Time travel is one of the most, if not the most, used tropes in science fiction. Some people—including Lai Shen—believe it’s way overused. Why is it so popular in science fiction?
Perhaps it’s because people have always wondered about the future. As Katherine asks Lai in The Lightning in the Collied Night, “Have you ever wished you could see yourself far into your future—know how everything worked out for yourself? And based on that, you might act differently—make different choices in the present?” Lai replies that she had done that, especially as a teen and young adult. Studies have shown that young adults today spend nearly 40% of their time thinking about the future. And we also tend to think a lot about the past. It’s a way to escape, for a time, the harsh realities of the present and savor fond memories. And while thinking about the past, we may ponder what would happen if we were somehow able to return to the past and fix a tragedy in the present by changing the past.
Of course, many sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows have dealt with that idea—far too many to list here. The problem these stories need to deal with is, what happens if changing the past causes a paradox? Perhaps the most well-known time travel paradox is the Grandfather Paradox: a time traveler causes their grandfather to die before he has children. Or, if traveling to the past doesn’t cause a paradox, a small change to the past could cause a cascade of unintended, tragic consequences—the Butterfly Effect.
Perhaps someone could travel to the past, armed with extensive details about history, and do everything possible to avoid changing history. There’s been many sci-fi stories based on that idea; a recent book that delves into that premise is The Unseen Observer. But, is it realistic for a time traveler to stay entirely out of history’s way? As Ray Bradbury’s classic short story The Sound of Thunder tells us … probably not.
But all of this ruminating about time travel ignores an unpleasant fact: time travel as depicted in sci-fi stories may not be possible—or if possible, highly unlikely. But that hasn’t stopped many, many writers (*raises hand*) from penning stories involving travel forward or backward in time—or both.
The ways by which time travelers navigate the past and future in sci-fi stories is almost as varied as the stories themselves. There’s time machines (The Time Machine, Back to the Future, Doctor Who etc.); warps in spacetime, including wormholes (Interstellar, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a certain debut novel by a certain author from Minnesota, etc.); time slips via traveling or sleeping (Rip Van Winkle, The Time Traveler’s Wife, It’s About Time etc.); and supernatural means (Outlander, Supernatural, A Christmas Carol etc.).
There’s a lot of information available on the web about time travel methods and time travel in sci-fi in general. One of the best online resources I’ve found is a paper by Melinh Lai and Professor Brook Stanton from Rutgers University: Time Travel in Science Fiction: What Time Travel Reveals About the Present.
Sci-fi stories excel at asking the question, directly or indirectly, What if …? And then they answer that question in a compelling way. Perhaps that’s why time travel is so heavily used in sci-fi. That device lets us ask and answer that question in an infinite number of ways, at any point in time. And it allows us to imagine what the world—even the universe—would be like if what has been written is re-written, or what it may hold for us in the future.
(Image courtesy Freepik)
