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Time Travel Tense Trouble
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"The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. ... Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs."
"Can we get some food? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon."
Most Indo-European languages have multiple tenses, to differentiate things that have happened from things that will happen, plus some to define what had happened before that, not to mention some that are a bit less identifiable in their everyday uses (I'm looking at you, Pluperfect Subjunctive). It mostly works fine when your timeline is a strict progression from cause to effect.
Unfortunately, when you would have will be are watching the San Dimas Time, winding through the threads of the Timey Wimey Ball, chasing another time traveler who will be was has been is always one step ahead of you, it could have can become awkward. As a result, time travelers have would have have been are going to will often stumble over their wording, leading to use of tenses that could have been had been will be can be torturous to understand.
Usually this is an experienced traveler explaining in eloquent yet incomprehensible terms that they didn't "just succeed", when you return from an adventure in the future. Alternatively, a less experienced character will attempt to explain what's going on, and struggle with their terms.
If your Future Me shows up, there may be pronoun trouble on a similar style, especially if there's several versions of future characters knocking around.
This was will be is going to be used to be is related to Meanwhile In The Future, Anachronic Order.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Avoided rather nicely in Fate Stay Night, as when it is revealed that Archer is a future version of Emiya Shirou, rather than deal with the issues on how to address him everybody either ignores his real name and keeps calling him 'Archer,' or refers to him as 'Heroic Spirit Emiya.'
- Mikuru from Suzumiya Haruhi is aware of the tense trouble, but she keeps flubbing it anyway. Considering that Mikuru is spacey and Moe Moe, this leads to Adult!Mikuru showing Kyon a mole on her breasts while saying something like "But you were the one who told me about it...wait, has that not happened yet? oops...".
- The fact that she showed Kyon the mole to confirm that she
will be is, in fact, Mikuru implies that Young!Mikuru will show him her breasts at some point in the future...
- Not exactly. By mentioning that to her shortly thereafter, she turns around and discovers the mole herself, confirming that it exists. She accuses him of seeing it at some time before that due to how he asked her about it ("Hey, did you know you have a star shaped mole on your chest?") and thus starts the loop. There's still the possibility that Kyon will actually see it in person at a later date, but by mentioning it, Future!Mikuru instigated Kyon asking about it, which caused Young!Mikuru to discover it (and think he saw it), which lead to Future!Mikuru remembering him seeing it... And now, my fellow tropers, I Need A Freaking Drink.
- Wait, didn't he just look at one of the many pictures he took of Mikuru and zoomed in on her breast, to make sure Future Mikuru was telling the truth?.
- Yep. It wasn't in a that explicit spot.
Film
- The tagliney prophecy which drives the action of the animated Science Fiction film Light Years makes use of it: "In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed. A thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved."
- Back To The Future Part II has something like this:
Marty: It's my fault — the whole thing is my fault. If I hadn't bought that damn book, then none of this would've happened.
Doc: Well, it's all in the past.
Marty: You mean the future.
Doc: Whatever!
- One of the best known Narms of Plan Nine From Outer Space is that the narrator, a fortune teller, switches frequently between the past, present and future tense while describing his prophecy:
Criswell: Future events such as these will affect you in the future... And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day.
- In Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, Gillian catches Spock referring to the extinction of whales in the past tense.
- Page quote for Primer. "I haven't eaten since later this afternoon."
- A consistent element of the Terminator series (although rarely lampshaded), going back Sarah's quote from the first movie: "You're talking about things I haven't done yet in the past tense."
Literature
- In Harry Potter, Hermione insists on the correct tense when she travels back in time.
- Hermione likes things just right!
- The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy has a good excerpt on the mechanics of time travel useful for this. There was even a book written in-universe called the Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations by Dr. Dan Streetmentioner.
- Note that the titular Guide doesn't even bother trying to explain the tenses, and simply notes that it does not use the future perfect tense, because it was found not to be.
- The Discworld Companion entry for a character existing in a Stable Time Loop says "Dios was (or is, or will be - certain temporal uncertainties make the choice of tense very difficult)".
- But when Vimes goes back thirty years in Night Watch, he is told to "just imagine things happening one after another" and sticks with that as less confusing.
