The folly of time travel in fiction

[Agenda]

I'm trying to write a story (not Star Trek) where the heroes chase a villain back in time. This guy is trying to change history in his favor and the heroes are trying to stop him. By the end of the story, the heroes do stop him and they go back to their future.

But I'm having troubles because I can't overlook the butterfly effect. To me, there is no way that all these characters could go back to the past and not have it affect what happens in the future. When they return to the future, things should logically be altered, but I don't think I want that to happen. Hence, I'm blocked from writing the story.

Any suggestions?

 

[RoJoHen]

Easy. They always went back in time. Nothing is actually being altered because it always happened with them there.

 

[Gepard]

Any suggestions?

Predestination paradox. Everything they did turned out to be what already happened, they just didn't know it. So when they get back to the present, everything is as it was because it never happened any other way.

Or ignore the whole issue and have the characters mess everything up but it's all fine anyway. Wibbly-wobbly and all that. Maybe lampshade it or turn the issue into some kind of running gag.

Edit: Ninjaed!. Damn you, RoJo! *shakes fist*

 

[Dream]

I'm trying to write a story (not Star Trek) where the heroes chase a villain back in time. This guy is trying to change history in his favor and the heroes are trying to stop him. By the end of the story, the heroes do stop him and they go back to their future.

Sounds exactly like the plot of ST First Contact...

Maybe you should try to be a little more original with your story?

 

[RoJoHen]

Sounds exactly like the plot of ST First Contact.

That was actually the very first thing that popped into my head.

 

[Agenda]

Easy. They always went back in time. Nothing is actually being altered because it always happened with them there.

Actually, that wouldn't work with this particular story because it's fanfiction. I want these characters to interact with characters in the past, when they clearly did not do so before.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

I see three options:
1. Write a less serious story and adopt Star Trek's time rivers and eddies, and the future is just about nearly the same as you left it.
2. Take the single universe approach, that way the future would be exactly the same as anything the characters could possibly do in the past is already part of the history.
3. Take advantage of the fact that they found themselves in a completely different future and make half of the story about that.

Of course, you could cleverly combine 1 and 3 and end up with a future where half of the world has changed in the most surprising and unusual manner, while many things happen to be nearly the same in an even more surprising manner. If I was writing it, I would replace every single person in the new timeline with a completely different one (I think that your butterfly effect makes sure that none of the people before would be born again), but keep the major events embarrassingly similar to what the characters remember from the original timeline.

 

[RoJoHen]

Well, in that case, you probably have to go with an Alternate Universe kind of scenario. By going back in time, the characters create an alternate universe with an alternate timeline, but their original universe remains intact.

 

[Agenda]

Well, in that case, you probably have to go with an Alternate Universe kind of scenario. By going back in time, the characters create an alternate universe with an alternate timeline, but their original universe remains intact.

I don't really like the alternate universe thing. You see, the villain is doing this because he is sure that this will change his reality. It lessens the stakes if all he's going to do is create an alternate reality like what happened in Star Trek 2009.

Anyways, I think I'll use the suggestion that a few minor things are changed but that's about it.

Thanks guys!

 

[Agenda]

I'm trying to write a story (not Star Trek) where the heroes chase a villain back in time. This guy is trying to change history in his favor and the heroes are trying to stop him. By the end of the story, the heroes do stop him and they go back to their future.

Sounds exactly like the plot of ST First Contact...

Maybe you should try to be a little more original with your story?

Well, thanks. But I didn't say that it was going to be anything like Star Trek: First Contact, did I.

 

[J.T.B.]

I don't really like the alternate universe thing. You see, the villain is doing this because he is sure that this will change his reality. It lessens the stakes if all he's going to do is create an alternate reality like what happened in Star Trek 2009.

Terminator?

 

[theenglish]

Yes, this is a pretty common time travel plot, but it will be all what you do with it.

