Temporal Paradox / Literature

Temporal Paradoxes in Literature.

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Grandfather Paradoxes

By Author:

• Works by Douglas Adams:
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe is full of this, particularly in the third book. A correction-fluid manufacturer tries to get an endorsement from a tragic poet and ends up preventing the tragedy that inspired him. A landmark cathedral is torn down to make way for an ion refinery, but escalating delays in the refinery's construction mean that in order to open on time they have to use time travel to start the project ever further back into the past. Eventually it started so far back in time that said cathedral was never built in the first place – making protests against its demolition strangely hollow, and postcards of it suddenly immensely valuable.
    • Worst of all are aorist rods, which provided power to the present by depleting the power reserves of the past ... when it was discovered those bastards in the future were doing the exact same thing, the rods and all knowledge of their manufacture was destroyed to stop what was already happening now from occurring in the future.
  • The resolution to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency involves a temporal paradox which one character explicitly points out has created an impossible situation. This is casually handwaved away by another character who states that it's no worse than any other paradox that exists in the universe, and that people will deal with it as they always have, which is to simply believe whatever is necessary for things to make sense.

By Title:

• In The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, main character Brendon Doyle, a modern expert on the poet William Ashbless, ends up back in the 1800's during Ashbless' lifetime. When Doyle ends up BECOMING Ashbless thanks to a body-snatching werewolf (don't ask), he publishes the poems from memory—which leaves us with the problem of how the poems were written in the first place. In fact, it actually freaks Doyle out, but he concludes that as long as the poems exist, history will continue in its proper order, so he shouldn't sweat too much over it.
• David Weber's The Apocalypse Troll has the characters discussing the theories about time travel — one (it's not possible) has been disproved by the fact that one character just did, to arrive in the time of the discussion; the other two, that the future will be altered by what she did or that her presence has caused an alternate world to split off, can't be proved or disproved by anything they can do now. They end up assuming the alternate world and thereafter ignore the question.
• The Caretaker Trilogy has an interesting take on this: there are no alternate universes, and while changing the future/past is possible, doing anything that would create a paradox is impossible simply because it would create a paradox. It's said that there is some natural "force" that prevents paradoxes from occurring. Exactly how that works is not explained, because the protagonist apparently doesn't have the necessary education to understand the specifics.
• The Dark Tower:
  • In The Drawing of the Three, Roland kills the man who murdered Jake, who Roland met in The Gunslinger. He spends the first part of The Waste Lands fighting off insanity because of the paradox this creates.
  • To say nothing about what happens to Jake in the first part of The Waste Lands, who is both alive and dead at the same time.
• It gets weird in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, which features Faction Paradox, a villain group whose hat is temporal paradoxes. In fact, part of their initiation ritual involves traveling back in time and killing off your own ancestors. Yes, really.
  • At one point, they infected the Third/Fourth Doctor with Faction biodata during a regeneration that wasn't supposed to happen (when he was shot on Dust, instead of the canon radiation poisoning on Metebelis Three), causing the Eighth Doctor to disrupt his own timeline so that the Third Doctor was shot on Dust, permitting the Faction to infect him with the biodata, which caused him to tinker with the past so he could be infected with the biodata... BOOM!
  • And that's before you enter the Eleven-Day Empire, a place literally made of nonexistent time. Or the Grandfather Paradox, the Anthropomorphic Personification of all potential evil and despair in the Universe. Or the part where Gallifrey's history is repeatedly raped into oblivion.
  • A broken timeship is the main setting of Vanderdeken's Children. Initially, the broken ship is found in deep space and slowly repaired. Then a second ship, this one more functional, appears. Soldiers board the second ship and find clearly-marked instructions, which they copy and transmit to the scientists fixing the first ship. The second ship is attacked, heavily damaged, and sent back in time to deep space. The scientists successfully fix the first ship, and attempt to prevent the attack on the second, so they set the coordinates to capture it earlier, but they all get killed, and so the repaired ship makes its journey to be found by the soldiers... Until the Doctor arrives and gives the paradox a slight nudge and allowing it to unravel, it's locked in an eternal cycle without beginning or end.
• In Dragonlance, Raistlin kills Fistandantilus and usurps his soul, and then goes forth to succeed where Fistandantilus failed in traveling into the realm of the Gods. Since it was Fistandantilus' drifting soul that resulted from that first failure which saved Raistlin's life during his Test in the first place, I think we can all say that Raistlin pretty much screwed causality in the ear.
• Time travel is forbidden in The Dresden Files because it might end up destroying the fabric of reality. Characters capable of seeing the future can't be specific about their visions for the same reason.
  • The Gatekeeper, specifically, has a vision of something major in the Dresdenverse, and alerts Harry to it, in the most vague, roundabout way. Bob later explains he did this to avoid the entire universe going kaput. He also mentions that no one has ever caused a temporal paradox before, and you can tell by the way the universe keeps existing.
• Distilled to its purest form in Fredric Brown's short story Experiment.
• Some argue that René Barjavel's Le Voyageur imprudent is the first ever example of the grandfather paradox.
• Lazarus Long, protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love creates a time machine and argues that it would not be possible for him to change the past, because in doing so he would also change the future—in the essence, negating his own existence, or at least the details of it—and making his own journey into the past improbable at best, if not impossible.
• Gregory Benford's Timescape describes a unique, quantum-mechanical approach to Grandfather Paradoxes. If a time-travelling signal were to prevent its own transmission, the signal and everything involved in triggering it would be in an indeterminate state where it neither does, nor doesn't, occur — like Schrödinger's Cat before the box is opened.
• The Time Scout novels avoid Temporal Paradox by the timeline including built-in safeguards; safeguards which are dangerous to time travelers. The most prominent are first, that you can't change anything that's important to the timeline—some improbable accident will occur to prevent it, no matter what you try—which is dangerous, as although some people, objects and events are obviously important to the timeline, there are even more that aren't obviously important, but just as crucial; and second, that if a time traveler ever arrives at a time where they already exist, the most recent version dies instantly to prevent them from doing anything to their past selves that would undermine their current presence.
• In Marion G. Harmon's Wearing the Cape, the Teatime Anarachist explains the rather unusual rules that do seem to eliminate the problem: there is a privileged Now, where his and everyone else's actions are real and affect things and can't be changed — because they slip into the Past, which he can't change. The Future, on the other hand, is only the most possible future. He can interact with it and bring things back, but acts in the Now can still alter it.
• Larry Niven has an essay on why there is no time travel. Time travel is invented. you go back and change the past, the timeline flows until time travel is invented, someone goes back and changes the past. eventually time travel is invented- until someone changes the past so it results in a world where time travel is never invented.

