the Role of Physics and Philosophy in Time Travel
Narratives of the Last 120 Years.
Dardo Zijlstra
S2222272
Supervisor: Dr Hans Jansen
26 Feb 2014
15102 words
Table of Contents
Introduction
3
1. Theoretical Background
7
1.1
The Physics of Time Travel
7
1.2
Philosophical Objections to Time Travel
8
1.3
Time Travel in Narratives
11
2. Analysis of Pre-Einstein Narratives
18
3. Analysis of Heinlein and Bradbury’s Narratives
23
4. Analysis of Modern Time Travel Narratives
29
4.1
Making History
29
4.2
King’s 11/22/63
34
4.3
Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox
40
5. Conclusion
44
Introduction
Everybody thinks they know how time travel works, and in a certain way they are absolutely right. It is true that most people are familiar with some basic principles of time travel because they have probably read or seen something related to time travel in science fiction (SF). Yet, the general audience of these stories will not possess an extended knowledge about the science behind time travel. Both physics and philosophy have produced theories on time travel, and these theories are the primary sources on which the modern concept of time travel is based. The efforts of Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Stephen Hawking, and many other scientists has shaped our current knowledge of space and time. Additionally, the field of philosophy provides a framework with which to check the validity of the theories posited by physics.
The time travel narrative is a subcategory of SF (Booker and Thomas 15). Not all time travel narratives need to be SF per se, but can be described as fantasy as well. I will not attempt to categorize the stories in my corpus as SF or fantasy, because there are many difficulties inherent to forming a suitable definition (examples of this can be found in Rabkin 15-22; Roberts 1-20; and Booker and Thomas 3-6). For the purposes of this paper, the term time travel narrative/story/fiction will suffice, since all works of fiction in the selection contains backwards time travel. The category of time travel fiction covers a vast array of texts in which space and time are distorted in some way or another. Therefore, I will not include any narratives that focus on the alteration (i.e. the slowing down or speeding up) of time in a way that was done in Star Trek Voyager:
Blink of an Eye where the crew of the starship Voyager observes a planet on which time passes much
of time travel only enables the traveler to move forward through time. Secondly, time travel to the future will be disregarded because this type of time travel does not cause very interesting time paradoxes. Therefore, I will not be analyzing a work of fiction like The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, even though it is one of the founding texts of this subgenre.
Instead, this paper will mainly focused on narratives where the protagonists are physically transported back in time. The term time travel is very obscure as it is a general term that allows for many interpretations. As such, I will adhere to Lewis’ (145) definition of time travel which states that time travel only takes place when there is a difference between the time spent traveling and the amount of time bridged during that journey. If you, for example, would travel back 500 years into the past, but the journey only takes a matter of seconds, or even a nanosecond, then you are a time traveler. As such you are not a time traveler if you are frozen in a block of ice and you wake up twenty years later, because the length of the journey is equal to the amount of time bridged.
intermediate stories were written in the mid-twentieth century. I have included Robert Heinlein’s By
His Bootstraps (1941) and Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952) because these stories explore the
possibilities and problems of time travel. Additionally, these two stories were the basis for two very famous time travel tropes. Lastly, I have selected three relatively modern time travel narratives which were written in the last twenty years. The first is Making History (1996) by Stephen Fry, where the protagonist tries to stop Hitler from being born, and the second is the very recent 11/22/1963 by Stephen King. In this story, the protagonist tries to avoid the assassination of JFK by going through an aberration in the spacetime continuum. Last is the Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer where the protagonist travels back in time to stop himself from killing a lemur because its brain contains the key to saving his mother.
posit the possibility of time travel, without exploring the actual mechanics of the process” (Booker and Thomas 16).
1. Theoretical Background
The idea of traveling back in time is most fascinating. What would you do if you could visit yourself in the past? Would you go back and get the girl you were in love with when you were 13, or would you save the world from WWII or any other tragic set of events? Indeed, the main reasons for going back into the past are nostalgia or the need to change history (Nahin 3-5). Unfortunately, one cannot take a trip to the past just yet. Physics has been very important in providing the laws that govern the universe, and physicists use the laws of physics to see if time travel is possible. The laws of physics might allow for some theoretical way of traveling through time, but this manner of time travel might defy common logic. Philosophy uses logic in determining the possibility of time travel. These fields of study have provided a well of information for authors of time travel fiction.
1.1 The Physics of Time Travel
However, current technology does not allow us to reach the speed of light, and thus, people that time travel to the future (e.g. astronauts) only do so by minute amounts.
Special relativity only allowed for time travel to the future (Nahin, 18); traveling backwards was considered theoretically impossible. However, “in the 1940s, Kurt Gödel discovered models of the Einstein field equations in which there exist closed timelike curves” (Smith 157). The whole concept of a closed timelike curve is difficult to grasp, but it is best viewed as a technical term for a path that allows people to travel into the past (Kaku 222).1 These efforts and discoveries have
enabled the creation of more elaborate theoretical time machines.2 The availability of this scientific
information inspired SF authors. Naturally, Einstein and Gödel are not the only contributors to this field. There are relatively newer theories (e.g. string theory and quantum mechanics) 3 which have
provided new ideas for realizing time travel. However, our current level of technology and understanding of the cosmos are far removed from realizing actual backward time travel.
1.2 Philosophical Objections to Time Travel
The equations of physicists might make traveling into the past a theoretical possibility, but these do not answer any questions as to what would happen if one actually managed to make a machine that travels back into the past. Indeed, the realization of backward travel could create situations that would violate the laws of logic. Philosophers in this field of study determine whether or not time travel should be possible. For example, a philosopher could say that time travel presents logical problems. Here, a logical problem refers to the philosophical objections to the logical possibility of
1 For CTC’s see e.g.: Perszyk and Smith (called closed timelike lines in their paper). For a detailed discussion of CTCs
read Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking by Visser.
2 Kaku (222-224) provides a few examples of machines that would allow time travel. However, conditions under which
these machines would function are of such an unimaginable magnitude that it is not possible to actually construct these machines.
3 A field where new approaches to time travel are being explored since the 1970s, and where important theories were
time travel: if time travel was possible it would reverse causality, and that creates a situation that is logically impossible (Nichols et al. 206).