- Also, in Equal Rites, when it is explained that the dead are unbound from all dimensions, the narrator describes the fact that a cat appears to simultaneously be its own age, a newborn kitten, and a decrepit moggy, as resembling a kind of white, cat-shaped carrot, "which will have to suffice until someone is able to devise effective fourth-dimensional adjectives".
- Averted in Poul Anderson's series of short stories about the Time Patrol. In those stories, the Patrol developed an artificial language, called Temporal, which allowed Patrolmen to discuss such matters without any of the tense problems raised in this trope. Since only Time Patrolmen learned and used Temporal, it also served as a way that Patrolmen could speak between themselves without risk of being overheard (or more accurately, understood) by others.
- Shows up a few times in Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine.
Live Action TV
- In Red Dwarf, after being erased by the inquisitor, the following conversation occurs:
Lister: We don't exist here anymore!
Kryten: Actually sir, we don't ever have existed here anymore, but this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past impossible never tense!
- Which is the source of many a blooper on the "smeg ups" on the dvd, despite that line actually being cut out of the episode on the same dvd!!
- They do it again in the episode "Future Echoes":
LISTER: Hey, it hasn't happened, has it? It has "will have going to have happened" happened, but it hasn't actually "happened" happened yet, actually.
RIMMER: Poppycock! It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future. Simple as that. Your bucket's been kicked, baby.
- Truth In Television: the tenses in the first example were so difficult that Robert Llewellyn, playing Kryten, kept flubbing the line and eventually had to have a cue-card held up out of shot.
- ...and then the line was cut anyway. It only resurfaced as they showed the final correct take after all the bloopers in the Smeg Ups collection.
- In the Doctor Who story "The Two Doctors", the Sixth Doctor comments on the Second Doctor in this convoluted way.
Sixth Doctor: Your Doctor is an antediluvian fogey! Allowing himself to be captured by the Sontarans. If anything happens to me as a result of it, I shall never forgive himself.
Peri: Oh, I do wish you'd stop switching personal pronouns!
Seventh Doctor: An anti-gravitation matter transmitter. Didn't you give me this next year?
- In Goodnight Sweetheart time traveler Gary Sparrow (who is married in the present day but is having an affair with a woman in 1940s Britain) upbraids his friend for cheating on his wife. When the obvious hypocrisy is pointed out to him, Gary replies "That's different. All my indiscretions are in the past. Even my future indiscretions are in the past.".
- Star Trek Voyager in episode "Relativity":
- Even happened on The Daily Show.
- In Daybreak, Brett often ran into this whenever he tried to explain the Groundhog Day Loop to another character.
Chad: When did I say this?
Brett: Today.
Chad: Wait, how many todays ago?
Brett: Yesterday.
New Media
- From The Other Wiki's article on the MIT Time Traveler Convention: "The spacetime coordinates continue to be publicized prominently and indefinitely, so that future time travelers will be aware and have the opportunity to have attended."
Boardgames
- In Time Agent the objective is to have always been winning by using time travel to have changed the past, while never having had time travel invented. The flow of causality operates according to the Schrodinger's Gun trope, which means that technologies often work until you discover that even before you had been making changes to the timeline, they had never been working. In one instance this troper had always seen, the player commander of the Zytal had to leave and be replaced by another player, but from the board's perspective, the new player had always been the commander of the Zytal, for the previous commander had never been playing.
Tabletop Games
- Continuum invents a time-travellers' jargon with terms regarding your personal 'spanner' timeline being separate from terms used in the general 'leveller' timeline. All events except those in your personal past require the present tense, since in a second, they may be your "now" too.
- Averted in one place in Gurps Time-Travel by saying that there are two timelines for the adventurer, the time he came from "hometime" and the time he is adventuring in and Hometime keeps going while the adventurer was adventuring. Thus all that is necessary is to distinguish between home past and away past.
- Genius The Transgression runs into this once it starts talking about time travel; when discussing the consequences of changing the past it says that "what used to happen (and here the past tense gets into a bit of trouble), is that you got your ass kicked by the transsapient gods who live at the end of time."
Video Games
Webcomics
- Irregular Webcomic has one here
 . Of course, Nazi scienc— wait, grammar sneers at it.
- "When we will have done what we soon will do in die past, you will see the results of what we have now already will have done!"