Ontological Paradoxes

• The ultimate time paradox story is Heinlein's —All You Zombies—, in which the protagonist turns out to be hisheritthey's own mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother, grandfather, grandson, granddaughter, great-grandmother, great-grandfather, great-grandson, great-granddaughter, great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather, and so on, ad infinitum. Also hisheritthey's own recruiting officer to the Temporal Bureau.
  • Another Heinlein story, By His Bootstraps, takes things nearly as far. Among other hijinks, the main character gets a book from the future, which he copies into another one (the same one, when it's new?) when it becomes too old and is falling apart. A good way to avoid an object-based ontological paradox.
• In Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox, Opal Koboi from the past travels to the present, and possesses Artemis' mother, making her appear ill. This forces present day Artemis to travel back in time to get the cure from the past Artemis. Opal then uses Artemis returning to the present to return to a few days before the present to make Artemis' mother ill in the first place. Ironically, this is all so she can aquire the secret of time travel.
  • Not to mention, Artemis had foggy memories of the past. When he went back in time, he left a note for Mulch to open the trunk Artemis and Holly were locked in. Also, the Mulch and Artemis of the past had their minds wiped, and since Artemis' wipe was a blanket wipe, there were still several remaining facts about fairies. By travelling back in time, Artemis caused himself to discover the fairy race. Whoa.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • The New Series Adventures novel The Stone Rose, the Doctor analyses the dregs from a mysterious vial of liquid, in order to create the full vial of liquid and take it back in time.
  • The information version appears in the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Happy Endings, when the Doctor warns The Isley Brothers against listening to any of their own songs that they haven't written yet while in 2010, because songs like that are always written by Time herself. O'Kelly Isley decides to hear "Summer Breeze" anyway. This being a fun anniversary story, the Doctor decides it's probably fine. (And we will ignore the fact that "Summer Breeze" was a cover of a song by Seals and Crofts.)
• "Time for an Experiment", a short story in Dragon by Michael G. Ryan, the main character is an elven wizard who needs a specific magical watch for his time-travel experiments, and is surprised to be given it by a woman he doesn't know. He later finds her again, and she becomes his apprentice, but she insists she has no memory of their first meeting. He eventually realises that he's going to send her back in time to buy the watch and give it to him, something that is only possible because he both knows her and has the watch. It then gets even more complicated than that.
• In Flatterland (a Spin-Offspring sequal to Flatland), Victoria Line and the Space Hopper end up trapped in a black hole. They're rescued by slightly older versions of themselves with a portable white hole, producing both a reverse grandfather paradox and an object loop.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and Hermione travel back in time for a number of reasons. During this time travel, Harry manages to save himself from dementors using an Expecto Patronum charm. The event is noted to have happened earlier in the book with Harry only glimpsing his mysterious saviour and thinking it looked a lot like his dad. Note that they are unaware of their problems they went back to fix being solved until after they travel back in time, thus making this not an example of the first.
• Chronos, the Incarnation of Time from Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, is immune to this, to an extent. He cannot be balked by paradox, he remembers the original and the new timeline, though no one else does. The limit is that he cannot interfere with his own workings (the "Three Person Limit"). He can exist once, go back in time and change things, but he cannot go back in time and stop himself from changing things, thus the three person limit.
• There's a human version of the object loop in Pyramids, with Dios (who frequently makes reference to a lack of memory very far back) being transported backwards through time to the beginning of Djelibeybi. The lack of wear-and-tear is explained by Dios using the time-destroying effects of the pyramids to reverse the effects of time on himself. There's also some Reverse-Grandfather involved, considering he persuaded the original founder of Djelibeybi to begin the Pyramid tradition, which in turn allowed Dios to live long enough to go back in time to persuade the founder and so on...
• Averted — by the characters, no less — in Isaac Asimov's short story The Red Queen's Race. They wind up creating a Stable Time Loop instead. A scientist conducts an experiment to send modern scientific texts back in time, translated into ancient Greek. His translator, fearing a Temporal Paradox, only translates the parts that would account for the oddly anachronistic scientific advances already in our ancient history, like Hero's steam engine or the infamous Baghdad Battery.
• In Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World, Jim comes home to find that sending He (that's the villain's name) to the time when Earth was about to be destroyed led him to launch the Time War, yet the Time War is the reason Jim got involved in the first place.
  Jim: The way I see it, He just bounces in a circle in time forever. Running from me, chasing me, running from me. . . . Arrrgh! When was he born? Where does he come from?
  Coypu: Those terms are meaningless in this sort of temporal relationship. He exists only within this time loop. If you wish to say it, though it is most imprecise, it would be fair to state that he was never born. The situation exists apart from time as we normally know it.
• Played with in the latest Thursday Next book, where they find that despite the existence of the Chronoguard, no one has actually invented time travel yet, so they assume that the technology much have been sent from the future and eventually they'll find the spot on the timeline where someone invented it to close the gap. As one character describes it, it's like they're running the technology "off of borrowed credit." This causes trouble however, when the Chronoguard begins to realize that no one in the timeline ever invented time travel. The resulting paradox causes the system to unravel and gets rid of any further possibility of Time Travel in the series (although it seems everyone in the populace has a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory).
• Played for Laughs in Xanthippic Dialogues, where a footnote explains that the really great poets' influence stretched backwards in time, which is how you can find Shakespearean quotations in plays from the fifth century BC.