Here's your solution. The characters go back in time, mess up the past but stop the villain (or not). They realize the only solution is to go time travel to a moment just before the villain went back in time, now knowing what they know, and stop the whole thing from ever happening in the first place.

 

[RoJoHen]

But if they change the timeline, then that moment will no longer exist!

 

[Captain Qwert Jr]

Have the heroes and/or the present be subtly altered without them being aware of it. The main thrust of history is more or less the same. Though the details have changed, in the end, the same wars happened, the same social/popular movements happened, and they are still in the United States of Vespucia.

 

[RoJoHen]

It's the Farscape take on it, which points to the elasticity of Time.

To quote Scorpius, "If nudged close enough to course, events have a way of restructuring themselves. If the participants are the same, the venues are the same, and the motivations are the same, then the outcome is likely to be the same."

Little things might change, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter.

 

[Owain Taggart]

You can always make them realize that they've got to fix the things that the villains did to get things back to the way they were.

 

[intrinsical]

I used to love time travel stories but I guess thanks to Moffat and his roller coaster style of time traveling in Doctor Who, I tend to puke a little at the thought of time travel. Watching Doctor Who does however open up one to various forms of creative time travel possibilities.

I'm going to skip the usual plot devices as the above posters have more or less listed them and focus on more creative and/or exotic ones that may not conform with the real world laws of science.

1) The universe fixes itself. I'm using the idea that the original timeline is a ground state and it takes a tremendous amount of energy (changes) to kick it into a different state. So if the heroes managed to stop most of the major alterations made by the villain, the universe will somehow cause the necessary fixes so that it settles back into the original timeline.

2) Time travel spawns a temporary/virtual alternate universe. Here I'm stealing and distorting the idea that in vacuum, virtual pairs of quantum particles are spontaneously being created and quickly annihilated . When the villain and hero "particles" travels back in time, it creates a temporary alternate universe. A permanent and new alternate universe is only created if the villain and hero does not cancel each other out. So when the hero stopped the villain, the two particles have cancelled each other out and the temporary alternate universe ceases to exist, and everything reverts back to the original universe.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Villain kills the heroes,set alls sorts of wheels in motion to change his future, returns and discovers nothing has changed.

 

[RoJoHen]

Villain kills the heroes,set alls sorts of wheels in motion to change his future, returns and discovers nothing has changed.

Ooh, that could be fun.

 

[Myasishchev]

Well, in that case, you probably have to go with an Alternate Universe kind of scenario. By going back in time, the characters create an alternate universe with an alternate timeline, but their original universe remains intact.

I don't really like the alternate universe thing. You see, the villain is doing this because he is sure that this will change his reality. It lessens the stakes if all he's going to do is create an alternate reality like what happened in Star Trek 2009.

Then you're already married to something that doesn't make sense. Which is, of course, actually no problem for a science fiction story.

I mean, I imagine you have your characters leaving the present and appearing in the past in the same geographical location, too, ignoring the obvious fact that astronomical bodies move, and at a pretty decent clip, at that.

It's really not a big deal for a time travel story to collapse under extremely close scrutiny, so long as it survives a cursory inspection. For example, I have a great fondness for time-loops. The most famous one is the creation of Skynet. Even though they're obviously stupid, they're nonetheless elegant and work well in fiction.

That said, one of the neat things about the "alternate timelines" approach is that it underlines tragedy in the same fashion as the Novikov self-consistency approach, but it's freer in what it allows a time-traveler to actually do. In a self-consistent set-up, the character can't really do much--Einstein can't kill Hitler. In a many worlds intepretation-based approach, Einstein can go "back" to the "past," and he can kill a Hitler, but it doesn't affect his memories, or the actual commission of World War II and the Holocaust in his own history. So basically you can "change" all sorts of stuff, but it won't change anything you care about--your own universe--and even more importantly you can't change yourself.

Well, thanks. But I didn't say that it was going to be anything like Star Trek: First Contact, did I.

Don't sweat it. It's beyond silly to imply the premise of First Contact was in any sense original.