Time travel in fiction
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Time travel is a common theme in fiction, mainly since the late 19th century, and has been depicted in a variety of media, such as literature, television, film, and advertisements.[1][2]
The concept of time travel by mechanical means was popularized in H. G. Wells' 1895 story, The Time Machine.[3][4] In general, time travel stories focus on the consequences of traveling into the past or the future.[3][5][6] The central premise for these stories often involves changing history, either intentionally or by accident, and the ways by which altering the past changes the future and creates an altered present or future for the time traveler upon their return home.[3][6] In other instances, the premise is that the past cannot be changed or that the future is predetermined, and the protagonist's actions turn out to be either inconsequential or intrinsic to events as they originally unfolded.[7] Some stories focus solely on the paradoxes and alternate timelines that come with time travel, rather than time traveling itself.[5] They often provide some sort of social commentary, as time travel provides a "necessary distancing effect" that allows science fiction to address contemporary issues in metaphorical ways.[8]
Mechanisms
Time travel in modern fiction is sometimes achieved by space and time warps, stemming from the scientific theory of general relativity.[9] Stories from antiquity often featured time travel into the future through a time slip brought on by traveling or sleeping,[10] or in other cases, time travel into the past through supernatural means, for example brought on by angels or spirits.[4][11]
Time slip
A time slip is a plot device in fantasy and science fiction in which a person, or group of people, seem to travel through time by unknown means.[12][13] The idea of a time slip has been used in 19th century fantasy, an early example being Washington Irving's 1819 Rip Van Winkle, where the mechanism of time travel is an extraordinarily long sleep.[14] Mark Twain's 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court had considerable influence on later writers.[15] The first novel to include both travel to the past and travel to the future and return to the present is the Charles Dickens 1843 novel A Christmas Carol.[citation needed]
Time slip is one of the main plot devices of time travel stories, another being a time machine. The difference is that in time slip stories, the protagonist typically has no control and no understanding of the process (which is often never explained at all) and is either left marooned in a past or future time and must make the best of it, or is eventually returned by a process as unpredictable and uncontrolled as the journey out.[16] The plot device is also popular in children's literature.[17][18] The 2011 film, Midnight in Paris similarly presents time travel as occurring without an explained mechanism, as the director "eschews a 'realist' internal logic that might explain the time travel, while also foregoing experimental time Distortion techniques, in favor of straightforward editing and a fantastical narrative set-up".[19]
Communication from the future
In literature,
A newspaper from the future can be a fictional edition of a real newspaper, or an entirely fictional newspaper.
A communication from the future raises questions about the ability of humans to control their destiny.[1]: 165 The visual novel Steins;Gate features characters sending short text messages backwards in time to avert disaster, only to find their problems are exacerbated due to not knowing how individuals in the past will actually utilize the information.[24][25][26]
Precognition
The protagonist of the short story
Time loop
A "time loop" or "temporal loop" is a
Experiencing time in reverse
In some media, certain characters are presented as moving through time backwards. This is a very old concept, with some accounts asserting that English mythological figure Merlin lived backwards, and appeared to be able to prophesy the future because for him it was a memory. This tradition has been reflected in certain modern fictional accounts of the character.[33] In the Piers Anthony book Bearing an Hourglass, the second of eight books in the Incarnations of Immortality series, the character of Norton becomes the incarnation of Time and continues his life living backwards in time.[34] The 2016 film Doctor Strange has the character use the Time Stone, one of the Infinity Stones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to reverse time, experiencing time backwards while so doing.[35][page needed]
In the film Tenet, characters time travel without jumping back, but by experiencing past reality in reverse, and at the same speed, after going through a 'turnstile' device and until they revert back to normal time flow by going through such a device again.[36] In the meantime, two versions of the time traveller coexist (and must not meet, lest they mutually destruct): the one that had been 'traveling forward' (existing normally) until entering a turnstile and the one traveling backward from the turnstile.[citation needed] The laws of thermodynamics are reversed for time traveling people and objects, so that for example backward travel requires the use of a respirator. Objects left behind by time travellers obey 'reverse thermodynamics;' for example, bullets shot or even simply deposited while traveling backward fly back into (forward traveling) guns.[citation needed]
Record
Protagonists do not travel in time but perceive other times through a record. Depending on the technology, they can minimally consult the record or maximally interact with it as a simulated reality that can deviate causally from the original timeline from the point of interaction. A record can be consulted multiple times, thus providing a time loop mechanism.[citation needed]
Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle features books reporting on an alternate timeline. The TV series transposes the mechanism of the books to newsreels. Incidentally, the alternate timeline is the historic timeline, as opposed to the alternate history of the works, so that the records also function as meta-references to the timeline experienced by the authors and the consumers of the works.[citation needed]
The plot of the film
Themes
Time paradox
The idea of changing the past is logically
The possibility of characters inadvertently or intentionally changing the past gave rise to the idea of "time police", people tasked with preventing such changes from occurring by themselves engaging in time travel to rectify such changes.[39]
Alternative future, history, timelines, and dimensions
An alternative future or alternate future is a possible future that never comes to pass, typically when someone travels back into the past and alters it so that the events of the alternative future cannot occur,[40] or when a communication from the future to the past effected a change that alters the future.[1]: 165 Alternative histories may exist "side by side", with the time traveller actually arriving at different dimensions as he changes time.[41]
Butterfly effect
The
The butterfly effect has found its way into popular imagination. For example, in Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, the killing of a single insect millions of years in the past drastically changes the world, and in the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect, the protagonist's small changes to his past results in extreme changes.[43]
Time tourism
A "distinct subgenre" of stories explore time travel as a means of tourism,
Time war
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes a time war as a fictional war that is "fought across time, usually with each side knowingly using time travel ... in an attempt to establish the ascendancy of one or another version of history". Time wars are also known as "change wars" and "temporal wars".[45] Examples include Clifford D. Simak's 1951 Time and Again, Russell T Davies' 2005 revival of Doctor Who,[46] Barrington J. Bayley's 1974 The Fall of Chronopolis, and Matthew Costello's 1990 Time of the Fox.[1]: 267
Ghost story
Researcher Barbara Bronlow wrote that traditional
See also
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-387985718.
