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

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!