I've been doing a lot of short comics stories lately - usually about 5 pages, although some are quite a bit longer. What I've realized is that certain genres are pretty tough nuts to crack, if you really want to do them right.
One of the most difficult is the Time Travel story.
Here's the problem: any story that involves time travel faces what I call "existential overload": if, say, an aspect of history can be changed (i.e., killing Hitler), then why not all of them? Why not a slurry of fanatical time-changers going back and changing things willy-nilly? How would this be regulated, except by a quasi-omnipotent order of "Watchers" who somehow ensure that time runs "correctly", whatever "correctly" means? Will only the time-changers know that history - and therefore existence - has been radically altered, or will everyone on earth retain their memories even when reality slips into a different mode?
I ask all these questions because it's really, really hard to make a "small" time-travel story, unless you have only one person in the whole world with a time machine. As we know, it'd be next to impossible to keep such a device a secret; your only chance for a story would involve espionage as others attempt to get their hands on the gizmo. This would lead to an arms-race, where nobody wants to fire the first shot; at best, the time machine would be used once or twice, before a kind of detente set in. This is assuming that memory isn't overwritten by a change in history. But what if the device is stolen before it's ever used? Well, why not assassinate the lead scientist before he figures out the formula? Why not go back and land an army to prevent the country that made the device from ever existing? But then wouldn't your time machine disappear, since the country that spawned the scientist that built the device in the first place would cease to exist...?
I guess I just wrote a whole plot right there. Could be interesting. But I don't like reducto ad absurdum, "It's all turtles all the way down"-type stories - they could be fun for a while, but without some kind of boundary, your story just goes all over the place. And anyway, the whole kill-your-grandfather scenario began and ended with Back to the Future; the movie version of Timeline did it too, basically ending up with Back to the Future with Knights (BTW, the book version was written just like a movie, and its whole point was that history could not be altered...don't get me started on Hollywood laziness).
I liked Crichton's model of time travel: essentially, the time-traveler teleported by warping spacetime on a quantum level in order to arrive in the past (I'd need to read it again, but that's the essence of it). This established the boundaries of the concept: not only was accessing the past difficult, but there was the problem of "transcription errors": every time you teleported, your DNA was messed up slightly. So you could only time-travel once or twice. Also, through some narrative finagling I'm still not clear on, history is somehow "locked in": the characters could change some details, but not the thrust of history. Big events always occurred regardless of small changes. Essentially, you could kill Hitler, but the Third Reich would still exist - and the Holocaust would still happen.
There's another theory, one which I like more than the "linear" model: the "infinite universe" concept. Basically, you can't actually travel in time; the time stream is locked in your particular universe. However, you can jump between parallel universes, where time moves more slowly or more quickly than in your base universe. Because every possible occurrence is occurring somewhere, all you have to do is pick the correct universe in order to experience the past or the future.
Naturally, this begs the question: how do you "pick" the right universe? Probably through a lot of experimentation, in order to find the correct probability amplitude of the universe you need to access. In the "Infinite Universe" hypothesis, we take the assumption that particles exist only as probability waves until they are locked in place by "observation". In our universe, the theory goes, every particle appears in a particular random spot...but in the next universe over, it appeared in a slightly different spot...and on and on. There are as many universes as are needed to satisfy every probability of a particular particle waveform coalescing in a particular spot, plus another set for each group of particles, all the way up to people, places, and things...which is essentially infinite.
Therefore, it follows that somewhere, in some other universe, our present lines up with a segment of time that corresponds to our past. It's simply a matter of jumping over there. (My grasp of quantum mechanics is admittedly pretty sketchy...I'm trying to use it for certain plot devices, hopefully with a little more realism than most...anyway, scientists always scoff at cool Sci-Fi ideas, so why worry?)
Of course this begs another question: if we can mess with other universes' timelines without any consequence to our own, will we? But what's the point of trying to change a history we'll never experience? Maybe some psychopath will try to change another universe's timeline just for kicks and giggles - like Chainsawsuit.com's Time Ruiner - but there's not much of a story there. And how would a random psychopath acquire the technology to do so?
All this cogitating is leading pretty much nowhere, in terms of figuring out my storyline; there's a slew of limits I need to put in place before the story can work, without it being riddled with plot-holes. If all else fails, I'll just avoid the obvious questions ("Why didn't he just...?") and blunder on through. Could be a cool story anyway, even if it all falls apart.
