Time Travel

Time Travel

In an editorial published in the November 1926 issue of Amazing Stories (“Plausibility in Scientifiction”), Hugo Gernsback wrote:

[E]ven in the best-written fiction stories you will notice the characters converse in rather extraordinary language.  This is the so-called fiction language and is not generally used in real life.  Open almost any first-class magazine and, if you stop to think a second, you will realize that human beings do not use the flowery language that the characters do in fiction.  This same is true of scientifiction in another respect, where authors often take poetic license, sometimes disregarding true scientific facts, although retaining enough scientific accuracy to make the plot or story seem probable and at the same time interesting.

I don’t believe any good science fiction editor today would allow a writer to ignore “true scientific facts” (with the exception of an obvious spoof), and certainly no writer who hopes to sell his or her work should believe it’s OK to write dialogue in “fiction language.”  One of the goals of this book is to help you tell your time-travel tales without resorting to “fiction language.”

Time machines and time travel are certainly radical topics that demand a skeptical reaction.  Even if physics should one day establish these topics on firm scientific and experimental grounds, I think many people will persist in thinking of them as fantasy (just as physicists who understand the optical properties of water droplets still stand in awe at the appearance of a rainbow).  In 1979, the science fiction grand master Lester del Rey wrote in his The World of Science Fiction: 1926-1976 that time travel is one of the genre’s conventions that “seems clearly impossible.”

Del Rey’s position was nothing new among science fiction critics, because, as early as 1960, writer-critic Kingsley Amis wrote in New Maps of Hell that “time travel is inconceivable.”  And even then the view wasn’t original, as in 1953, the respected anthologist Groff Conklin wrote the following as an introduction to Murray Leinster’s time-travel story ”The Middle of the Week After Next” (in Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension): “In this tale we meet our first Mad Scientist.  Just as in reality the thoroughly cracked pots used to be found inventing perpetual motion machines, so in science fiction we find the lunatic fringe more often than not trying to perfect time-travel mechanisms.”

And finally, as long ago as 1940 a writer in the British pulp Tales of Wonder wrote words that many (but not all) physicists today might agree with: “Of all the fantastic ideas that belong to science fiction, the most remarkable – and, perhaps, the most fascinating – is that of time travel…indeed, so fantastic a notion does it seem, and so many apparently obvious absurdities and bewildering paradoxes does it present, that some of the most imaginative students of science refuse to consider it as a practicable proposition…”

© 1997, 2011 Paul J. Nahin