Although traveling back in time to visit your past self is one of the basic desires that backward travel invokes, it is also deemed impossible to be at two places at once. This problem is often referred to as the self-visitation paradox, or the twins paradox. Imagine that you could travel back in time a moment when you were sleeping: can you actually be at two places at the same time?4
A philosophical approach portrayed by Perszyk and Smith (6) suggests that you should adapt a different image of yourself: the object that is your body is not connected to the temporal you. According to them, the totality of your being is spread out across time: the past you is just a different part of you. Therefore, backwards time travel does not make two of you appear at one point in spacetime, but just two parts of you do (6).
Next, the most logical objection to backward travel is the grandfather paradox (TV tropes “Grandfather Paradox”, Csicsery-Ronay Jr. 99. General consensus sees Le Voyageur Imprudent (1944) by Barjavel as the first instance of the grandfather paradox, but Nahin (286) has found earlier examples of grandfathers being killed in fiction. The opening illustration to Thompsons Time Traveling
Theory by Mort Weisinger provides a well-known example of this paradox in a time travel story: it
shows the time traveler as he steps out of his time machine and shoots his grandfather through the head. Imagine that you have access to a time machine and you decide to go back in time kill your grandfather before one of your parents was born. Should you succeed, your parent would never have been born, and thus you cannot exist. As such, this creates a problem of a logical nature, which suggests again that backwards travel impossible (Nichols et al. 206). Therefore, the very premise of time travel is dismantled by logical reasoning even before science can play a role in the equation.
Naturally, different approaches to this problem exist. Lewis refutes the idea that this logical problem renders time travel impossible: he skillfully provides arguments based on word meaning that suggest that this scenario is not a premise for impossibility (145-152). He states that backward time travel is possible, but that it certainly would be odd. Another approach suggests that you can travel back in time, but that you cannot change the past. This resolution is based on the philosophical notion that the past is fixed and cannot be changed (Nichols et al. 206). As such, the traveler can be present at an event in the past, but is unable to change anything, because it already happened (Perszyk and Smith 5). In fact, according to this approach, you were there when it happened the first time; you cannot kill Hitler, because you did not succeed when you had the chance.5 This way of looking at time is related to the growing block universe principle in which the
past and present are set in stone and only the future is subject to change.6 Igor Novikov proposes a
similar solution in The River of Time (1992). In the final part of his book, he explains that all events must be consistent: if everything is consistent, a paradox cannot occur. This would suggest that there is a force – Novikov calls this the self-consistency principle – which prevents inconsistencies from occurring in the universe. If applied to the scenario where the traveler wants to kill their grandfather, the bullet will not be able to pierce the grandfather’s skull. This might be because the gun suddenly does not work anymore, or they miss because they slip on a banana peel.
The above objections to time travel are based on the premise that time is like a river. One could go back and forward in the river, but all events exist within this one river. Yet, another approach suggests that every change made in the past creates a new river. According to this theory, by changing the past, the time traveler creates a parallel universe, and his own timeline would
5 On the difference between changing the past and affecting the past, see e.g.: Nahin 269-285; and Smith Bananas Enough
for Time Travel? 364-366.
6 See Being and Becoming in Modern Physics by Steven Savitt for more information on the growing block universe (which is
continue to exist.7 It is a perfect way to avoid any kind of logical problem which is often used by
authors of SF.
The ontological paradox is a popular trope in SF literature. It is also known as the bootstrap paradox because it was made popular by Robert Heinlein’s famous short story By His Bootstraps (1941). In this situation, an object, person, or information from the present is sent back to the past, and leads to the initiation of an event in the past. The object remains in the past and follows the normal flow of time to the present. When the object reaches the present, the object will be sent back to the past again, creating a loop where the point of origin of the item is obscured. A famous example can be taken from the movie The Terminator (1984) where a robot with artificial intelligence is sent back in time to kill the future rebel leader John Connor, because he is the only one that can stop the robots from exterminating mankind. Although the robot eventually gets destroyed, a part of it survives and gets used by the scientists to create the artificial intelligence which gave the machines the power to conquer mankind in the first place. This leaves the question as to where the origins of the robot lie.8 Philosophers identify these phenomena as causal loops: these are situations where
“every part of the loop has a causal explanation, but the loop as a whole does not” (Kiekeben 233). When the phenomenon is concerned with the path of an object through time, it is called an object loop (Kiekeben 206). Similar to the bootstrap paradox is the predestination paradox, which also involves a loop. It is also similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the time traveler is destined to cause the very event he is trying to stop from happening. The traveler is both part of the loop, as well as the cause of the loop. Logic claims impossibility since the law of causality is violated (Nichols et al. 207), but Lewis has stated that backwards causality and time travel are not mutually exclusive (148).
The butterfly effect is a term made popular by its appearance in Ray Bradbury’s short story
A Sound of Thunder (1952). The term describes the principle that a very small change can have large
and catastrophic consequences to the future.9 In general, this problem focuses on travelers that
succeed in changing the past despite logical objections, and on the effects of said change. In Bradbury’s story, a trophy hunter, Eckels, travels back into the distant past to kill a tyrannosaurus. He is warned to not stray off the path, for if he even kills the smallest of animals, he would trigger a domino effect that could have a serious impact on his future. After some time in the prehistoric past, Eckels goes off the path, steps in mud, and accidently crushes a butterfly with his boot. The death of this butterfly changes the entire future (explained in further detail in section 2). A more specific approach to this problem is the Hitler’s Murder paradox, also called the “Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act” (TV tropes “Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act”). Fiction that features this problem often considers what would have happened if Hitler was killed. However, similar to the butterfly effect, the problem of this paradox does not lie with the impossibility of changing the past, but with the consequences of meddling with the timeline.
1.3 Time Travel in Narratives
If one searches any history of SF one almost certainly finds that Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and
Frankenstein: a Modern Prometheus (1823) are named as precursors of modern SF. The time travel
narrative is one of the oldest subgenres of science fiction, and it can be traced back to a popular story as old as Irving’s Rip van Winkle (Nahin 15).10 The way in which time travel is portrayed in
those older stories would seem a bit outdated to the modern audience, because we have been influenced by new discoveries in physics and philosophy on time travel. According to Nahin, time travel can be divided into two subcategories: machineless time travel and time travel by machine
(Nahin 13). As mentioned above, there are several ways to travel without a machine, such as sleep and suspended animation.11 Another narrative device that was often used to rationalize time travel in
some of the older novels is by use of dreams. The most famous example of this can be found in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Moreover, Edwards et al. (“Time Travel”) provide a very early example with the Danish play Anno 7603 (1785) by Johan Hermann Wessel, whereby fairy magic is used to propel the travelers through time.12 The last manner of time travel is a timeslip. In
this situation, the traveler gets transported in a random manner by some unknown force. It is a commonly known method for authors to implement time travel without having to spend much effort into providing any scientific information.13
Indeed, physics has been a great influence on the way that time travel is portrayed in narratives. The number of time machines mentioned increased dramatically after Einstein published his theory on special relativity in 1905. His calculations refuted the Newtonian belief that time is absolute and the same everywhere in the universe. These new findings made scientific discussion about time travel possible (Nahin 25). However, special relativity only allowed for time travel to the future (18). The magnitude of these findings was incredible back then, and they are still very important for modern physics today. Scientific discussions on the possibility of time travel were a result of Einstein’s breakthrough. Later, this scientific information was adapted to fit SF in the years following.
