Time travel has been a fixture of science fiction ever since a young Englishman named H.G. Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine. Wells wasn't the first person to write about time jumps — Mark Twain did it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — but before Wells it was always treated as fantasy. Twain's hero is cast back in time by a blow to the head, then sent back to his own time by magic. (Thus giving the excessively literal-minded reader the chance to say "it was all just a dream." I hate that trope.)
Wells moved it into the realm of science because physicists like Einstein were starting to consider time as another dimension of spacetime. As Wells's nameless protagonist The Time Traveller puts it, you can move around in three dimensions with steamships or balloons, so why not move around in four, letting you go backward or forward in time? So time travel gained some new plausibility thanks to science.
Lately I've been thinking about time travel stories, thanks to this recent Ars Technica article about the best time travel films. I realized that "time travel stories" actually combines two distinct sub-genres, or sub-sub-genres.
The first type, and by far the most common, is exactly what H.G. Wells himself did in The Time Machine: someone uses a time machine to travel to the past or future. They get in their car ("time machine") and drive to History, do stuff there, and then drive home again. Instead of a car one can use a train, an elevator, a door, or whatever. The point is that The Past or The Future is treated as a place, where one can have adventures, meet famous dead people, make dreadful warnings about social trends, or whatever.
Authors writing this kind of time travel story tend to put significant limits on how the time travel works, because the whole point is to go back or forward in time and have adventures. If the characters can just get back in the time machine and replay their exploits over and over until they get the right result, it's not very suspenseful or exciting.
The second kind of time travel stories are those which are actually about the mechanics of time travel itself. Examples of this variety include Heinlein's "All You Zombies" or "By His Bootstraps," novels like Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, or films like Primer. In this kind of story, the authors get to play with causality, closed time-loops, paradoxes, and so on.
As one might expect, the second type is considerably harder to write, and the ship-in-a-bottle difficulty of pulling it off at all tends to make the actual stories more clever than good.
I wonder if we should come up with names to distinguish the two types of time travel stories. Maybe call the first variety "Time Voyages" and the second "Time Twister" stories? Suggestions are welcome.
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