Writing and Time Travel

[merlinofchaos]

For some reason, a lot of shows I've watched lately have involved Time Travel, and some of it heavily. Usually, time travel is handled so sloppily that I have to just not think too hard about it, because the writers rarely care about consistency. But one I've watched might be making an effort--Timeless. I'm not SURE yet; they've shown some really

Comments

[tersa]

I subscribe to the Closed Loop Theory of time travel, but that's me. :)

[merlinofchaos]

It definitely varies based on who is writing it. Very, very little fiction subscribes to closed loop. Almost everything is open loop, with some branching thrown in for fun.

Oh and for grins, the stuff in the Arrowverse is a bizarre and inconsistent mishmash of the two, with artifacts of both whenever they think it's convenient. With the usual comic book logic behind it all. I swear, it's mostly there so they can feel free to rewrite anything they want with a wave of their hands. Though after awhile audiences get real tired of that.

Looper?

[grodog]

Did you see Looper, Earl? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that one.

Allan.

Re: Looper?

[merlinofchaos]

That is one I haven't seen; reviews of it weren't great, but I know nothing about how well they did the time travel part.

[ghudson]

In the short story "Ripples in the Dirac Sea", you can experience going back in time, but upon returning, there is no effect on the current timeline other than your own memories of that experience

[merlinofchaos]

All things I hadn't read.

Flash uses a non-specific concept of temporal inertia, which I bring up; changes in the timeline do take awhile to propagate. I ascribed inconsistency in Back to the Future to that; Marty was being written out of the timeline slowly, but he had a window to fix it.

(Of course, for the sake of drama, it got fixed by actions that weren't his or of anyone's outside the normal timesteam, so HOW it got fixed wasn't what you'd call consistent, but whatever, that was how they built the drama, right?)

Your last bit reminds me I had intended a section on prescience, which is the time travel of information, and how prescience *also* fits into these 3 categories; i.e, closed loop (Cassandra -- knowing the future and powerless to change it), open loop -- knowing the future gives you the opportunity to avoid it, and branching, where once you know the future you branch and the future you perceive *will* be different but you can still use the information to affect how, or choose not to.