Written by Gordon the Friendly Dragon
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The concept of time travel is probably as old as man's fallibility. The first of our ancestors to think, "oops" may very well have been the first to conceive of time travel as a means of returning to the trees, reattaching a favorite fin, or reentering Eden, depending upon his or her system of belief. Since that first oops, time travel has been exhaustively debated by physicists, theologians, and fiction writers alike. Each of the three groups has a fundamentally different motive behind their interest. The physicists want to make time travel happen, the theologians want to know if there is a special place in Hell for the physicist that finally achieves it, and the writers want the physicists and theologians to shut up and go argue somewhere else while writers continue to devote ridiculous amounts of time to inventing fabulous new ways of having fun with an intriguing and surprisingly controversial idea.

This guide is devoted to writers because of the simplistic relationship they have with an infinitely complex and almost entirely uncharted area of science/theology. An in-depth explanation would be needlessly lengthy and require use of words like "ontologically," so I have decided to stick to the basics. What you will find here is a guide to some common rules and uses for time travel in fiction. My goal is to leave you with a solid foundation of fictional time travel convention, helping you to avoid cliché and find your own new and exciting twists for a concept as old as stubbed toes.

Everyone is capable of traveling through time, in fact, I'm doing it right now. The problem is that this kind of time travel is unidirectional. As the old saying goes, if you want to know what the future holds, wait ten minutes. This point A to point B sort of thinking often leads us to conceive of time as a line, or, if you take a broader geometrical perspective, a plane where mankind wanders along making choices on a two dimensional platform. It also begs the question, "What if I don't like my choices, or what if I would like to change the choices of another?" If you don't care for the way things turned out, why not just travel back to the point where that choice was made and alter it to your liking?" Will you encounter that ambling mass of humanity as it was when it crossed that point, or will that point on the plane be empty, the people having moved on? If the people and events are present as you had hoped, will you be able to effect them, and what effect will your actions have on the world you return to? Novelists and Hollywood writers have been over this ground time and time again. For those of you who missed it, I'll recap. With the help of my friend Travelin' Rick, I will show you a few of the many variations on time travel as seen in the media.

I. Travel through time is not possible
Rick, like everybody else, does not travel through time because only the present exists. Each moment is like a film cell. Rick's brain experiences each new frozen moment and strings them together with his memory to form a fluid perception. Rick can not move to the future because the future does not yet exist. Rick can not travel to the past because the past has ceased to be. The future and the past are relevant only as far as the idea of their existence influences Rick's actions in each successive instant. There is no line or plane, only a series of points that appears to be a line from a certain point of view. Close your right eye and look at the series of dots below from the left edge of you monitor to see what I mean.



Stephen King's " The Langoliers" made interesting use of a variation of this idea (by "interesting use" I refer to the concept only. The story was awful). A group of people travel back in time only to find that all animate creatures have gone. Food loses flavor and jet fuel loses combustibility as the old world wears out and the millions of monsters that consume the tired earth at the end of each day close in. Yesterday is eaten while a new tomorrow awaits humanity. Each day is a stand alone entity, a new dot in the line.

II. Only information can travel in time
Neither Rick, nor any other physical object can travel through time, but information can. Like a transmission along a wire, Rick can view any point in time as if it were a live feed. Depending on the make and model of his chronoscope, he can see, hear, taste, and smell vivid simulations of future and past events.

Do not discount the importance of information distribution without the possibility of physical travel as a story device. In the film Frequency, the main character was able to contact his father across several decades with his ham radio because of some particularly funky sunspot activity. Transmitting only sound through time, the two were able to collaborate and change history. Aside from one fairly obvious flub the film handled time well, and produced an interesting story without anyone stepping through a mystical or technological doorway.

In Isaac Asimov's short story "The Dead Past," a device called the "chronoscope" had been in existence for some time, but controlled by the government. When a professor was denied permission to use the government's machine, he decided to build one of his own. Working with two other gentleman, he created a working model that was inexpensive to build and operate. It turned out that anyone could build a chronoscope with very little effort, capital, or know-how. Why would the government keep such an invention under close security? The machine could view the past at any point in time or space. With the right coordinates and frequency anybody could view a top secret military council, or a neighbor in the shower, a fraction of a second after each moment passed. Secrecy and privacy would become nonexistent.

III. Time travel is possible, but only to the past
Rick is astoundingly lucky. He is riding a wave of events that leaves all creation in it's wake. The future does not exist yet, but the past is wide open for pillage and plunder. After which, he can return to his own time to reap the rewards or pay the price for his meddling. Good or bad, right or wrong, Rick can return to his rightful place at the head of history. If he travels back in time and stabs out his own eye at the age of five, he will be blind in one eye when he returns to his own time. If he then decides he wants is eye back, he must go back farther still to change events again.

The film The Butterfly Effect is an example of this sort of time travel. Evan Treborn is able to travel to his own childhood with sheer force of will. In this story, any change will be burnt into his memory upon returning to his original place in time. Evan can remember both the original and the altered timeline. All other characters know only the world he has created. As far as Evan is concerned there is no future, but the past and present are what he makes them.

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