As said before, the second subcategory of time travel entails travel which is made possible by some kind of machine. A classic example of a machine specifically designed for time travel, is the machine that is portrayed in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). This novel is seen as one of the
11 Examples are the episodes Space Pilot 3000 from Futurama and Go God Go from South Park
12 A similar kind of magic is used in Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox and in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban, in which the pendant that Hermione uses to travel through time is also fuelled by magical properties attached
to the pendant.
founding texts of the subgenre (Edwards et al. “Time Travel”). Additionally, in fiction, there are several kinds of machines that are able to transport the protagonist through time: those that travel with them through time14 and others that teleport them to a point in the space/time continuum.15
Lastly, there is the machine called the time viewer which allows for a more passive type of time travel and that enables the protagonist to view into another point in time.16
It must be noted that no label such as SF existed during the 1890s under which these books could be published, since the genre supposedly originates from the 1920s when Hugo Gernsback introduced it (Luckhurst 15). As such, these books are usually described as fantasy books since they do not use science to cause cognitive estrangement. The narrative structures of the books used for this dissertation – and in particular Mark Twain’s book – are similar to that of the historical romance. Twain’s book might also be compared to the exotic travel narratives which were popular during the eighteenth century (Taylor 15). In Twain’s novel, however, the natives of the exotic continents are replaced by the uncivilized community of the Medieval Period.
The SF genre has grown quite extensively during the twentieth century, and the amount of time travel narratives did so too. The popularity of cheap pulp magazines made widespread distribution of short SF stories possible in the early twentieth century (Roberts 174). The genre grew exponentially in the years that followed. One is immediately reminded of the 1926 SF magazine
Amazing Stories, later renamed Astounding Science-Fiction by John W. Campbell in 1938 (Roberts 195).
The period between the late 1930s and 1950s is universally called the Golden Age of SF, where Hard SF (stories where authors emphasized the scientific principles of concepts or machines in the stories.
14 A prime example of this is the machine created in the novel The Time Machine (1894), or the machine used in the 1999
short film Blackadder: Back and Forth. They are vehicles that one can enter, and the traveler can exit the machine whenever it has arrived at its destination.
15 The machine used by the artificially intelligent robots in the Terminator Films creates a singularity through which
organic material can be transported through time and space.
In time travel narratives this emphasis is applied to explanations pertaining time travel mechanics) was the most popular sort of fiction. Roberts also states that Campbell had a large influence on the kind of SF that became popular (195). Back then, SF still had the stigma of being a low form of fiction due to its popularity in pulp magazines. Admittedly, most of the early SF stories were not in novel form, but were short and linear narratives that revolved around the telling of the paradox (Slusser and Chatelain 162).
sorts of SF tropes, but it seems that time travel was a popular trope in the Star Trek franchise. The last addition to the Star Trek TV series was the series Enterprise (2001-2005), which was completely centered on time travel. In general, the success of SF movies inspired an even higher influx of SF movies because producers saw that there was money to be madeRoberts 276).
In the late twentieth century, physics and philosophy had provided many theories on time travel, and the time travel trope had appeared in myriads of SF stories. Consequently, authors had access to a large pool of easily accessible information which they could implement in their novels. Still, the fact that many narratives had already included time travel also had some negative consequences. The numerous works that dealt with time paradoxes in the 1930s-1960s seem to have oversaturated the market. As such, writing a successful time travel story became more difficult, and finding a new angle for time travel stories is not an easy task. Daniels (“Time Paradoxes”) states that the time paradox story is a wasting asset, and that it requires a lot of cunning to come up with new and original angles. This idea is also found in Slusser and Chatelain (qtd. 182) when they quote Knight (1962). He also states that authors have to be cunning, but that science also influences the time travel narrative:
Knight says: “Once, a good many years ago, I was rash enough to say in print that I thought the time travel story was played out.” Knight goes on however to qualify this: “I would hate to tell you how many time travel stories I have written since then.” If, in 1961, the form again seems played out, he admits that, with Laumer, a "major new idea" has arisen. More is at work here than ingenious game-playing; the factor fuelling these "revivals" appears to be the restless scientific speculation on the nature of time.
2. Analysis of Pre-Einstein Narratives
Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee is widely regarded as one of the first great time travel romances. In fact, Bud Foote states the novel is the very first novel to feature travel into the past where the protagonist actually ventures to change history (Foote 13). Although there were other stories, “none of these travelers does anything to change that past and thereby his present” (Foote 13). Furthermore, although people might have thought about the possibility to change the past, it might be that the human mind of that time was unable to imagine such things: that “All experience, all common sense, all morality, all religion would have made the whole idea unthinkable” (Foote 13). Nevertheless, Hank Morgan, a Yankee from the nineteenth century, gets transported to the Middle Ages after being hit on the head. The timeslip does occur at the moment of impact, and this makes one wonder if he was not asleep the whole time. Foote, however, seems adamant to state that this is “real” time travel:
And, in spite of Twain’s notes, the story as he finally wrote it is not a dream. If evidence is needed … “Camelot-Camelot,” says Hank to himself. “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before.” But if one is to dream of a place, one must have heard about it before; and therefore Hank’s Camelot is not a dream (14 my ellipsis).
Indeed, up till that time, time travel machines were certainly not a common narrative device and had only been used recently in fiction. Albeit that Twain published his novel about four years after Wells did, Foote has argued that it is unlikely that Twain knew about The Time Machine (1895) at that time (Foote 20). Consequently, the absence of a time machine is not unexpected, and little attention is given to the concept of time travel throughout the book. The primary function of the book is to describe and criticize the glorified Middle Ages (Foote 44).
modern physics. Indeed, he states that the concept of alternate universes did not exist to the literary mind in 1889, and that travel to the past was still in its shapeless infancy (31).
