Time Paradoxes

Entry updated 12 July 2017. Tagged: Theme.

The fact that Time Travel into the past disrupts the pattern of causality, changing or cancelling matters of known fact, has not caused stories of this kind to be banished from the sf field; instead it has led to the growth of a subgenre of stories celebrating the peculiar aesthetics of suchParadoxes. The essential paradoxicality of time travel is often dramatized by asking: "What would happen if I went back in time and killed my own grandfather?" – a question to which sf writers have provided many different answers. A time-paradox story usually leads either to a singularly appropriatereductio ad absurdum or to a cunning literary move which appears to resolve the paradox by removing or avoiding the seemingly inevitable contradiction. FAnstey's pioneering fantasyThe Time Bargain (1891; vtTourmalin's Time Cheques) provided a prototype for the first kind of story by dismissing its ultimate, unresolvably complex tangle as no more than a dream. FritzLeiber's "Try and Change the Past" (March 1958Astounding) is a good example of the second kind, with its postulate that history is resistant to alteration owing to the "Law of Conservation of Reality": a man laboriously saved from being shot in the head is nevertheless killed by a micrometeorite which inflicts a closely similar wound. Sf writers frequently invoke sweeping metaphysical hypotheses in the cause of accommodating potential paradoxes; AlfredBester's "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" (October 1958F&SF) does so by providing every individual with his or her own personal continuum. There are several notable stories and series aboutTime Police who try to protect the world – or, quite often, a whole series ofAlternate History worlds – from temporal upset.

The closed loop in time (seeTime Loop), in which an event becomes its own cause, is the simplest narrative form of the time-paradox story, seized upon by several of the contestants invited by the editor ofAmazing Stories to find a clever ending for Ralph MilneFarley's "The Time-Wise Guy" (May 1940Amazing). More notable examples include RossRocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" (June 1941Astounding), AlfredBester's "The Push of a Finger" (May 1942Astounding), P SchuylerMiller's "As Never Was" (January 1944Astounding), MurrayLeinster's "The Gadget had a Ghost" (June 1952Thrilling Wonder) and MackReynolds's "Compounded Interest" (August 1956F&SF). Greater ingenuity is exercised when these loops become more complicated, forming convoluted sealed knots. Two classic exercises in this vein were written by Robert AHeinlein: "By His Bootstraps" (October 1941Astounding) as by Anson MacDonald and "All You Zombies –" (March 1959F&SF), the latter being a story whose central character moves back and forth in time and undergoes a sex-change in order to become his own mother and father. Samuel RDelany'sEmpire Star (1966 dos) similarly folds its two main human characters through time to play various roles as each other's contemporaries, mentors and pupils.

The second fundamental variant of the time-paradox story is that in which the present from which the time-travellers start is replaced by an alternative because of the effect (often trivial and unintended) which they have had upon the past. NatSchachner's "Ancestral Voices" (December 1933Astounding) is an early story which uses such a device to expose the absurdities of ancestor-worship and racism, but the best known example is RayBradbury's moral fable "A Sound of Thunder" (28 June 1952Collier's), in which a time-tourist who treads on a prehistoric butterfly alters thePolitics of the present for the worse. EandoBinder's "The Time Cheaters" (March 1940Thrilling Wonder) suggests that time might have stubbornly ingenious ways of taking care of such threatened contradictions, and WilliamTenn's "Brooklyn Project" (Fall 1948Planet Stories) points out that observers who change with the world would not notice such alterations, however drastic they became. In many stories the good intentions of would-be history-changers go sadly and ironically awry. L Spraguede Camp's "Aristotle and the Gun" (February 1958Astounding) is a fine example; others are Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" (June 1956F&SF) and KirkMitchell'sNever the Twain (1987). Works in which such ideas are further extrapolated and intensively recomplicated tend to featureChangewars fought through time by the representatives of alternate worlds ambitious to demolish their competitors. JackWilliamson'sThe Legion of Time (May-July 1938Astounding; rev1952) opened up such imaginative territory for further exploration in Fritz Leiber'sChange War series and Barrington JBayley's spectacularThe Fall of Chronopolis (1974); the longTimewars series by SimonHawke of exuberantly extravagant stories in this vein, begun withThe Ivanhoe Gambit (1984), is still continuing.

The potential which time-travellers have to exist twice in the same time is considered so uniquely unreasonable (seeDoppelgangers) as to be specifically proscribed in stories like WilsonTucker'sThe Lincoln Hunters (1957), where the restriction opens up potential for ingenious plotting, as it does also in JohnVarley's elaborate paradox-avoidance storyMillennium (1983). Such simultaneous existence generates sensations of wrongness and alarm in IsaacAsimov'sThe End of Eternity (1955) and AnneMcCaffrey'sDragonflight (fixup1968). However, other authors – including such non-genre writers as OsbertSitwell inThe Man Who Lost Himself (1929) and EliotCrawshay-Williams in "The Man Who Met Himself" (inThe Man Who Met Himself and Other Stories, coll1947) – have been particularly intrigued by the possible psychological effects of a person's meeting with a later version of his or her own self. Ralph MilneFarley's "The Man Who Met Himself" (August 1935Top-Notch) is an early example from the sfPulp magazines. Later sf writers have casually extended this notion to its absurd limits, displayed by Barry NMalzberg in "We're Coming Through the Window" (August 1967Galaxy) as by K M O'Donnell, and DavidGerrold inThe Man Who Folded Himself (1973), the latter being a notable if silly story which conscientiously attempts to compile a narrative portmanteau of all possible time paradoxes.

Sf writers who have made particularly prolific and ingenious use of time-paradox plots include Charles LHarness, whose many works in this vein extend from the early "Time Trap" (August 1948Astounding) and "Stalemate in Space" (Summer 1949Planet Stories; vt "Stalemate in Time" August 1966New Worlds) toKrono (1988) andLurid Dreams (1990), and RobertSilverberg, whose even more numerous contributions range from the early "Hopper" (October 1956Infinity; exp asThe Time-Hoppers1967) andStepsons of Terra (1958) through the convolutedUp the Line (1969) to the neat "Many Mansions" (inUniverse 3, anth1973, ed TerryCarr) and the smooth "The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve" (March 1982Omni).

The time-paradox story may have posed an attractive challenge to sf writers but it has also been something of a wasting asset. All the elementary changes have been rung, and it now requires considerable cunning to find a new twist or even to redeploy an old one in more pointed or poignant fashion. Nevertheless, there still remains a good deal of life in the subgenre: BobShaw'sWho Goes Here? (1977) slickly exploits the comic potential of the theme; HilbertSchenck'sA Rose for Armageddon (1982) is a brilliantly recomplicatedTimeslip romance; Walter JonWilliams'sDays of Atonement (1991) interrelates time paradox and quantum physics; and JohnCrowley'sGreat Work of Time (inNovelty, coll1989;1991) cleverly recombines several well worn themes to striking quasi-surreal effect. [MJE/BS]