dealing with time travel and how not to screw up

i'm mostly focused on one project at the moment but there are times where i don't mind doing side project. this side project in particular is a something that came up recently but never considered fully developing it. so one thing a ran into is the whole keeping the parallel timelines from going of track. sometimes a crack in space will open which can suck anything that came near it into an alternate timeline. this could be disastrous as it could potentially lead a mistake after another because of the object or person in question. to counteract this, Questers, beings that can travel through time and space, are enlisted to fix any mistake in the multiverse stream before it's too late. Nex is one of those people.

so how might i make sure to have some grounds as to not screw up on the time travel thing?

Quest Next: Nex is what you might call a “quester”, a being that travel through time and space. He, and others like him, work as agents for an organization known as Q.S.T (Quantum Search Team) with the main intent on making sure everything is in its rightfully timeline or universe. In one of his missions, he ends meeting a girl named Henrietta and brings her into the H.Q by accident. Now they have to partner up to search for people and objects that wind up in the wrong timeline and set things right.

edited 18th Oct '17 7:10:58 PM by ewolf2015

Simple answer: formulate a set of rules about how time travel "works" - what is possible and what isn't - in your setting and stick with them.

Longer answer: the thing that does most damage to any work of fiction, speculative or otherwise, is inconsistency. It breaks the audience out as they involuntarily go a "what the ever-lovin' fuck?" moment.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief is expected of audiences, but not to the point that you can break the rules of the in-story universe with impunity.

Bear in mind that you don't have to list the rules for the reader or have Mr. Exposition deliver lengthy discourses to be conveying rules. Rules are conveyed whenever you show the process in action. If you've decided that characters can meet their past/future selves, you show that the minute you have two temporally-disparate versions of the same character meet. No amount of saying "you can't meet your future/past self" later in the story is going to alter the fact that you've shown that the rules of time travel do permit it.

So, fix your rules firmly in your head and be sure that everything you have happening in the story adheres to those rules. If meeting your past/future self causes an implosion, then you'd better be sure that they always avoid meeting themselves or that you have an implosion occur when they do meet themselves.

If they can do something one chapter and arbitrarily can't the next - or vice versa - or logical consequences of rules you've established don't pay off, then you are likely to alienate your audience - a.k.a. screw up royally.

i think him traveling to different realities would work.

If he's traveling to other realities that are similar to ours, but have alternate histories, then technically he's not a time-traveler, he's a dimensional shifter. Time-traveling usually implies that you're limited to a single universe, where only minor changes to the timeline are possible, and the fluid nature of time tends to straighten things out.

As an analogy, imagine the flow of time like the flow of water in a stream. If you try to alter the course of the stream, such as by dumping a big rock in its path, it will flow around the rock, and eventually resume its original course. If you take more drastic measures, such as by causing an avalanche, it may (or may not) divert the stream in an entirely different direction — in which case, you've just branched off into an alternate reality. Trying to go back and undo it just creates another alternate timeline.

edited 19th Oct '17 6:13:51 PM by pwiegle

hmm. that is true. i think setting up some ground rules and not overthinking it will be fine.

Technically, time travel that causes branching realities is still time travel, since you are going to an earlier (or later) point in time regardless. The main issue with multiverse theory in a narrative sense is that it explicitly denies that you can change anything about your existing timeline.

If I create an alternate timeline in which Hitler never rises to power, then the timeline in which he does still exists. I haven't fixed anything for the people in that one. And if you postulate that time travel exists at all, then logically many people would have tried to stop Hitler and created innumerable alternate realities in which he did or did not rise to power. If you're assigning any moral weight at all to the suffering of the people in such timelines, each attempt to change things runs the risk of making millions more people die horribly — or of making the same people die horribly many times, depending on your perspective.

Bioshock Infinite has an interesting take on this: it uses branching multiverse theory, but the universes overlap like sheets of paper and can have effects on one another. If you're alive in one universe and dead in another, your brain can get overloaded trying to reconcile the overlapping memories, especially if the branching point is very recent. Time travel is also possible, but the conditions for using it require the traveler to exist as a quantum superposition of themselves across all universes, which is not something achievable on a whim.

In that game, time travel is used by one character to annihilate undesirable realities, by going back to a point in time when a key choice was made and wiping out one of the outcomes of that choice, thus retroactively unmaking all realities dependent on that outcome. Rather than creating branches, time travel can be used to prune them. It's one of those situations that makes more sense the more you think about it. ^note To explain in more detail: the character creates a Stable Time Loop in which every time the adverse choice is made, they return to that point and unmake it. So the universe proceeds as if the choice were never made. Seamless, at least until the DLC screws it up.

I suppose the point of this is that you really want to think twice before combining time travel and multiverse theory. The permutations can get too complex to wrap your head around, and unavoidably create some unfortunate implications about the moral worth of individuals.

edited 20th Oct '17 1:47:34 PM by Fighteer

I just to want to keep them separate. The two theories I mean.

There are many ways time travel can be portrayed and they all have consequences - as per the examples given by pwiegle and Fighteer.

If those consequences are improperly/inconsistently handled, you wind up with an incoherent mess. If they are properly handled, you can get Fridge Horror moments when the audience suddenly realises "but what about all those poor bastards in the alternate universes?" or have Willing Suspension of Disbelief suspended by realising that there's a horrendous paradox and there's no reason why the person would go back in time (a softer form of the Grandfather Paradox in which, rather than killing one's ancestor and therefore not existing, the time traveller successfully changes the past and therefore has no reason to go back to the past to make the change.)

You could go with "the past can't be changed" and any actions of the time traveller already have happened (goes back in time and breaks the Sphinx's nose off, accidentally sets fire to London on 2 September 1666 etc) - which has strong implications for travel to the future, predestination and the non-existence of true "free will".

Again, consequences.

This is becoming depressing.

It can still be done, and it can still be engaging as long as you think through the consequences and address them.

A number of good time travel stories have been written, so the potential is there. You just have to work out how you want it to "work" and what restrictions it has and then write your way around the consequences.

I often thought of writing a story of a time traveller who frequently pops back and helps himself - and he always remembers being helped by his future selves. They shape his life.

e.g. he's working on a project and needs an extra pair of hands, suddenly there's a future version there to help him. They get the job done then he goes back in time to help himself get the job done (knowing exactly what needs to be done to get the job finished), looping through the day again, helping his earlier self then watching his earlier self vanish back in time - Stable Time Loop. End result: the job is done, he's a few hours older than he would normally be at that time of the day and he knows he helped himself because he recalls being helped and recalls doing the helping.

edited 20th Oct '17 4:34:54 PM by Wolf1066

see, here's the thing, the idea is more or less aimed for children for the most part. That does not mean it's going to be dumbed however. I'll mention th at these consequences exist but don't in a way for children can understand.

I wouldn't worry too much about perfect logical consistency if you're aiming at kids. Internal consistency is usually enough. You can certainly bring up the bootstrap and grandfather paradoxes, because those are integral to almost all depictions of time travel, but I would avoid multiverse theory unless you really, really want it to be there.

To clarify: having lots of alternate realities is fine — kids' stories do that all the time. But the idea of time travel creating branching realities is a bit complicated.

edited 23rd Oct '17 5:45:56 AM by Fighteer