The book Tourmaline’s Time Cheques (also known as The Time Bargain) (1891) by F. Anstey17 is
a pioneering novel for an entirely different reason than Twain’s story: the narrative centers around the problems in the future that arise from traveling back into the past (Edwards et al. “Time Paradoxes”). In this novel, time travel is validated by a dream state. The protagonist, Peter Tourmaline, is a bachelor/man, returning to England on the boat The Boomerang after a trip to Australia and who is looking to prove his love for his fiancée Sophia. Peter finds that he is very bored during the trip, and he wishes he could get another use for his spare time. During the trip, Peter is given the opportunity to deposit his spare time on a type of time-account and can withdraw those moments by writing out a cheque. Although rather confused by the offer, Peter later finds that “it was an immense relief to know that he had got rid of his extra hours for the present, at all events, and that he could now postpone them to a period at which they would be a boon rather than a burden” (Anstey 28). The cheque is activated when Peter puts it behind a clock – any clock that happens to be around in the area – and the transportation is instantaneous. One could argue that clocks are time machines, but the realization that Peter dreams it nullifies this argument. In this novel, time travel is a concept which can be easily validated by either magic or dreaming, and where science plays no role.
The novel is particularly interesting because it explores the problems that arise from traveling into the past. Peter always resorts to time travel when he feels that his fiancée is wearing him out. The cheques that he cashes in are usually only for fifteen minutes of his spare time. He does not seem to remember anything about the hours he has put in the bank. Moreover, when
cashes in these moments, he is transported to a random place and time on the boat. As such, Peter faces unknown circumstances and people. For example, Peter talks to a woman called Maud Davenport and finds out that she is very fond of him. He does not understand the reasoning behind her fondness, and discovers that she likes him that much because he saved her life, something of which he has no recollection. Later in the book, Peter is transported back to a time before the conversation took place. He rescues Maud Davenport, but he undertakes this action because he had prior knowledge of the incident: “Another time, he discovered himself in the act of dragging Miss Davenport unceremoniously from the bulwarks: but here again his memory furnished him with the proper excuse for conduct”(94). This situation is similar to a predestination paradox in the sense that Peter seems to have inspired himself to save the woman, but it is certainly not overtly linked to philosophical theory.
3. Analysis of Heinlein and Bradbury’s Narratives
Whereas H.G. Wells is called the Father of SF, Robert Heinlein is often called the Dean of SF. Indeed, Heinlein is considered one of the influential authors in the SF genre. Today, causal loops are still called bootstrap paradoxes: a term inspired by Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps.In this short story, Bob Wilson is stuck in a causal loop with various versions of himself from different points in time. The second short story that this dissertation will focus upon is by SF icon Ray Bradbury. First published in 1952, A Sound of Thunder centers on the discussion of the consequences of changing something in the past; it is the origin of the term the butterfly effect. While Heinlein’s story presents the reader with a narrative that reflects the journey of the protagonist, Bradbury’s story concentrates more on the consequences of time travel.
In By His Bootstraps, the audience is introduced to Bob: a philosopher who is writing an essay called “an investigation Into Certain Mathematical Aspects of a Rigor of Metaphysics” (Heinlein 1). In this research, Bob theorizes about time travel, and about the way in which time is perceived by humans. As Bob is writing, a circle appears and a man from the future steps through this circle. He ends up fighting with this man before going traveling to the future by going through the circle. This circle is a manifestation of the time portal that is generated by a time machine. The story describes the machine as:
Four colored spheres the size of marbles hung on crystal rods arranged with respect to each other as the four major axes of a tetrahedron. Three spheres which bounded the base of the tetrahedron were red, yellow, and blue; the fourth at the apex was white. “Three special controls, one time control,” explained Diktor (Heinlein 15).
machine in a four-dimensional spacetime continuum. Important is that one can travel freely forwards and backwards in time through that time portal. Bob enters the circle and ends up in a strange future where the human race has been subjugated by aliens for twenty thousand years, and they seem to have destroyed the human psyche as we know it. The humans that remain appear to be little more than dogs in their behavior. In this strange future, he meets a man called Diktor, the ruler of these simple humans, who needs Bob’s help in gaining more power over his subjects. Diktor is able to explain the controls of the time machine and says that “using the here-and-now as zero reference, displacing any control from the center moves the other end of the Gate further from the here-and-now” (15). When Bob asks for more details about the machine, Diktor dismisses him and tells him that he can look through the gate to the other side and need not worry about such things. Later, Heinlein provides the reader with a scientific explanation of the time travel mechanics: a piece of silk cloth represents spacetime, and if you fold it, you can connect two points and travel through time. This description was not constructed by Heinlein himself, but was taken directly from the way in which physics describe the Einstein-Rosen Bridge – more commonly known as a wormhole (Langford “Wormholes”). It is clear that the time machine in this story is based on scientific information available to the author at that time.
in the earlier novels. Also, the quote above suggests that Heinlein researched the philosophy of time travel, since it is similar to the solution to the twins paradox as provided in chapter 1.
The narrative literally revolves around the confusing situation that is created by time travel. Bob is stuck in a time loop. According to the ontological paradox, the beginning of a time loop is obscured, and that is exactly what is happening here. For the reader, the story ends when Bob waits patiently for ten years to intercept the man he thought started the loop, and then realizes that he actually is Diktor. However, the loop will keep repeating itself: Bob went the future since was sent there by himself, and he will keep sending himself to the future forever. Not only is Bob in the loop, but the reader is as well: Heinlein tells the story three times from the perspective of each of Bob’s versions. Heinlein shows his considerable active knowledge of causal loops in creating such a narrative.