Rick Out!
One of the most difficult is the Time Travel story.
Here's the problem: any story that involves time travel faces what I call "existential overload": if, say, an aspect of history can be changed (i.e., killing Hitler), then why not all of them? Why not a slurry of fanatical time-changers going back and changing things willy-nilly? How would this be regulated, except by a quasi-omnipotent order of "Watchers" who somehow ensure that time runs "correctly", whatever "correctly" means? Will only the time-changers know that history - and therefore existence - has been radically altered, or will everyone on earth retain their memories even when reality slips into a different mode?
I ask all these questions because it's really, really hard to make a "small" time-travel story, unless you have only one person in the whole world with a time machine. As we know, it'd be next to impossible to keep such a device a secret; your only chance for a story would involve espionage as others attempt to get their hands on the gizmo. This would lead to an arms-race, where nobody wants to fire the first shot; at best, the time machine would be used once or twice, before a kind of detente set in. This is assuming that memory isn't overwritten by a change in history. But what if the device is stolen before it's ever used? Well, why not assassinate the lead scientist before he figures out the formula? Why not go back and land an army to prevent the country that made the device from ever existing? But then wouldn't your time machine disappear, since the country that spawned the scientist that built the device in the first place would cease to exist...?
I guess I just wrote a whole plot right there. Could be interesting. But I don't like reducto ad absurdum, "It's all turtles all the way down"-type stories - they could be fun for a while, but without some kind of boundary, your story just goes all over the place. And anyway, the whole kill-your-grandfather scenario began and ended with Back to the Future; the movie version of Timeline did it too, basically ending up with Back to the Future with Knights (BTW, the book version was written just like a movie, and its whole point was that history could not be altered...don't get me started on Hollywood laziness).
I liked Crichton's model of time travel: essentially, the time-traveler teleported by warping spacetime on a quantum level in order to arrive in the past (I'd need to read it again, but that's the essence of it). This established the boundaries of the concept: not only was accessing the past difficult, but there was the problem of "transcription errors": every time you teleported, your DNA was messed up slightly. So you could only time-travel once or twice. Also, through some narrative finagling I'm still not clear on, history is somehow "locked in": the characters could change some details, but not the thrust of history. Big events always occurred regardless of small changes. Essentially, you could kill Hitler, but the Third Reich would still exist - and the Holocaust would still happen.
There's another theory, one which I like more than the "linear" model: the "infinite universe" concept. Basically, you can't actually travel in time; the time stream is locked in your particular universe. However, you can jump between parallel universes, where time moves more slowly or more quickly than in your base universe. Because every possible occurrence is occurring somewhere, all you have to do is pick the correct universe in order to experience the past or the future.
Naturally, this begs the question: how do you "pick" the right universe? Probably through a lot of experimentation, in order to find the correct probability amplitude of the universe you need to access. In the "Infinite Universe" hypothesis, we take the assumption that particles exist only as probability waves until they are locked in place by "observation". In our universe, the theory goes, every particle appears in a particular random spot...but in the next universe over, it appeared in a slightly different spot...and on and on. There are as many universes as are needed to satisfy every probability of a particular particle waveform coalescing in a particular spot, plus another set for each group of particles, all the way up to people, places, and things...which is essentially infinite.
Therefore, it follows that somewhere, in some other universe, our present lines up with a segment of time that corresponds to our past. It's simply a matter of jumping over there. (My grasp of quantum mechanics is admittedly pretty sketchy...I'm trying to use it for certain plot devices, hopefully with a little more realism than most...anyway, scientists always scoff at cool Sci-Fi ideas, so why worry?)
Of course this begs another question: if we can mess with other universes' timelines without any consequence to our own, will we? But what's the point of trying to change a history we'll never experience? Maybe some psychopath will try to change another universe's timeline just for kicks and giggles - like Chainsawsuit.com's Time Ruiner - but there's not much of a story there. And how would a random psychopath acquire the technology to do so?
All this cogitating is leading pretty much nowhere, in terms of figuring out my storyline; there's a slew of limits I need to put in place before the story can work, without it being riddled with plot-holes. If all else fails, I'll just avoid the obvious questions ("Why didn't he just...?") and blunder on through. Could be a cool story anyway, even if it all falls apart.
Rick Out!
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