Edward Aubry
I was actually working on two different time travel stories for a while before I realized they were actually the same story told from two different angles.
One was a reaction to Time Traveler's Wife. That’s a great book, but I came away from it vaguely troubled by the deterministic nature of that world. She goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it is impossible to change past events, to the point where when the characters find out there is a terrible thing coming, there is nothing they can do but wait for it to happen. Downer. I wanted to write a story in which every act of time travel permanently and irrevocably alters the past, but only the traveler is aware of it. Kind of like Back to the Future, but with less slapstick.
The other story was about someone using time travel for an unconventional purpose. Heroes want to use time travel to fix terrible things in the past, and villains want to use it for power and personal gain on large scales. I wanted to talk about what an ordinary, flawed person would do, if given a chance, to use time travel for something very small and very personal, and how that could still have catastrophic consequences.
It took me the better part of a year batting these ideas around separately before I realized they were the exact same story. After that it cascaded, and the story came to me more quickly than I could write it down. It took me two months to write the first draft, which is faster than anything else I’ve done.
One was a reaction to Time Traveler's Wife. That’s a great book, but I came away from it vaguely troubled by the deterministic nature of that world. She goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it is impossible to change past events, to the point where when the characters find out there is a terrible thing coming, there is nothing they can do but wait for it to happen. Downer. I wanted to write a story in which every act of time travel permanently and irrevocably alters the past, but only the traveler is aware of it. Kind of like Back to the Future, but with less slapstick.
The other story was about someone using time travel for an unconventional purpose. Heroes want to use time travel to fix terrible things in the past, and villains want to use it for power and personal gain on large scales. I wanted to talk about what an ordinary, flawed person would do, if given a chance, to use time travel for something very small and very personal, and how that could still have catastrophic consequences.
It took me the better part of a year batting these ideas around separately before I realized they were the exact same story. After that it cascaded, and the story came to me more quickly than I could write it down. It took me two months to write the first draft, which is faster than anything else I’ve done.
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