Moreover, the notebook on which Diktor/Bob has noted down the some language notes is part of the object loop, Heinlein provides a detailed explanation for the fact that the notebook does not seem to get older as the loop repeats itself: Diktor copies the content of the tattered version of the notebook onto a new one, after which he destroys the old one (112-113). This solves the problem as the notebook is renewed every time the loop starts again. A similar solution is provided by the philosopher Franz Kiekeben (222). Again, the knowledge that Heinlein possessed on the matter of time travel and time paradoxes is well-founded in science.
to hunt and kill a tyrannosaurus. He enlists the employ of the company Time Safari Inc. This company has access to a time machine with which they can transport. His time machine is portrayed as a cubicle of some kind, which the safari party can enter to be transported to the past. Unlike other narratives, the trip in this short story does not seem to be instantaneous: “First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night-day. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared” (Bradbury 3). That time passes as the characters undergo their trip in the past appears often in time travel fiction: the TARDIS from the Doctor Who series takes similar amounts of time, as does the machine that Black Adder uses in the 1999 film Back and Forth. The machine does not need an introduction since it was a common narrative device already in the 1950s. Additionally, the inner workings of the machine are not explained in further detail, but the story is so short that such a detailed explanation of time travel mechanics would distract from the main story line.
that he crushed a butterfly with his boot. The remaining hunters discover that this small change has major ramifications, as their present is now ruled by a German fascist regime. The explanations are short due to the fact that there is no need for detailed information within the narrative. Also, compared to Heinlein, Bradbury did not do as much research into the scientific principles he employs in his work. Nichols (“Ray Bradbury”) states that “his work was always more Fantasy and Horror than sf”.
Time travel problems are identified as paradoxes in A Sound of Thunder. Next to explaining the logic behind the consequences that arises from changing the past, Bradbury shows that he is aware of the self-visitation problem. When Lesperance, an employee of the safari company, explains that he tracks the animal to be hunted for its entire existence, Eckels asks the party leaders if the party will meet another version of Lesperance in prehistoric time.
“That’d be a paradox,” said the latter. “Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess—a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There’s no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our monster, or whether all of us—meaning you, Mr. Eckels—got out alive” (Bradbury 8).
These two short stories contain time travel that feels closer to our modern concept of time travel. Back in the time of Heinlein and Bradbury, one had to include some kind of scientific background to time travel; dreams alone were no longer acceptable. The stories are very different in nature: Heinlein’s story could be categorized as hard SF, while Bradbury’s story is soft SF. Heinlein’s researched the physics and philosophy of time travel: he provides scientific explanations about the controls of the machine, and he also explains the physics of traveling through a wormhole to the reader. Bradbury did not include a detailed description of the time machine, and he didn’t need to do so. A typical SF audience would have been familiar with a generic time machine.
4. Analysis of Modern Time Travel Narratives
The modern time travel narratives are analyzed in this chapter. The analyses of these novels are considerably longer. As such, the novels are analyzed in separate subsections.
4.1 Making History
What if you could go back in time and kill Hitler? This is a question that Stephen Fry does not hesitate to answer in his novel Making History. The question, however, is not a new one, and similar scenarios have been explored numerous times in various novels and films. In fact, such scenarios are now referred to as Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act (TV tropes “Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act”). At the beginning of Fry’s novel, the protagonist Michael Young, a student of History, is about to hand in his “Meisterwerk”, which is his thesis on the early years of Adolf Hitler and his family. He meets an Einstein-like physicist named Leo Zuckerman, who is very much interested in changing this particular stretch of the past. The physicist wants to prevent Hitler from coming to power, because his grandfather worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII. The reader is informed that Leo works in the field of quantum mechanics and that he has invented a time machine (the Temporal Imaging Machine, later called TIM), with which he can observe spacetime as though looking through a window (Fry 123). After a few modifications to the machine, the two are able to send a male contraceptive pill back in time and dissolve it in the water well in the town where Hitler’s parents lived. In doing so, they aim to sterilize Hitler’s father. After they succeed in doing so, disaster, accompanied by a healthy bit of hilarity, ensues.
Particular traces” (123). He then goes on to say that the machine is virtually useless, because one can only observe the past: it is “an artificial quantum singularity of no more use than an electric pencil-sharpener. Less” (125). After Michael gets the idea of sending the pill back in time, he asks Leo if the machine could be modified to accomplish this wish. Leo agrees and modifies the device. After the modifications are completed, the reader is presented with a new scene in which TIM is able to send something back in spacetime. The most important addition to the machine is a canister that serves as a receptacle for the items which are to be sent back in time. When one presses a button, the objects disappear and get teleported to the past (224). The machine does not travel with the object/person to the future; it is only able to teleport things. The manner in which the pills are teleported to the past is not explained in detail, but the problems that occur after the transportation is complete give some extra clues, next to the ones that Leo provides before when he elaborates on the physics behind the workings of TIM. As said before, as soon as the pills are transported to the past, strange things start to happen. A vortex forms around TIM, in which matter, light, and energy start to conglomerate: it is described as a tornado, and “the epicentre of that tornado is TIM’s screen. All matter, starting with small objects is morphed and swirled into it” (225). What is described here is undoubtedly some kind of wormhole.18 In fact, the machine has created a black
hole. This is confirmed by the implosion of the tornado at the end of the chapter. The fact that the verb implode is used (Fry 225) in this context says a lot, because the only natural way for a black hole to be created is with the implosion of a star (Nahin 86). Additionally, when Michael emerges from the wormhole, he is the only one to remember what happened due to the fact that he was within the event horizon of the singularity; the world has been already altered because of his actions. The terminology that Fry uses and the explanations he provides of the time machine display that he
is familiar with the theories concerning time travel. The machine is clearly linked to the field of quantum mechanics, and the terminology that is used is common to the terminology in physics.
Michael is afraid of using TIM because the results could be totally random: “I mean, this might be a disaster. It might start all over again. I might wake up in the middle of an Iraqi punishment cell or a Siberian gulag. Jesus, I might be destined to do this the rest of my life” (541-542). The fear of Michael is based on popular time travel tropes: to the random aspect of time travel, which is not unlike the randomness portrayed in Anstey’s novel. Next, the reference to an infinite time loop was well known due to the popular movie Groundhog Day (1994). Fry even adjusts the narrative structure of the novel as a wink to popular culture. For example, the structure of the novel changes to that of a movie script whenever Leo and Michael are about to use TIM (Fry 143, 203, and 460).
at some time in the future someone would have gone back and stopped things like the holocaust from happening, wouldn’t they?’’ (Fry 136-137). Again, Fry shows that he knows about the theories about time travel, and he refers to philosophical objections to time travel which echo those of Perszyk and Smith (5, as mentioned in chapter 1).
Fry mentions a lot of physicists throughout the book, and that betrays his extensive knowledge of the history of philosophy and of the physics used in the concept of time and space. In fact, the book is riddled with subtle – and slightly less subtle – references to both physics and philosophy. For instance, the chapter Making Waves (101) begins with the Michael’s opinion about physics, and the pages are filled with a flurry of famous names and theories. The name of Albert Einstein is mentioned frequently, as are other relevant physicists and philosophers. Yet, Fry probably did not do extensive research on the physics behind time travel, but he did take a Physics course at university (Fry, Moab is my Washpot 145).
