Time Travel 101; A Study of the Topic in Genre Science Fiction

Time Travel 101; A Study of the Topic in Genre Science Fiction
Jan 23, 2011
Colin Harvey
Suite 101

From early works by Lawrence Manning and John W. Campbell to recent stories from John Crowley to Michael Swanwick, time travel is a science fiction staple.

Time travel is a theme that dates back to ancient Hindu mythology such as the Revati, but this article will examine stories from genre science fiction, which dates from the launch of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in 1926. It will therefore specifically exclude novels such as Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969) whose authors denied any genre connection.

The earliest time travel stories were those in which individuals travelled into the future to observe the wonders awaiting humanity, such as in Lawrence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933), and John W. Campbell’s “Twilight” (1934) and its successor “Night” (1935). Latterly temporal observers have travelled into the past, in Connie Willis’ Hugo and Nebula winning novelette “Fire Watch”-where a future sent is sent back to observe The Blitz- and its sequels the novels Doomsday Book (1992) and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998). All three of Willis’ stories (among her many others) use as a major plot element the need to avoid tampering with the past, while observing it.
Vintage Season

An obverse from this is where the period visited is contemporary, most notably in stories by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. “Vintage Season” (1946) tells of the arrival of a group of mysterious strangers in an unnamed American city, in its last glorious golden season. “Mimsy Were The Borogoves “ (1943; filmed in 2007 as the Last Mimzy), tells of toys sent back from the future as part of an experiment, and the shocking effect they have on one ordinary American family. An equally grim fate befalls the doctor who finds “The Little Black Bag” in Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1950 novelette about a drunken doctor finding a set of future medical tools. All three stories were nominated for the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
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In 1977 John Varley’s landmark “Air Raid,” updated the classic theme, with snatch squads from the future infiltrating airline flights destined to crash. The novelization Millenium (1985) uses classic time-travel story titles as chapter titles, but unsurprisingly loses some of the short story’s intensity, since “Air Raid’s” headlong pace is surely impossible to maintain over novel length. Short stories involving people arriving from the past include David I. Masson’s “A Two Timer” (1967) in which a Jacobean mysteriously appears in the present.
Try and Change the Past

Soon after Campbell’s “Twilight” the greater demands of the genre determined that time-travelling protagonists would begin to affect changes in the time-stream, such as in L. Sprague de Camp’s classic Lest Darkness Falls, which in 1941 was expanded from that which first appeared in Unknown in 1939 to a full length novel. The novel ends with Padway clear that he has altered history – it is left to sequels to explore what has become an alternate history.

More subtle changes are sought by the scientists of Timescape byGregory Benford (1980) when humanity is faced with extinction as they seek to send tachyon-induced messages back to 1962 in an attempt to change history.

Perhaps the most succinct example of the dangers inherent is in “Try and Change the Past” by Fritz Leiber, a short story in his Changewar series, of which more later.
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The second category of such time travel stories is where the time traveller seeks to actually maintain their (and by implication, our) original past. Sometimes, as in Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1966), the traveller will apparently succeed, often with tragic personal consequences.
The Man Who Walked Home

Time travel stories where the protagonist attempts to change the future are rarer. In Wilson Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970), a series of visits to the future lead to the collapse of that timeline due to a series of disastrous misuses of knowledge of that future.

James Tiptree, Jr. wrote two classic stories which both involved time travel into the future. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) a crew of astronauts are catapulted into a future in which men have died out, and the remaining (female) population live in a Utopian society. Tiptree was less interested in the time travel than in the sociological effects of the men’s return. However a more classic approach came with “The Man Who Walked Home,” (1972) in which a stranded temponaut tries to return home – with poignant results.
Paradoxes

One of the favourite devices in genre SF involve the so-called Grandfather Paradox, in which the time traveller changes history, most notably in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), sometimes -as in Robert Silverberg’s blackly comic Up the Line (1969)- setting out to avoid ceasing to exist.

Two of the most convoluted paradox stories were written by Robert A Heinlein: “By His Bootstraps” in 1941 was succeeded by “--All You Zombies—“ in 1959. In both Heinlein negates the concept of free will by invoking predestination – that in creating a paradox, the time travellers are actually fulfilling their destiny. These concepts were pushed to the very limit by Robert Silverberg in “Many Mansions” (1973).
Changewar

With such preoccupation with altering time, it seemed inevitable that writers would write one or more stories involving agencies seeking to maintain the time stream. Poul Anderson is one such example of this, with his “Time Patrol” series, starting in 1955. By contrast, Fritz Leiber’s Changewar series (1983) which includes The Big Time (1958), posited a war raging throughout time by two opposing forces, so vast that individuals don’t know who or what they’re fighting for.

Interesting updates on this theme include John Crowley’s World Fantasy Award winning “Great Work of Time” featuring a British Empire that never falls, and Michael Swanwick’s “Legions in Time.”

It's proving harder and harder for contemporary writers to come up with new twists on classic themes, but authors like Crowley and Swanwick prove that it's possible, while classic stories tend to be less dated.

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