Time travel.

[doubleohfive]

There seem to be two major 'types' of time travel popular in fiction these days, at least from what I've been exposed to.

The traditional form of time travel we're used to seeing in Star Trek, Stargate, Back to the Future, etc. wherein persons from the future travel to the past and (whether intentionally or not) cause changes to occur that affect the timeline and change future events. Essentially, choice dictates how the future unfolds.

The second type, more recently popular (again, in my estimation) seems to be the type we've seen on LOST. I'm pretty sure it's also a driving force in the novel "The Time Traveler's Wife" wherein time travel is possible but even if you interfere with events in the past, the universe will still correct itself and see to it that whatever happened before will happen again. Characters who died originally but then were saved due to time travel still end up dying. I think this was also an element of the remake of The Time Machine a couple years ago too. Here, essentially free will doesn't really get its way.

Anyway, with apologies for such a glib blurb on the subject, my main question -- which type of time travel stories do you enjoy more?

 

[Davros]

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

 

[Checkmate]

I enjoy any story that focuses on the time travel in a fun or interesting way, not just a way to get ratings up (ala Voyager) or as a mindless fanwank.

The last time travel story I really enjoyed was Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. It was surprisingly well done, too, and I only noticed one minor error in the in-movie consistency. Which is pretty awesome considering most such stories.

 

[sojourner]

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

^ I would think that's mostly an accepted contrivance needed to allow the story proceed.

 

[Small White Car]

There are 3 kinds, then.

1) You can change the past: BTTF, Star Trek

2) The timeline corrects itself: LOST

and

3) Everything is always as it was: 12 Monkeys, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban


#3 kind of SEEMS like #2, but it's actually different. There is no 'self-correcting' because nothing actually changes. Bruce Willis and Harry Potter both saw their future selves their FIRST time through the timeline.

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

I don't see the problem. If you leave the Delorean sitting in a parking lot for 30 years, the earth's gravity will attract it that entire time and it will stay there, right?

So what's to say that gravity won't continue to attract it for the 30 years it's sitting there, suspended in time?

 

[Davros]

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

^ I would think that's mostly an accepted contrivance needed to allow the story proceed.

I know that, but I cannot help but see the flaw in the plot.

 

[Procutus]

One of the best time-travel novels I've ever read was James P. Hogan's Thrice Upon a Time, which, as I recall, seems to deal with the first type of time-travel in which free-choice is involved. It's been many years since I've read it, but I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a real science-fiction writer's take on the topic.

 

[Checkmate]

I know that, but I cannot help but see the flaw in the plot.

Sci-fi in general must be a really tough genre for you, then.

 

[Procutus]

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

^ I would think that's mostly an accepted contrivance needed to allow the story proceed.

I know that, but I cannot help but see the flaw in the plot.

Actually for me, a far bigger flaw in the BTTF series is when Doc takes Marty forward in time and he meets the future version of himself.



I'm sorry, but if he left the time-continuum in 1985 to travel forward 30 years, then there wouldn't be a future version of himself to meet, as he wasn't there from the point he left the timeline.

That my friends, is the biggest goof in those three films.

 

[Small White Car]

^ I would think that's mostly an accepted contrivance needed to allow the story proceed.

I know that, but I cannot help but see the flaw in the plot.

Actually for me, a far bigger flaw in the BTTF series is when Doc takes Marty forward in time and he meets the future version of himself.



I'm sorry, but if he left the time-continuum in 1985 to travel forward 30 years, then there wouldn't be a future version of himself to meet, as he wasn't there from the point he left the timeline.

That my friends, is the biggest goof in those three films.

But he was always planning on coming back to 1985. In fact, he DID come back to 1985. So what's the problem?

If he's been killed in the future, I'd see your point, but he wasn't.

EDIT: Hell, he PREVENTED HIS OWN BIRTH back in 1955 and it took him almost a week to fade away, didn't it? How long was he in the future? 12 hours? Why should that change even faster than preventing your own birth apparently did?

 

[Procutus]

^

See that's my point. If he prevented his own birth, then it seems to me that he'd just simply cease to exist, period.

Ditto goes for leaving the timeline. When Kirk took Gillian Taylor with them into the future, do you think there was a version of her still around 30 years later?

 

[DrCorby]

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

^ I would think that's mostly an accepted contrivance needed to allow the story proceed.

In Joe Haldeman's novel The Accidental Time Machine, the protagonist did indeed reappear further & further westward with each time jump forward, and eventually off the Earth entirely. Knowing the increasingly-longer jump intervals allowed others to generally predict where he would reappear.

You might want to check it out; it was a pretty good read.

 

[RoJoHen]

There are 3 kinds, then.

1) You can change the past: BTTF, Star Trek

2) The timeline corrects itself: LOST

and

3) Everything is always as it was: 12 Monkeys, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I think LOST would actually fall into category #2 AND #3. What happened in the past always happened. We just didn't know it yet.