Michael has tried and failed to learn the “popularising histories of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Unified Field Theories, the T.O.E. [Theory of Everything] and all the rest of it” (Fry,
Making History 102), and Fry faults the physicists for using unnecessarily hard language in their
papers. His attitude to physics could also partly be explained by Fry’s personal experiences: “I did not just fail Physics, I ploughed it spectacularly. Such was my pride that I could not bear to be seen to fail anything unless it was quite deliberate” (Fry, Moab is My Washpot 84). Throughout the novel, Fry continues to jab at the language used in these papers, basically claiming it is impossible for a “non-scientist pseudo-intellectual” to grasp even the easiest of books on the matters of particle acceleration and the sorts. He also comments on the language in Isaac Newton’s work, quoting from
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687): “Bodies attract each other with a force that varies
concerns about the silliness of the word inversely in the sentence, claiming that it is “a bit of a bugger” to measure the inversion of a force (104). Next, there are a number of famous Einstein’s quotes mentioned on page 105, and on page 106, Fry mentions a spat between Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, and says that it has “something to do with neutrinos, I hear. Albert doesn’t believe in them. Wolfgang’s furious”. The previous statements by Michael reveal Fry’s knowledge of the history of physics, but his reference to movies and popular culture reveal that Fry borrows from these sources too. Fry also successfully uses more covert ways of creating events that do not directly show that his rational understanding of the topic of time travel. Only when you know a bit about the concept of time travel and speed of light will you fully appreciate when Leo says: “We are looking back into time every time we look at the sky. It is no big deal” (Fry, Making History 123).19
Moreover, it could be argued that Fry implemented an Easter egg when he chose to abbreviate the Temporal Imaging Device into TIM. If you look at Lewis’s influential paperThe Paradoxes of Time Travel (145-152), you will see that the examples he employs always contain a
hypothetical man named Tim that travels back in time to kill his grandfather. In fact, this hypothetical Tim is used as an example in various other papers on time paradoxes. The reference to TIM would not only suggest that Fry possesses considerable primary knowledge of time travel theory, but also that he possesses a lot of secondary knowledge from film and other fiction. In fact, the way in which he refers to the language used in theoretical papers, reveals that Fry consciously avoids presenting the reader with similar difficult language.
19 This is a simple example at best perhaps, but it is true that if you look at an object on the other side of the room, the
Fry shows that he is quite skilled in writing about time travel and its paradoxes. The time machine is made into an authentic one by the fact that Leo is a quantum physicist, and by references to physics. Time travel mechanics and paradoxes are also explained by the insertion of similar explanations. These explanations are scientific in nature, but are not overly detailed. Fry acts like Leo Zuckermann when he provides these explanations: he is like a physicist explaining time travel mechanics to a historian. Fry shows that he is aware of this problem by joking about various famous physicists. Moreover, he actually says the language that physicists use in their papers unnecessarily difficult. Fry avoids this same fallacy by providing funny references to popular culture and by changing the structure of the text to resemble a movie script whenever Leo and Michael are about to use TIM. Still, Fry does show that he has done some research on time travel. It is probably not by accident that Fry used TIM, the name for a hypothetical man that is often used when discussing paradoxes in philosophical papers. Fry very consciously plays with information from physics and popular culture when he chooses to imbed an Easter egg instead of paraphrasing Lewis.
4.2 King’s 11/22/63
At the beginning of the story, the reader gets introduced to Jake, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine. Shortly, after the reader is introduced to Al, a proprietor of a diner, and a friend of Jake. It appears that Al instantly changes for the worse, and the reader notices that something strange is happening in Lisbon Falls: it seems that Al discovered a distortion in the spacetime continuum that allows him to teleport/travel back to 1958. Al himself is obsessed with preventing the Kennedy murder, because he thought that this event was the first domino to fall. He thinks it caused the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and more political issues. Al did thorough research into the murder and is convinced that Harvey Lee Oswald is the true assassin. Unfortunately, Al is terminally ill and cannot see his mission trough to the end. It is up to Jake to complete the task at hand, but that will not be easy since the past fights back when the time traveler tries to change it. The narrative does not make use of a time machine; instead, there is a natural way of traveling through the fourth dimension, which is more commonly known as a time portal. In the pantry of Al’s diner, there is a gateway that leads to September, 1958. This portal works as a two-way-street: you can return to the present by stepping through the portal again, and you will emerge two minutes after entering the portal the first time. By calling the gateway the rabbit-hole, King references to Alice in Wonderland. Referring back to a well-known literary device enables the reader to accept this particular mode of transportation. Referring to such a well-known portal as the rabbit-hole would probably enough: the reader knows that it is a natural anomaly [wormhole], but King does provide a pseudo-scientific explanation later in the novel when Jake talks to a friend of the Yellow Hat Man (explained in further detail on page 38 and 39).
waiting – for Jake to come and try to change history. King succeeds in turning time into a palpable being that is to be feared because it will strike at the ones that try and change it. As such, Jake is bound to require several attempts before he complete his final plan to stop Oswald from shooting the president. Al reckons that the portal has another special property: all actions that you undertook in the past can be erased simply by going back to the future. This means that Jake can try and stop the JFK assassination as many times as his body will allow. Al warns Jake that there always seems to be a drunken man just outside of the rabbit-hole, whom he calls the Yellow Card Man. This man seems to know that something strange is going on every time Jake emerges in 1958, and tries to warn the traveler. We later learn that this is a member of an organization that monitors the integrity of the spacetime continuum. In his afterword, King admits that he did extensive research into both the conspiracy theories concerning the JFK murder and the 50s and 60s in general. Consequently, this narrative is also similar to a historical novel due to detail in which he describes mid-twentieth century America. Indeed, King spared no expense in providing many details concerning this historical period. This suggests that time travel was not that important for this narrative, and, as such, the physics of time travel did not receive a lot of attentions from the author.
grandfather paradox, but he still implements information that actually prevents the paradox from being a valid objection to time travel in his novel.
