Time Travel (and why I don’t use it in my novels)

If a traveler goes back in time to prevent a catastrophic event, can he return to his time—either via time travel technology (presumably the tech he used to go back) or the slow passage of hours, days, years…?

For me, the answer is NO.

Before I explain my own reasoning on this particularly popular Sci Fi trope, let me acknowledge that there are a lot of awesome books/TV shows/video games that explore these ‘what if’ scenarios, and some of them do a fairly decent job of conducting the thought experiment of ‘what would we do differently if we could go back in time and change it?’ while others completely miss the mark, leaving their viewers/readers with more questions than they began with.

Let’s face it—the time travel trope is usually used as a story-telling device to express very few, or just one, human emotion on the perception of cause and effect: guilt, regret, fear. I’m not saying that’s true for every story, but it seems to me that those motivations pop up more often than any others. Guilt over having allowed a tragedy, or having failed to prevent said tragedy. Regret over how an individual (or a nation) handled a situation that turned out to be a pivotal moment in history. Fear that the catastrophe will be so great that humankind will never recover from it. (Why yes, I have just finished Travelers, always, always think of Back to the Future and The Time Machine, and don’t get me started on Doctor Who unless you’ve got hours to block out of your schedule…)

Most of the time, the time travel trope presents humanity, either collectively or as an individual, attempting to change events that led to death, suffering, instability, etc, and that motivation in and of itself is fine. Admirable. But in so many instances, this leaves the reader in the position of determining which decision is ‘right’ and which is ‘wrong’. On the surface, the answer seems clear, but if you peel a few layers back, you may see something you weren’t expecting. No one would say it would be good to allow events to proceed that lead to a deletion of half of the population of the physical universe, but in the end they also agreed that simply turning back time to prevent the snap in the first place would not be an acceptable alternative. Yes, those people Thanos blipped out of existence deserved to be brought back, but all the children born after that event would cease to exist if a simple rewind was the solution. Even if those children could be guaranteed to be born (which is impossible), they wouldn’t be the same people, having lived different lives.

And who would remember the old timeline? Would the person traveling somehow retain knowledge of both timelines, or would their knowledge of their original timeline be overwritten? If it was, would they have even had the motivation to go back in time in the first place, or would that have become unnecessary? Would they exist at all, or would they fade away one body part at a time while strumming a guitar at a high school prom?

I think we can all agree that, while not a scientific analysis of the situation presented in The Time Machine, Über-Morlock did have a point when he finally answered Alexander’s question, “You are the inescapable result of your tragedy, just as I am the inescapable result of you.” He wasn’t saying that Alexander was destined to build the time machine, but had his fiancé, Emma, not died, he might never have felt the motivation to build it at all. The choices he made were a direct result of something that had ALREADY happened. Every moment that we step into has the potential for infinite outcomes depending on millions of little choices, as well as a googolplex of controlled/uncontrolled/anticipated/unforeseen/likely/impossible factors.

In other words: Anything can happen, but nothing can un-happen.

The main reason I choose to leave time travel, as well as time dilation, temporal manipulation out of my novels is because the heart of my stories explores the human condition on an emotional level in the present—How does one react to a childhood of trauma? Unfathomable losses? Pain so great that it feels like opening your heart to let someone else in would shatter it? And instead of focusing on the past, how does one move forward?

The FMC in my first trilogy must learn to let others into her heart, overcome the pain of decades of captivity, find her unique power, and face her abuser.

The FMC in my second trilogy must bridge the gap between the present recovering House Grey and the man responsible for her family’s near-extinction, while acknowledging that losses on both sides are permanent.

The FMC in my third trilogy is traumatized by being the perceived cause of the death of her entire family, and refuses to return home even after being told they actually survived, because she knows she will return changed.

The FMC in my fourth trilogy learns secrets of her past that physically and fundamentally change who she is, and suffers losses that simply cannot be undone.

My point is simple—time travel tropes work excellent in stories where a seeming impossibility is explored, where humanity faces their inability to change the past but finds catharsis in imagining if it were possible, or where adventuring in the present (and only the present) leaves one wanting to experience more. Humans are a naturally curious and inventive, and I truly hope these kinds of explorations never stop.

For my work, though, the way I ‘time travel’ is simply by re-writing the narrative. I cannot go back and change the fact that I grew up in an unsafe environment that taught me not to trust, that irreplaceable pieces of myself were lost, that I emerged a different person than I could have been, or that the choices others made in the past affected me… and still do.

For me, it isn’t about going back and changing anything… it’s about moving forward with what I have, even if it’s only a small step.

That step is victory.