Other

• In L. Sprague de Camp's short story "A Gun for Dinosaur," four characters (two hunters and two guides) travel to the Cretaceous period for a dinosaur-hunting safari. One of the hunters, Holtzinger, is killed by a tyrannosaur, and the other, James, is blamed for his death because he recklessly fired the shots that woke the dinosaur up. Later, James, swearing revenge, tries to go back to just before the expedition arrived so he can kill the guides once they emerge from the time machine. Instead, the space-time continuum snaps him back to the present to prevent a paradox, killing him messily.
• The novel Ice And Blood manages to produce a very strange reverse grandfather paradox. ZJ is a depressed, bipolar paranoid schizophrenic who has no memories of his childhood. He hates his life enough to deliberately break into a lab where time travel technology exists, he goes back to the past, and he kills his parents in the hopes he'll stop existing. Instead the violent and bloody deaths they suffer triggers his past self's mental illness. The obvious problem with this is that there's no guarantee that ZJ would suffer the exact same breakdown and block out his memories every time, nor is there any logical reason that depressed ZJ would ever go this route again when suicide would be significantly easier for him. It just doesn't work from a logic standpoint. (It's still a good read if you apply enough MST3K Mantra to it.)
• In Ted Chiang's short story The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, the titular gate can transport anyone exactly twenty years into the future, or twenty years back. This leads to increasingly more improbable shenanigans, starting with a Stable Time Loop involving a treasure map, and reaching its arguable peak when a character's wife meets her husband's younger self in the past, takes him to the bedroom, and upon descovering his lack of the, er, skills that the husband has in the present, teaches him how to please a woman, over the course of weeks. It's also implied that the husband married her in the present because, when he saw her, she reminded him of the middle-aged woman who took his virginity.
• In Strange Attractors by William Sleator, almost any time travel to the past causes instability in the universe. As those instabilities add up, the entire universe can "go chaotic", essentially becoming a huge mass of paradoxes. The only noticeable effect of this is that electrical lighting flickers. In fact the timeline in the series is so fragile you can cause paradoxes by going so much as five minutes into the future.

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