The butterfly effect is explicitly mentioned when Al and Jake think about consequences of changing the past: “Right. It means that small events can have large, whatcamadinget, ramifications… That sounds as crazy to you as it does to me” (King 53). Indeed, the protagonists in King’s novel do not seem to be able to think seriously about the consequences of changing the past. Instead, they dismiss the paradoxes immediately and establish that all event reset if one enters the rabbit-hole again. Whereas Al might disregard conventional results, King certainly does not: the alteration to the time stream causes a nuclear holocaust of epic proportions. By the year 2011, the planet is in such disrepair from all the nuclear explosions that the estimated disintegration of the planet will be in the late twenty-first century (709). The insertion of the butterfly effect to this particular situation serves only one goal: satire. King is able to take this well-known term and make fun of it, but he is unable to completely ignore the underlying principle: something bad usually has to happen when one tampers with time.
would you do that?”) The rules are simple’ (Morris “Stephen King goes to the Rescue of JFK”). A review by Greenfield seems to be a bit more skeptical of the casual way in which King dismisses time paradoxes: “While the unintended consequences of Jake’s journey seem to me too casually rendered — summed up by the old ad line that ‘it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature’. It would seem that an author has to juggle with the amount of information he provides about time travel mechanics and paradoxes: too much might discourage casual readers, and too little might frustrate SF fans.
Jake’s efforts to improve the present lead to him to sunder the very fabric of reality. One time, after he nearly died during the mission, he returns to the rabbit-hole and meets another member of an organization monitors time. It seems that the Yellow Card Man has died from the sheer impact of the changes that Jake just implemented. It appears that every time he changes something, he creates a new “string” in the time line. The abundance of strings is such that the change that Jake made caused an earthquake. Thus, if their current situation is not altered, reality might cease to exist. The replacement of Yellow Card Man then begs Jake to reset the hole one more time so that all the strings do not get snarled (King 697). It is quite amusing to see that the time cop faults both Al and Jake for being so naïve as to expect to actually reset the universe after going back through the wormhole:
You should have known better. Each trip creates its own string, and when you have enough
When the cop explains a bit more about the wormhole during the last part of the book, the reader gets more detailed information. These descriptions do not provide a lot of scientific information,20
but contain common terminology: the time cop calls each universe a string, and he connects the workings of the universe to that of harmonics. As such, words like wave and frequency are part of the related terminology. The word string is not a remarkable choice in this respect, and could very well be derived from string theory.21 Also, the insertion of a type of time cop is not unexpected since it has
been a well-known theme in time travel narratives since the mid-twentieth century (Langford Time
Police). King then is able to provide a recognizable situation in which changes to the past cause the
universe to disintegrate. He uses commonly used terms when explaining this. He probably learnt these terms due to his experience with earlier works of fiction containing similar information, because he did not do extensive research into time travel, nor does he have a background in science.
This section shows that even authors as famous as Stephen King have to rationalize time travel in some way or another. Yes, the author can shape and ridicule well-known tropes like the grandfather paradox and the butterfly effect, but he still has to add some proof that he has a basic understanding of these principles. As reviews of the book suggest, modern-day authors have to provide something more than magical time portal to satisfy their audience, and this audience need overly detailed information as they are familiar with these tropes. King uses popular time travel tropes, but he does not simply copy them; he creates something new. The reader has the feeling that the obdurate past could strike Jake at any time. King successfully balanced the detail and the amount of information he added to his first time travel narrative. King’s self-proclaimed lack of knowledge about time travel
20 The absence of detailed scientific explanation is caused by King’s lack of knowledge on the matter. He admits that he
does not know a great deal about time travel, and that his son helped him edit out some of the errors concerning time travel. He also stated that: ‘Nothing I’ve written in 11.22.63 will provide answers to those questions, because time-travel is just an interesting make-believe’ (King 734).
might also account for the absence of detailed scientific explanations, but King’s knowledge of English literature and common time travel tropes enable him to fulfill the reader’s wishes and expectations concerning time travel.
4.3 Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox
Eion Colfer’s series of books on the teenage genius Artemis Fowl contain a lot of fantastic things, and time travel is one of them. Together with his friend Holly, the protagonist, Artemis Fowl, has to travel back in time to save his mother from certain death. The antidote for his mother’s illness can be extracted from the lemur’s brain. Unfortunately, Artemis sold the last one in existence to extinctionists – people that enjoy killing the last of a species – in the past. The type of time travel that Artemis is going to take is dangerous, because it seems to destabilize one’s atoms for some reason.
The protagonists do not use a machine to travel through time. Instead, they use magic to travel to the past. This type of time travel is comparable to the mechanics of teleportation in Star
Trek, that is, the traveler is broken down on a molecular level and then transported to another point
in spacetime. A more detailed description is given by a demon called No 1 when he tells the two
heroes that they have to think about a specific place in the past (Colfer 73). This demon acts like a time machine that transports the travelers into the past, and acts like a beacon to guide the travelers back to the present (73). The fuel for time travel might be provided by magic, but this type of travel seems to obey the laws of physics: “the only way to see these creatures was to somehow build up enough momentum to travel faster than the speed of light and go back in time” (74). Not much later, No 1 explains that he cannot send Artemis to a specific location, because the act of putting the
time travel in 11/22/1963, magic (or a rabbit-hole) is not a valid premise for time travel: it needs to be accompanied by scientific information for it to be an acceptable form of time travel.
The characters are knowledgeable about the logical objections to time travel. For example, Artemis is able to identify and comment on common time paradoxes. He calls the logical time travel paradox as “the trusty time paradox” (Colfer 73, italicized by himself), and provides the well-known example of the projected consequences of killing one’s grandfather. He then says: “I believe, as Gorben and Berndt did, that any repercussions are already being felt. We can only change the future, not the past or present. If I go back, I have already been back” (Colfer 73). While Gorben and Berndt are two philosophers not known to the public,22 it is nevertheless very telling that Artemis
quotes from a paper on the matter of time travel – or at least, pretends to. Either way, the basis of his reasoning is well-founded as it is synonymous to the statement provided on changing the past in chapter 1 provided by Nichols (206), and Perszyk and Smith (5). Other characters seem to be aware of the dangers of time travel. Holly, for example, says: “Artemis, this is lunacy. Time travel was outlawed for a reason. The potential repercussions of the slightest interference could be catastrophic” (Colfer 73). Holly’s distress is a clear reference to the butterfly effect. The characters, though, do not seem to pay much heed to this fact as they change a lot of things in the past. In this universe one is also able to meet his past self. Colfer does not provide a detailed explanation to any of these paradoxes, but still makes sure that these do not cause obvious plot holes. For example: The older Artemis promises his younger version that he will not wipe his memory before the past-Artemis returns home. Thus, when the older past-Artemis meets his younger self, then he should already know what will happen. This creates a problem, as he does not remember meeting his older self. Colfer solves this issue by making No 1 accidentally wipe the minds of young Artemis and his butler.
