 Drama: July 01, 2015 Issue [#7077] |
  Drama
This week: The Trouble With Time Travel Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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Time travel is a fascinating concept, filled with potential for adventure and drama. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to keep your story straight.
This week's Drama Newsletter, then, is all about time travel and its pitfalls.
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Have you ever watched Back to the Future? If you haven't, here is the basic plot outline: Marty, a teenage boy, accidentally gets sent back into time. His arrival in the past upsets the chain of events that led his parents to meet and fall in love. In order for him to continue existing and be able to travel back to the future, he must set things right.
Back to the Future is a fun, imaginative movie, with lots of adventure and a touch of drama. It also has a problem. At the beginning of the movie, we are told that Marty's dad is quite a tragic figure. He is a man who has given up on his dreams. He is unhappy, bullied and disrespected. When Marty goes back in time, he encourages his dad in his goals and helps him build his confidence. So, when Marty returns to the future, he finds a dad who is successful and respected by all. This is offers a feel-good moment to the audience. Unfortunately, it cannot be true.
It cannot be true because Marty's dad cannot be, at the same time, an unhappy, bullied and disrespected man who has given up on his dreams and a happy man who followed his dreams and is respected by all. The only way this could be true is if Marty didn't just travel back in time, but travelled back in time in an alternate reality and then moved forward to that future. That would mean that in the original timeline, Marty would go missing, which would make his dad even unhappier. And in the new timeline there may be two Martys. Or the Marty of that timeline might never have been born, in which case his parents would be very surprised at having someone show up claiming to be their child.
This highlights a problem for writers of time-travel stories. If you state that something is the case at a certain time and at a certain place, this cannot then be changed later on, as this will create an inconsistency. You have already established what is and this cannot, therefore, be changed.
Why is this the case? A well-known example to illustrate this is the grandfather paradox, proposed by writer René Barjavel and expanded upon by others. It boils down to this – someone is very angry at their grandfather and travels back in time to before their grandfather had met his wife and had any children. The traveler's plan is to end the life of their grandfather. The problem is that if he were to do so, his parents wouldn't be born, and therefore he wouldn't be born, which means that he woudn't be able to travel back in time to end the life of his grandfather. But we already know that the time traveler exists. That fact has been established. Therefore, we can confidently say that even if the time traveler does indeed travel back in time, he will fail in his attempt. Maybe he has a change of heart. Maybe he slips on a banana peel. Who knows? He exists, though, which means that his grandfather lives.
Does this mean that time travel stories have to be boring? Not at all. You just have to ensure that everything adds up. For example, if you want to send your characters back in time to stop some horrible event from happening, the problem is that if they succeed, the horrible event will never have happened, and your characters will live in a world in which there is no reason to go back in time. And, as in the grandfather paradox, and as in Back to the Future, as you have already stated that the horrible event has happened, they cannot succeed in their mission, because something cannot have happened and not have happened at the same time. What your characters can do is go back in time and witness an event, or stop some other time traveller from upsetting history.
As always, it is all about being creative. Time travel is a fascinating idea, filled with potential for adventure and drama. Have fun with it, and if you want an example of a good time travel story, I recommend Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.
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