Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "time-travel"

Imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien had skipped writing The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or Fellowship of the Ring entirely, and had fast-forwarded right to the Two Towers? And he had no idea what the One Ring even was or what the hobbits were doing with it? And then Eldarion travelled back in time to help them out and tell them of some important bits they could never have known without him at all? Also he already helped kick Gollum into Mt. Doom and he's on the way to give a hand to Bilbo on his way to the Lonely Mountain as well, and then maybe going all the way back to Túrin Turambar and Fëanor as well, except obviously Tolkien is yet to write any of these...

That's kind of like what I'm doing right now. Time travel stuff, involving going farther and farther back in time, except I started writing right from the middle - neither from the chronological beginning, nor from the time traveler's own future home. I think I have a pretty good idea on where the story is going from here, though.

Time travel stories tend to make the entire thing pretty complex: either you'll have to be careful about everything you do lest you accidentally change something really important and alter the lives and memories of everyone you ever knew, essentially making them entirely different people...



...or you're plain unable to change anything at all, the fate of the universe having already been sealed and everything you do failing by default. At best, you already changed the past, everything you do having been taken into account all along. At worst, trying to muck things up results in time paradoxes that can wipe out the universe or send creatures outside of time to fix it and kill you.



So all in all it seems like a pretty raw deal, where all you can do is observe - trying anything more than that will always bite you in the arse - but really I see it as far more simple and also somewhat optimistic, and it's the rule I'm following in the time travel story I write right now, as well as in any time travel story by me.

Here's the essential question: how do you ever know you changed anything, or to what extent? How can you tell what of the present-day situation is thanks to you, and what would've come to be anyway? How much can any of us even begin to comprehend of the tangled mess of time and causality, of events leading to others, and of blame and consequences?

And since we can't possibly know, what harm could we do in the end?

It follows the Already Changed The Past the closest, I suppose, except that you're nearly always allowed to freely choose what to do, since the future you know will not change either way. Unless you start to really, deliberately muck up with things you know didn't go this way, everything will be fine... and even if you do, there's good odds the universe will manage to fix its way somehow anyway.

Let's take an example: one of the very first things people tend to think about, when talking about changing the past for the better, is killing Adolf Hitler. This... almost assuredly wouldn't work, because we all know when and how he died. You can't kill him when he was a child, because that's not how it went and you know it.

But it doesn't mean you couldn't help. Nothing would stop you from infiltrating the Nazi-occupied Europe and helping with the resistance, saving lives, doing the little things you can. After all, it's almost certain that you didn't already know every resistance fighter and every little city skirmish and prison break! Once you return to your time (assuming you survive at all), you could finally read on the subject and see if you could find yourself in the annals of history!

Hmm... this could make for a pretty good historical fiction story, actually. A guy goes back in time to kill Hitler, realizes it doesn't work, but still finds ways to put his future technology and knowledge to a good use. Nazis and WWII really are overused, though, so maybe set it to another time and place, one tragically underused in fiction, and one of which far less material exists so that I wouldn't need to do so much research... see, it works for the convenience of the writer too! The less stuff there already is to be known, the more free I am to do whatever I want!

A proper time travel story needs a Constant: something that exists in every time - lasting and permanent - to remind the reader that they're still in the same place, just at different times. Great many things change in time travel, but not everything: some things need to stay the same too.

Otherwise it might as well be the same time but a different place: the whole notion of time travel starts to crumble.



I don't have a constant right now. This is a problem.

Both of my books so far have been pretty long, but I've gotten around to writing a few short stories as well, as I think I may have mentioned. Here's one.



Last Gasp tells the tale of the last and the only planet in the universe, wherein some people make a startling discovery and begin to see a way to escape the terrible cold end of their dying sun.

It should be available for free from tomorrow on. Maybe you can give it a read then. It's quite a bit shorter.

A significant chunk of my plotting lately has involved one of the main characters working to undo a Bad Thing - a dramatic, tragic twist that made things worse for absolutely everybody. Looking at how a lot of fiction has dealt with similar, I've summed it up about so: A plot development, and cancelling it, should hold equal narrative weight.