22 The thoughts expressed by Gorben and Berndt reflect those voiced by philosophers, but they seem to be the only
The book is called The Time Paradox, and this refers to the causal loop that is central in this novel. Artemis comments: “it is the big time paradox. If I had done nothing, then nothing would have needed to be done” (Colfer 356). The lemur that Artemis needs is also the vessel that Opal Koboi, the villain, needs to attain evil magic powers. The Opal Koboi from the present has already been stopped by Artemis and is now being kept in jail. Therefore, the Opal Koboi that follows Artemis around has to be the one from eight years in the past. When Artemis succeeds in getting the lemur and travels back to the present, Opal Koboi follows him into the time stream. She is able to get out of this time stream just a little earlier and sets the whole story in motion. Indeed, it is Opal that infects Artemis his mother in the first place, thus creating the causal loop. Ironically, the fact that Artemis travels back to the past to save his mother, causes her to get sick in the first place.
Overall, Colfer shows that he knows quite a lot about time travel. The protagonists might use magic to travel through time, but Colfer provides some basic scientific information that validates magic time travel. It is highly unlikely that Colfer read scholarly papers on time travel and paradoxes to get the knowledge required for providing such descriptions. Instead, the author probably relies on commonly known scientific principles (e.g. going faster than the speed of light to travel through time) for his explanations. Also, Colfer talks about his interest in time travel in a W.A.R.P.: The
Reluctant Assassin. He refers to an increase of interesting SF on television: “Into this time of brain
5. Conclusion
Overall, analysis of the selected texts show a considerable change in the importance of physics and philosophy for time travel narratives of the last 120 years. Time travel was not linked to science in any way in the pre-Einstein stories, and the consequences such travel were not linked to philosophy. The stories from the mid-twentieth century by Heinlein and Bradbury show that physics and philosophical theories are very important to time travel for these narratives. The importance of these matters has increased because time travel itself is linked to science instead of fantasy. Additionally, the two authors refer to philosophical theories when they explain the problems that time travel causes. Modern time travel novels cannot ignore physics and philosophy, but the link to actual physics and philosophy has become weaker. Instead, famous time travel tropes from previous time travel fiction have become the most important source of information for the authors of time travel fiction.
Analysis of A Connecticut Yankee and Tourmaline’s Time Cheques confirms that physics and philosophy are not important for these time travel narratives. These stories did not require this kind of validation because the laws of physics did not allow people to think seriously about time travel: it was only a fantasy. Nothing forced the authors to spend any effort in explaining how their particular manner of time travel actually worked. Twain does not explain how his type of time travel works at all. Anstey, however, includes a reason why he does not provide an explanation: it was all a dream.
this is not because physics or philosophy demands repercussions. Peter Tourmaline is punished because his actions in the past are immoral and unbecoming of a bachelor in his position.
Chapter 3 shows that the works By His Bootstraps and A Sound of Thunder contain a scientific type of time travel, and that these narratives also contain time paradoxes. Heinlein and Bradbury did not need dreams or timeslips to rationalize time travel in their fiction, because physics and philosophy provided a scientific framework with which they could rationalize time travel. Indeed, Heinlein uses physics to describe his time machine, and to describe time travel mechanics in general. Bradbury, however, uses previous time travel fiction as his source. Bradbury simply used a well-known time machine trope that did not require any further explanation. In this context, time travel in Bradbury’s story is similar to that in the pre-Einstein stories as he used an accepted literary device to make time travel believable within the confines of the story.
Both authors show that they did their homework on paradoxes, but Heinlein provides a more detailed account of the main time paradox in his story. Heinlein’s story is focused describing the concept of a causal loop. As such, he does not only explicitly explain the paradox, but actually wrote a story that mimics the feeling of being in a causal loop. In doing so he shows a lot of knowledge about theories related to this paradox. Bradbury does not provide such elaborate explanations, but he does show that he read something about chaos theory when he describes the hypothetical chain reactions of causing a small change to the past.
Chapter 4 shows that the three modern time travel narratives Making History, 11/22/63, and
Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox contain a lot of references to time travel tropes, and that these
Secondly, paradoxes cannot be ignored and the authors can safely refer to famous tropes like the butterfly effect without explaining these extensively. Lastly, the authors share a similar way of talking about time travel and paradoxes that reflects the status of time travel in narratives.
All authors of modern time travel narratives feel obliged to connect time travel to physics in some manner. However, there is a noticeable difference between the amount of detail that Fry and Colfer provide to the information that King provides on time travel. Fry shows most detail with his descriptions of time travel mechanics and paradoxes in Making History. He is probably able to provide such information because he actually studied Physics at university. Next, Colfer shows that he is very knowledgeable about older SF tropes, and that he knows about physics when he refers to time travel or paradoxes. King admits that he does not know a lot about time travel, and that is reflected in the amount of detail he provides on time travel. Instead, he uses older tropes like the rabbit-hole successfully rationalize time travel within his narrative. Yet, even King cannot resist adding some pseudo-scientific explanation of time travel towards the end the book.
that time travel has caused. The travelers in Fry and King’s narratives both create a dystopian future by traveling through time, and Artemis Fowl creates the problem he has to solve by going back in time in the first place.
Lastly, the way that the authors refer to time-travel related matters reveals the current position of physics and philosophy in time travel narratives. That is, so much has been written about time travel that finding new angles is hard for authors of time travel fiction. Time travel and paradoxes are now always linked to science, but explaining these things is not needed anymore since the audience already knows a lot about time travel-related matters. Fry, King, and Colfer show that they are familiar with popular time travel tropes, and even comment on some famous time travel tropes. Fry comments on the absurd difficulty of the language in paper in theoretical physics. The other two authors provide slightly different comments, because they comment on time travel tropes; not on papers in theoretical physics. King expresses some dissatisfaction with the fact that the butterfly effect and the grandfather paradox are tropes that are conventionally added to time travel fiction. Colfer does not voice negative thoughts about time travel tropes, but the matter-of-fact manner in which the characters of both King and Colfer’s novels speak about these things suggest that these time travel tropes are part of our general knowledge, and that these might have been overused in time travel fiction. As such, the audience of time travel stories has lost interest in these well-known tropes. Authors of good time travel fiction recognize this and are forced to adapt accordingly.