The thing that's weird about LOST, however, is that there are characters that seem to exist outside the normal flow of time. Desmond, for example, kept changing the future by saving Charlie's life, but no matter what he did, time dictated that Charlie would eventually die. Desmond also seems to have the ability to change his own past without it changing the course of his future (like when Farraday found him in the Hatch and told him to find his mother, and the Desmond suddenly remembered it happening).

 

[Vendikarr]

A problem I have had with time travel stories recently is where the time machine moves through time but not space but they forget that the earth is not a static location. It moves all the time. When Marty went back to 1955 he shouldn't have ended up at that farm. He should have wound up in the cold vacuum of space.

^ I would think that's mostly an accepted contrivance needed to allow the story proceed.

I know that, but I cannot help but see the flaw in the plot.

Then just imagine that whatever device makes time travel possible checks and corrects for the rotation of the earth and the movement of the solar system in order to give the appearance of being stationary. In BTTF, just assume it's one of the functions of the flux capacitor.

Doc Brown probably programmed the capacitor to behave like that to make his testing easier. Afterwords, he probably found no reason to change it.

 

[chrisspringob]

12 Monkeys follows a logically coherent set of time travel rules (that being, whatever happened, happened, and there's no way to change it.) The new Star Trek movie follows a different, but still logically coherent set of time travel rules (going into the past creates a new timeline that branches off from the old one).

Most televised fiction, however, follows the rule "Time travel works in whatever way is convenient for the writer to advance the plot." This is pretty much how it works in Back to the Future, and most of the time travel stories in Trek. In these stories, the underlying logic of the time travel doesn't make any sense. Sometimes, it seems like it makes sense on the surface, but if you spend any length of time thinking about it, the logic falls apart.

So my own time travel divide would be between "logical" and "illogical" time travel rules. I definitely prefer the former. That doesn't mean that you can't have good stories of the latter variety. Back to the Future, for example, is a lot of fun. But if the writers have actually gone to the trouble of setting up a world with a coherent set of rules that doesn't seem to arbitrarily bend to meet their whims, then I'm usually pretty impressed.

 

[Harvey]

The Spanish film Timecrimes also followed a similar time-travel logic to 12 Monkeys. So did the movie Primer, which is a pretty cool no-budget affair.

 

[chrisspringob]

The Spanish film Timecrimes also followed a similar time-travel logic to 12 Monkeys. So did the movie Primer, which is a pretty cool no-budget affair.

I had a tough time following Primer. But I'm pretty sure that it did *not* follow "whatever happened, happened" time travel rules a la Twelve Monkeys. We specifically see a replay of an earlier scene, in which events play out somewhat differently from the first iteration.

 

[startrekwatcher]

Either one is fine with me just so long as the writers make the rules absolutely clear like the LOST writers did.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I saved this from the last time we had this little chat: The Major and Minor Types of Time Travel Logic.

1. Timelines are preordained. If you try to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, the cosmos will conspire to stop you, even if implausible things need to occur, like your gun jams 200 times in a row.

2. Timelines change all the time, but people don't realize it. If you try to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, you can do it, but then you vanish from the timeline. Nobody remembers you in your own time because you didn't exist.

2a. Sometimes people are "outside the timeline" and can perceive these changes that nobody else realizes.

3. You can't actually time travel within your own timeline. If you try to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, you'll kill someone else's grandfather, who is almost exactly like you, and now that person doesn't exist in that timeline. This timeline logic comes in one of two flavors:

3a. The time travel and/or attempt to change the timeline (killing grandad) causes the timeline to split and create a new timeline.

3b. Infinite parallel timelines already exist, and since they are infinite, anything that could happen does happen in at least one of them. So whatever you want to do in the past, there's a timeline for that to happen in, and you can kill that other guy's grandfather, in fact, you have to, in at least one timeline. This isn't actually time travel so much as parallel reality travel.

4. Time traveller as ghost. You can't materially interact with the past or future, but only observe. No grandfather paradox possible.


Lost is an example of Type 3a. When Juliet & the gang tried to change the timeline

Spoiler: this season of Lost

they created an alternate timeline/universe, but their own did not change, since that is impossible.

It's possible Lost is 3b instead, but that doesn't really synch up as well with what I think the writers are trying to do.

Star Trek's time travel is basically a cheat. If you can travel within your own timeline, which is what they almost always purport to be doing, you could kill your own grandfather and not vanish in a puff of temporal logic, which is impossible, so they can't be doing that at all. Even worse is when they "reset" the timeline. That's like trying to unscramble an egg. You can change a changed timeline, but it'll never go back to exactly how it was.

 

[Harvey]

The Spanish film Timecrimes also followed a similar time-travel logic to 12 Monkeys. So did the movie Primer, which is a pretty cool no-budget affair.

I had a tough time following Primer. But I'm pretty sure that it did *not* follow "whatever happened, happened" time travel rules a la Twelve Monkeys. We specifically see a replay of an earlier scene, in which events play out somewhat differently from the first iteration.

I *think* that my recollection is correct, but I'll have to watch the film again sometime and see.