It’s About Time

We are all time travelers. If we were not, we’d be stuck in one moment of time. That would be boring. The time stream flows steadily forward, and we are swept along with it. At least, that’s how it feels.

Imagine one huge long-exposure photo taken by a gigantic still camera with the shutter left open to capture your every move for your entire life. From this photo you could see how your body grew and changed over time. You could see which places you went to the most, which places you went to only once or twice, and where you’d never gone.

Imagine then trying to trace your life in this huge photo, starting at your birth and ending at your death. It might be rather difficult, since there would be lots of overlap between one day and the next, one month and the next, one year and the next.

Suppose now that instead of your having this huge photo, that some supernatural, extra-dimensional being has a huge blank piece of paper on which to lay out the path of your life. This entity does the necessary plotting before you are born, and you must follow this path. We’re talking pure destiny, the complete absence of free will. Everything you do—or, as Sting might say, every breath you take, every move you make—all planned out and programmed before you are conceived in the womb. You are born, and then you merely follow the program.

That, too, would be boring.

We are three dimensional beings. We have height, width, and depth. We also exist in time, a fourth dimension. But we do not have freedom of movement along the fourth dimensional axis. We can only move forward. And in that way, yes, we are programmed. We do not have freedom of will in this regard. We must move forward along the axis of time, in the positive direction, without exception.

Why is that? Have we perhaps placed the constraint of moving only forward in time upon ourselves? Would our brains suffer meltdown if we could move as we desired along the axis of time? If we could go to sleep tonight and set our alarm to wake up in the morning ten years, three months, and fifteen days ago, could our minds handle the transition?

Is your brain hurting just from thinking about this? How much more difficult then do you expect it would be on your brain to experience a jump in time from now to some distant time in the past or the future, as opposed to moving from now to the next moment?

It may be that we are capable of traveling in any direction along the axis of time. But it may also be that we have self defense mechanisms that prevent us from attempting it, to keep us from going insane.

In fiction, we can remove those self defense mechanisms from our characters, yet still prevent our characters from crossing the border into the realm of insanity. Fictional characters can time travel with ease, not only forward in time at the same rate as the rest of us, but also backward, or fast forward, or leap frogging over undesirable moments.

It’s also easy in a time travel story to describe conflicting events. A man goes back in time and kills his younger self. Huh? If he did that, he wouldn’t have lived to the age he was when he went back in time to kill himself. Which means that his older self couldn’t have killed his younger self. And that means that his younger self would have lived. Which means his older self would have existed, and could have gone back to kill his younger self. Huh? What? Are we repeating ourselves?

Yes, we are. We are caught in an infinite loop of incompatible cause and effect. We are experiencing paradox, and if we are not careful we will unravel the whole fabric of the universe.

A favorite theme for authors of time travel stories is to solve problems of the present by traveling to the past and changing the course of history. In such stories, main characters die, worlds crumble, universes collapse, but are restored to normal by the protagonist’s careful restructuring of history. Such stories do not necessarily get into an infinite loop of incompatible cause and effect, but they suffer from inconsistent world views. A space ship explodes. Daring heroic captain goes back in time and ejects the bomb into space before it can detonate. History is changed, and the space ship does not blow up. So which is it? In one world view, the ship blew up. In the other world view, it didn’t blow up. And thus we have a paradox.

Suppose we could truly travel along the time axis as we desired, and could visit any given point in time whenever we desired and as often as we desired. If a ship blew up at 03:56:13 on August 24, 2009, shouldn’t we expect to always see the ship blow up at 03:56:13 on August 24, 2009, regardless of how we came to be alive at 03:56:13 on August 24, 2009, or how many times we lived through 03:56:13 on August 24, 2009? It doesn’t matter if we got to 03:56:13, August 24, 2009 the normal way from 03:56:12, August 24, 2009, or if we jumped to 03:56:13, August 24, 2009 from 11:23:48, July 17, 2010 or from 17:26:55, May 12, 1999.

Maybe you can guess that I’m not a fan of time travel stories in which history is changed or paradoxes are otherwise introduced. So it is that for Eposic’s second anthology, Out of Order, a collection of stories on the theme of reality rearranged—a theme which allows time travel stories—I sought to select stories that avoided paradox.

It’s not easy to write time travel stories that avoid paradox, but I selected a few that satisfied me, and they are slated for publication in Out of Order just as soon as I can make my edits, get the contracts signed, and put the book together. Maybe by Halloween? If only I could jump back in time once I finish the book and could make it available yesterday, that would be nice. But I’ve yet to master the art of jumping backwards in time.

I hope you will take the opportunity when the time comes to support Eposic and grab a copy of Out of Order. It’s about time. And a few other things.