Picture a pendulum (sharp edge and a bound victim optional). To write a dramatic plot event - demise, defeat, twist, even triumph - is to lift the pendulum high up with your hand. To later undo this event - raise the dead, bring back the evil empire, otherwise return to the status quo - is to let go. Then what does the pendulum do? It swings all the way to the other side, almost as high as you brought it in the first place. It takes an appropriate time and effort to get done, holds the equal weight and force to how it once was, and its consequences will be felt for a long while.

None of this should need any saying, I don't think. It's one of those unspoken rules that most of us already know about, at least subconsciously - may even have written down in some book somewhere that I've never read. When something happens, it sticks.

And yet - it's much too common for this rule to be broken, especially in comic books and any other long-runners. Characters are brought back from the dead all the time. No prison ever holds the bad guy. Both heroes and villains switch sides... but only briefly. Romances and love struggles, that took an entire movie or book to go through, are brought back to null before the sequel so that the hero would be free to romance a new girl. The Spellplague. The First Order. Return of Bhaal. This thing:



Great twists and whammy plot events that change everything... only to be brought back to normal with little to no fanfare, usually because status quo is (or feels like) the only thing that sells, the comfortable and familiar that the fans have learned to know and love. The pendulum has been brought high and far - but it is only an illusion, because when it comes down, it does not shift to the other side at all... meaning, by the laws of force and gravity, it could never have gone very high to begin with! Such a cheap resolution undermines all the drama and stakes that were involved in the first place.

Why do these heroes even care if someone dies? Why do they try to put the villains away, knowing it doesn't stick? Why struggle for change, when nothing ever can? What is the point?



This is almost assuredly the biggest reason to why I was always so off-put by the new Star Wars trilogy. The original trilogy represented many years' worth of struggles, of triumphs and defeats, of pain and effort, for so many characters. The Empire was brought low with the blood and sweat and tears of all these heroes, these jedi knights and smugglers and rebels working together, many dead or dismembered in the process. The victory was earned, and it felt that things were getting better now.

Only for the new trilogy to completely pull the rug from underneath them. Han and Leia spent three movies getting together, only for them to break up again and their child turned to a villain. Luke was to raise the Jedi Order from the ashes, only to have completely brought it to ruin. Anakin redeemed himself by destroying the evil Emperor, only for him to have just popped back up in some cop-out. And all of this was done off-screen: if it had followed the rule, and spent a whole trilogy or two plotting this out and slowly bringing everything back to hell, it might have been good, great even - but no, none of that. Shame on all of them.

Done well, undoing something is a springboard for new and wild adventures - which is what I'm doing. I did not start on this journey just to return things how they were, because I regret having the tragedy happen in the first place or because some fans hated it; I went on to it because the characters themselves would like to get it fixed, and I'm getting some good ideas on how to do that. I'm still a bit of two minds on whether to go ahead with it at all, or to have them live with their mistakes and head on into the future with the baggage... whatever creates the best drama and the best new story hooks, I suspect.

So how would I do it? How to undo a tragedy without making it meaningless?

Time travel.



But that's the easy bit. It's already been established as possible in the setting, if difficult, with people nearby to help in the matter. The real rub of the matter is changing what happened without actually changing it - to craft an illusion where what he at first thought to have happened, did not happen at all. This is the only way to avoid time paradoxes.

To do that, he needs a powerful artifact, and to find such an artifact he will need to request one from a cosmic entity. Even invoking this entity is enough to shatter the cosmos a little, form a breach between countless alternate realities - alternate versions of him, each of them having walked different paths in life, each of them under different difficulties, each of them wishing for something entirely different.

And one of them is evil. And what he wishes is for a way to traverse between dimensions, so that he might steal the wishes of all the other versions of himself. The rest of them will, therefore, have to team up in order to do battle with this one evil version of themselves.



I think I'm digressing from the original point a little bit, now. So yeah. Pendulums. Remember them.