- Related incident in 8-Bit Theater after Sarda does something to Berserker when he attacked him:
Cleric: I demand a rational explanation. Sarda: Your brain can't process six of the verb tenses needed to explain it to you.
- More recently, again from Sarda: You can't do something you haven't yet done differently than how it will come to be done.
- A truly memorable example occurs in Bob And George, referencing Hitchhiker's Guide (the comic in question is indeed titled "Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional"), as Bob, trapped in the future, tries to find out from Prometheus/Protoman how he gets back to the present:
Bob: Okay, if I told you what I did, how did I get back?
Prometheus: Don't you mean, if you will tell me what you will do, how will you get back?
Bob: How about, if you won't tell me how I did get back, I will shove my boot up your ass?
- In Schlock Mercenary, they give us both the pronoun trouble version, as well as the tense issue.
Western Animation
- In Kim Possible: A Sitch in Time Shego's future self tries to explain her scheme to take over the world in the future to her present self.
Future Shego: Listen, we don't have a lot of time... OK, actually we do—well... we will.
Present Shego: When you wanna make sense, just let me know.
Future Shego: Grab the Time Monkey!
Present Shego: Why?
Future Shego: You need the Time Monkey.
Present Shego: Can't I just use yours?
Future Shego: No, this is mine! OK, well, actually, it's yours too, I mean... well it's the one you're supposed to steal, so technically...
Present Shego: If you need me, I'm gonna be in there watching Kim Possible lose.
- Kim Possible: But if the Supreme One has the time monkey in the future . . . or the past . . . or . . .wow. Aah! Brain pain.
Rufus 3000: Time travel does that.
- In the Futurama episode "The Farnsworth Parabox," an analogous situation arises while discussing parallel worlds. Professor Farnsworth exclaims, "Nonsense! I would never do such a thing unless you were already having been going to do that!"
- South Park' had the memorable episode "My Future Self and Me", where Stan's adult future self (later revealed as an actor) comes to live with present, young Stan. "Don't be so hard on yourself, Stan" and "Why don't you go upstairs and play with yourself?"
Comic Books
- In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan, who is able to perceive the past, present and future, says "Yes, yes, he killed Blake and half of New York. Excuse me, Rorschach, I'm informing Laurie 90 seconds ago," to Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk, being confused by tachyon interference, before saying the same thing to Rorschach 90 seconds later.
Real Life
- Technically, English has a system a bit like this with tense and aspect; tense denotes the action's time related to a reference point, while aspect denotes the reference point's time related to the time of speaking. In a sentence like "I had done it by 3 o'clock", the pluperfect "had" tells you to imagine it's 3 o'clock, and the past "done" tells you that from that point, the event was in the past.
- Though not actually time travel, English has a perfectly grammatical verb form called the Past Perfect Progressive Passive. It goes like this: It had been being written. The Present Perfect Progressive Passive is also somewhat hard to wrap one's head around: It has been being written.
- Pfft. Try FUTURE Perfect Progressive Passive. It will have been being done.
- ...That will have been being done my head hurt.
- Your head will have been hurt by it. Perfectly accurate in next to if not actually all situations, but also obstructively unspecific.
- BOOM!
- Your head will have had been asploding...
- Were it going to have exploded, it would have been being exploding
- Please. Were it to have been inducing your head to explode, it will have, having been doing so precisely when it was being done. Happening, it will have been being ongoing from the moment it was begun, taking as long as it will have been observed to have taken, and, thus concluded, it will not have not been said to have been happening precisely when it was. And it had better have been going to be so doing when it did, or else we run the risk of becoming our own grandfathers.
- Microsoft Outlook's "Warning: This meeting occurs in the past."
- Larry Niven called this effect "Excedrin Headache Number SQRT(-π)".
- It's not Time Travel as much as Ascending To A Higher Plane of Existence, but John 8:58 in the New Testament mangles grammar the same way: "before Abraham was, (there was) I am."
- Only if you don't realize that this is more translation trouble. In Hebrew, all names have destinctive meanings describing the individual. Since God is all knowing, all powerful, omnipresent, creator of everyone and everything etc. the only name that can describe him is "he who is" or, from his perspective, "I AM".
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