Foam tipped waves, spray streaming landward. Thunderous walls of malevolent ocean driving into the shingles. Pebbles driven shoreward. Gravel dragged seaward. Your hair whipping in the gale, your foot slipping in the sand. Move the scene on a few heartbeats. Spray splits, tendrils whipped in the gale. Pebbles collide, scatter. Violent waters clash, eddies spinning off. You tense your foot. Let it play for moments more … then consider time traveling that oh so short distance back to the start of the scene. Let the stormy waters be as they were. Position the pebbles as they were. Shift your foot back. Your hair. The violently shifting air masses. Your heartbeats. Pull back the record of that cove to what it was just moments before. Because that’s what is needed for time travel to be a reality. You must have that reconstructed beach to travel back to. Not just imagined, but a construct that allows you to be in that scene once more and to interact with it. To achieve that for this single scene would be pretty mind-blowing. To do it for every cove along that 400km coastline? For the whole Earth over those same moments? And for the world throughout the ages? Well, that would true time travel.
How could this happen? Well, that is, of course, beyond this humble life-form’s ability to answer. But … what I would say is that to achieve this ‘storing’ of those past ages – to remember those shifting continents, those mountains built then shattered, those oceans formed and lost, those lives born, lived, then forgotten – would require a process underpinned by an incomprehensibly powerful energy source, a mind-bending power beyond that of our people’s ancient gods. A power beyond our imagining.
Beyond our imagining? No. Not beyond our imagining, because that is what we can do! We can imagine the terrifying power, that primordial source of staggering energy it would take to pull this off. That phenomenal power to preserve our world through time. We can step beyond what we know, what we think we understand, and enter the wondrous speculative realm of our minds to imagine this power out there in the cosmos – beyond the cosmos – that could make this a reality.
And could that be? Could this Cauldron of energy exist out there to feed, to enable, time travel?
Well, what I will say is this. We live on a small rock orbiting an unremarkable sun in the outer reaches of a far-flung galaxy, itself merely a mote in some unseen god’s eye. We peer out through bespectacled eyes from this tiny rock, trying to make sense of … everything! And that is good. It is who we are. It is a part of our human journey of discovery to push on past the boundaries of what we think we know. But, at this moment in time, should we believe that from our speck of dirt floating around some random fusion ball that we know all the myriad secrets of the cosmos? Should we be complacent and say we know it all? That we can definitively state: “That cannot be.”
And if we say we do not know all? Well, then maybe that fantastical Cauldron does exist somewhere out there to feed this Continuum of ours!
Okay, maybe I’ve provided enough of the flavour of the thoughts that were swirling through my confused mind as I followed this tale of Beth, Jessica, Lanky and the rest. These thoughts proved sufficient for the science geek within – I could see a way that time travel could be woven into my tale using a theme/ undercurrent that would keep the whole aligned and consistent. With my pen dipped in inks of fantasy and sci-fi, and my mind’s eye seeking beyond the Continuum, my trilogy led me out into the Void where I discovered …
Well, take a read through the Warriors of the Continuum Trilogy and see for yourself what was revealed!
Until the next blog.
R.