“Pretty good book, quick read, all that.
The main thing I wanted to talk about is time travel because I really do want to talk about what I want to talk about. That would make a great chorus for a pop country song.
What’s cool about Connie Willis is that, for my money, she handles time travel well. It’s not explained in this story, but I had a kindly office mate explain to me that Connie Willis’ other books that take place in the same universe involve something called “slippage.” Slippage is the thing that keeps you from going back in time and killing Hitler, for example. If you tried to go back in time to change a large historical event, you would find that your ability to travel accurately, to an exact time or place, would be limited. The larger your potential for changing history, the more time keeps you from placing yourself accurately.
I like that. It’s a pretty decent explanation for the way in which time travel can still work in a narrative without answering the question of why someone didn’t kill Hitler, which is really the ultimate time travel question (The Hitler Paradox, as I like to call it).
I’ve been thinking a lot about time travel narratives lately. At first I thought that the only way time travel narratives work was in comedies, such as Back to the Future. But that’s not entirely true because it can also work in things like 12 Monkeys or (on a self-contained level) Memento.
So what is it that makes a time travel narrative work, if it’s not about theme?
The answer, as far as I can tell, is that the time travel is the path the writer takes in order to talk about something that he or she is passionate about. In other words, Connie Willis uses time travel, but really it’s mostly about the fact that she wants to write about the Blitz. Additionally, the beauty of time travel is that you can write about something like the Blitz from a modern perspective, which means that you can discuss it while still being respectful of it.
Because (as I understand it) characters are not allowed to time travel backwards within their own lifespans, the other problem of time travel is dealt with as well. You know, that whole thing where you run into yourself and then you explode or something? I call it the Hitler Paradox II, not because it has anything to do with Hitler but because I name all my time travel paradoxes that way just so I can index them properly.
And if you think about it, the idea of traveling back to see your own young self makes no sense.
Normally, it goes one of two ways:
Alpha Pete travels back in time. He runs into his young self (who is supposed to also be Alpha Pete) and then changes time somehow.
That doesn’t make sense because what has happened there is, essentially, cloning. Because the universe now exists in such a way that there are TWO Alpha Petes, yet the only process that occurred was time travel, not cloning. So rather than being one consciousness that is Alpha Pete, there are two iterations of Alpha Pete. But why?
Okay, here’s the other common scenario:
Alpha Pete travels back in time. He is wearing a red sweater. He sees his young self (Beta Pete). This fulfills a pattern that Alpha Pete remembers from his childhood (when he was Beta Pete), a time when a mysterious stranger in a red sweater (Alpha Pete) showed up.
This works a little better for me, although if this is the case time travel is very pointless because once young Beta Pete sees grown Alpha Pete, in this scenario, this event will ALWAYS happen for Petes Charlie through Zebra and on and on. Not only that, but it will have always happened in the past as well. In other words, this event is replicated infinitely in the “past” and “future” and is therefore kind of silly and pointless.
Anyway, time travel rant over, thanks to Connie Willis for figuring a decent workaround that’s good enough to satisfy, yet nebulous enough that it’s not fully explained. Because if you ask me, fully-explained science fiction is not only boring, it’s not really science fiction anymore. It’s just a fictionalized textbook.”