On one hand, one can take many liberties when writing about time travel because to my knowledge, no one has ever traveled into the past or future. Who is to say how it happens? Can you affect the future by changing the past? If I go into the past and kill my mother, do I disappear from the future (the grandfather paradox)? Do I disappear from the now, in which case I could not commit the murder? Is the future a parallel world? If the future exists already, does it mean that we cannot make our own decisions? Authors can make up their own answers to those questions, the only limit is their imagination.
On the other hand, as I suggested above, time travel is a circular topic and difficult to handle without slipping up. In many books on time travel, one can find an inconsistency or something that just does not makes sense. It doesn't make the book a bad one, not at all, it just underscores the thin line between creating a fantasy world and losing your reader's ability to ignore reality.
Why is all of this on my mind, you may ask. In my books, the Caribbean Adventure Series, the children travel through time into the past. In the first two books, I avoided all difficult issues. I ensured that the book never skirted over into the area of science fiction, I leave that to my able co-bloggers KeVin and Shauna. The children participated in actual historic events, but their actions had no effect on the outcome of the event or on the future. Not so in the third book. In this book, they affect the life of one person and as a result, their future ... or is it their present (see, I am confused already) is changed. This was the major delay in my (now complete) WIP. It took me a long time to build up the confidence to try to convince my readers that, not only were these children traveling effortlessly through time, but they were also affecting their present by changing the past.
What is your view on the issue of time travel? Do you read it critically or do you let your imagination take abandoned flight into the fantasy?
7 comments:
I have often wrestled with the conundrums of time travel (or as the scriptwriters at Star Trek dubbed them: "temporal mechanics.") They beat me every time. Is ever second 300,000 km long? If the earth moves through space and I travel 100 years back in time here won't I be alone in space at this point with the earth wherever it was 100 years ago? Makes me crazy thinking about it.
Fantasy stories can and often do happen in safe bubbles, where the actions have no consequences. Congratulations on being able to penetrate that bubble in a way that will make sense to young readers. Learning to consider the possible outcomes of choices before acting is an understanding that never comes too early. Good job on giving kids something to think about.
Thanks for the encouragement, KeVin. I don't know how you keep track of it all!
Time travel is a hard sell to me, although I actually used it as a plot device in Swords of Talera where it plays a bit part. It's just so hard to do well, but I have recently taken part in a serial project involving time travel that I think came out pretty well. It was called "Rip Through Time," and will be published as an ebook sometime this fall or early spring.
Writing about time travel is kinda like writing about the what goes on in the minds of the dead. Since none of us have experienced death or time travel, we don't have an appropriate frame of reference for either. So we wing it. We fudge.
My guess is that the other elements of storytelling will more than compensate for what we might see as logical inconsistencies (although, I'll point out that our application of logic would be unknown in an area so outside our experience).
You're a braver woman than I, Carol. I've never dared a time travel story.
Keep your fingers crossed for me, Shauna!
It all depends on the skill of the writer to create a credible world that pulls me in. Don't think I'll be trying that one in a hurry...
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