I hate time travel. I mean, I really hate it! From a storytelling standpoint, it’s almost as bad as the Liar Revealed trope, where most of the story is taken up with covering up a deception.
So, if I were to write a story with a time machine — and not take the idea too seriously — my first question would be, “How do I break this stupid thing so the reader will care about the plot! Why should anyone care about what’s going to happen if it can all be repeated again?
Still, a few time-travel stories have been done right, so I’m going to close out this series of articles by presenting two examples of time-travel stories done correctly. Then, next Saturday, using the rules I’ve described in this series, I will build a time-travel plot. My goal is to show that the story rules I’ve been discussing aren’t just arbitrary regulations. They can prevent plot holes before they emerge, and they can even be used to build the story itself.
An early time travel story
First, though, I want to bring up an honorable mention: A Christmas Carol. This is probably the best time travel story in history: Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 tale uses a soft magic system in the sense that the time travel is done by ghosts. That is about as soft as you can get. While Carol uses the time travel as a means of character development — which is typically how a hard magic system is utilized — its mysterious nature is crucial to understanding the character’s journey. Scrooge is being given what amounts to a miracle, a last chance to change his ways. The fact that three ghosts appear in succession shows the severity of his current state and his need for transformation.
When it comes to time travel, A Christmas Carol is a bit of an outlier. On the one hand, it’s a soft system because the ghosts can pretty well do what they want. By definition a miracle has no rules attached to it. But on the other hand, it’s a hard magic system because Marley’s ghost does give a set of rules — Scrooge will be visited by three further ghosts: Past, Present, and Future — and this rule creates a ticking clock that drives the plot forward. If the magic systems were on a line and point A was soft and point C was hard, I would say that A Christmas Carol is point B, directly in the middle. It strikes a perfect balance between both systems. Perhaps that’s why it’s a classic.
(Muppet version, 1992)
But alas, A Christmas Carol isn’t science fiction, and in order to illustrate my point, I need two examples from the sci-fi genre. That means omitting not only Carol but Groundhog Day (1993), and The Butterfly Effect (2004) from the running, even though they all deal with time travel beautifully.
Making a soft magic system work
With that in mind, I’ll begin with a positive example of a soft magic system. As much as it pains me to say it, H.G. Wells’s novella The Time Machine (1895) is the most classic example of a soft magic system in science fiction — done right.
How the time machine works is irrelevant. Wells focuses on his social commentary — repugnant as it is. The time machine in the story is simply a device to accomplish that end — to establish a scenario where a man can postulate about the future of humanity. To create tension, he allows the machine to be machine stolen; however, this is a plot device that mostly explains why it took the traveler so long to return from his journey. It does not create a story question.
Because Wells’s primary focus in the book is his social commentary, the only issue he has to address is, if the technology works, why there aren’t more time machines? He deals with that handily by having the traveler disappear, never to return, at the end of the book.
Making a hard magic system work
When it comes to a hard magic system, I’m going with Timeline (1999). I haven’t read the novel by Michael Crichton (1942‒2008) but in the movie version (2003), each time the machine is used, it damages the user. The damage the machine does is compared to a fax machine distorting the letters on a document. Every time the users travel, they are altered in some way. Thus they can only travel into the past so many times to complete their task without risking serious bodily harm. This is one of several of the film’s rules that generate complications for the characters.
It would take another series to explain all the things these films do right when handling the subject of time travel. But for this article, I want to focus on one crucial point that both stories have in common: In both stories, the systems are used to establish limits, something the Terminator franchise never did. The machine can only be operated a certain number of times, either because it breaks, or it does damage to the user, or it is stolen, or whatever.
It’s the same principle as the fact that there are only so many bullets in the chamber of a gun. Setting limits to the system is the first step to establishing stakes in a story.
The larger problem of understanding time
We also need to ask what approach should be taken to time itself. Should the writer lean toward fate or toward the butterfly effect? Most writers wisely try to find a middle ground. The best way to describe their tactic would be to say that in all cases, time should remain a soft system because theories about time are not well understood. But the machine itself can be either a hard or soft system, depending on which approach better fits the story.
Note also that the type of time system utilized — fate or the butterfly effect — is not nearly as important when the protagonist is traveling into the future. Whatever damage is done in the future can be undone for the purposes of the story by returning to the present. Thus, a safe way to use time travel in writing would be to travel into the future and ignore the troublesome questions that come with journeying into the past.
But that would be too easy. So, next Saturday, I intend to build a plot that deals with traveling into the past. We will walk through that process then, in the final article of this series. See you then!
Here are the earlier essays on my series on time travel in science fiction:
The pluses and the perils of time travel in science fiction. Time travel can be treated as a form or hard or soft “magic” but it is important not to confuse the two. Soft magic is vague and incidental; hard magic imposes rules on the story. Too often in science fiction, these rules get broken.
Time travel: How and why the Terminator series worked — then didn’t Part 2: Time travel works well enough as a soft magic system but time-travel stories run into problems when it is treated as a hard magic system. Terminator 3 crossed into hard magic territory when it added the concept of fate to time travel, which means that specific rules began to matter.
Time Travel: The threat of escalation in the Terminator series. Part 3: The Terminator series writers never knew whether there would be a sequel, and that had implications for how they plotted time travel. Shrouding the story rules in mystery only works with soft magic systems, where the story focus is on something other than the system.