- ISBN 9781421401201.
- ^ a b c Sterling, Bruce (3 May 2016). "Science fiction - Time travel". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 28 December 2017.
- ^ ISBN 9781615304943.
- ^ a b Sterling, Bruce (3 May 2016). "Science fiction - Time travel". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 28 December 2017.
- ^ a b Flood, Alison (23 September 2011). "Time travel in fiction: why authors return to it time and time again". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 November 2015.
- ^ charliejane (31 January 2008). "Can You Escape Your Fate? Science Fiction Has The Answer!". io9. Retrieved 22 February 2020.
- ISBN 978-0-231501842. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
[...] the time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present.
- ^ Stephen Hawking (1999). "Space and Time Warps". Retrieved 20 February 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-521-88665-9.
- ISBN 978-0-820309323.
- ^ Anders, Charlie Jane (12 June 2009). "Timeslip romance". io9. Retrieved 27 August 2015.
- ISBN 978-0-853236184. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
- ^ Lee, Maggie (12 April 2016). "Film Review: 'A Bride for Rip Van Winkle'". Variety. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
- ISBN 9781107493735. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
- ISBN 9781434403209. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-313324833.
- S2CID 145407419. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
- ISBN 9781476620084.
- ^ Ackerman, Forrest J. (1973). Best Science Fiction for 1973. Ace Books. p. 36.
- ^ "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper". Gutenberg.net.au. 10 November 1971. Retrieved 24 December 2015.
- ISBN 978-1-55783-269-6.
- ^ Jonsson, Gunnar (29 June 2006). "Fp [Folkpartiet] satsar på löpsedlar som valaffischer" [FP [The People's Party] focuses on headlines as election posters]. Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish). Retrieved 9 September 2015.
- ^ 秋葉原に時間の扉が開かれる 『シュタインズ・ゲート』 [The gate of time can be opened at Akihabara, "Steins;Gate"] (in Japanese). Famitsu. 13 June 2009. Archived from the original on 21 October 2012. Retrieved 1 November 2009.
- ^ Ishii, Senji (15 October 2009). 時間という禁断のテーマに挑んだ本格派ノベルゲーム『シュタインズ・ゲート』インプレッション [Impressions of "Steins;Gate", a novel game about the forbidden topic of time] (in Japanese). Famitsu. Archived from the original on 13 November 2009. Retrieved 7 November 2009.
- ^ "Steins;Gate". Famitsu (in Japanese). Enterbrain. June 2009. p. 231.
- PMID 25176614.
- S2CID 143485859. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-198240112.
- ^ ISBN 9781439168486.
- ^ a b c Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. "Time Loop". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved 2015-10-18.
- ISBN 978-0-786478071.
- ISBN 1135583404.
- ^ Amazing Science Fiction Stories. 58: 15. 1984.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ Stolworthy, Jacob (27 August 2020). "The crucial Tenet scene that reveals true meaning of movie's title". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2022-05-07. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
- ^ Langford, David. "Time Paradoxes". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved 30 November 2015.
- ^ Swartz, Norman (October 31, 1993). "Time Travel: Visiting the Past". Norman Swartz - Biography. Simon Fraser University. Retrieved February 20, 2016.
- ^ ISBN 0415974607.
- ISBN 978-0-195305678. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
- ^ "Journeys in Space and Time". Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 8. November 16, 1980. Event occurs at 36 minute mark. PBS.
- .
- ^ Peter Dizikes (June 8, 2008). "The meaning of the butterfly". Boston Globe. Retrieved May 31, 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-765305343.
- ^ Langford, David. "Changewar". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved November 17, 2015.
- ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-15.
- ^ Bronlow, Barbara H. Petrovna, Natalia; Cougland, George C.; Ramirez, Juan Mario (eds.). Workshop on the Ongoing Impact of Ancient Myth on Contemporary Culture: 146–148.
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Further reading
- ISBN 978-0-307908797.
- ISBN 978-0-387985718.
- Wasserman, Ryan (2018). Paradoxes of Time Travel. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-879333-5.
External links
- Timelinks - the big list of time travel video, film, and television - over 700 films and television programs featuring time travel.
- ITTDB - the Internet Time Travel Database.
- Andy's Anachronisms - Exploring the themes of time travel and alternate universes in literature and entertainment.