I’ve been discussing some of the rules for telling an effective time-travel story. Last Saturday, I offered a couple of examples from sci-fi where the trope done right. So now my aim is to put everything together and build a hypothetical plot from scratch.
The first question
The first question when dealing with a story about time travel is: How should time operate? As noted last time, we want to keep time itself as a soft magic system because theories about time are not well understood. We want to avoid the two extremes — implacable fate and the butterfly effect, where huge future changes may result from small past ones. Both ends of that spectrum are too likely to create plot holes later in the narrative.
In my opinion, a writer should avoid multiverse scenarios — sometimes referred to as alternate timelines — like the plague. Bluntly, multiverses kill emotional stakes. No one is going to care about a character if infinite iterations of that character could be running up and down infinite timelines. Stories must conclude, and they can’t conclude if another version of the character can reset things at a writer’s whim. I’ve addressed this before while reviewing films so I won’t rehash it further.
An alternate timeline can work in stories where the characters are traveling into the future because — as I noted last Saturday — the future can always be reset by returning to the present. However, from a storytelling standpoint, I’m limiting the plot I intend to construct to traveling into the past because traveling into the past is more difficult than traveling into the future. It is a better test of my approach.
What if time travel is soft magic but the machine itself is hard magic?
How should we address our theory of time while keeping time travel a soft magic system? I’m choosing to do that by setting limits to the time machine itself. The goal is to keep time a soft system (a bit fuzzy) while making the machine itself a hard system (there are definite rules).
Let’s say our traveler has a machine that can transport him through time. But his machine operates within a force field of sorts. Thus he can only affect things within a certain radius. And to keep things from getting confusing, he can only stay in the past for an hour. If he stays longer than an hour, his machine runs out of power.
This creates a believable scenario. Even if something like the butterfly effect were in play, the future chaos could be mitigated by the force field. The character doesn’t have to worry about avoiding changes to an entire environment, just the changes within a certain radius. And say he did change something he shouldn’t have, then all he has to do is rewind the clock a few minutes and undo whatever he did. He can anticipate problems by limiting the space and thus limiting the other variables. Any loops or paradoxes or alternate versions of the character would all be contained within the force field.
The advantages of making the machine itself a hard system (even if time is soft)
I can play time’s interaction with this machine however I want. If I want to make time a soft system, then I simply have to avoid letting my character stepping on a butterfly or otherwise making any drastic changes within the radius. This is believable because the character is operating within a small space.
If I want to lean into something like the butterfly effect, then I can add other rules. Let’s say I want to introduce a humorous element: The character, despite having tried to avoid it, does step on a butterfly. So he rewinds time — and steps on an ant instead. But a moment later, the version of him that stepped on the butterfly appears, and the two start fighting because they don’t know which version is the real one who should return to the present.
In this scenario, I still get the chaos generated by the butterfly effect and its paradoxes. But I don’t have to worry that the ripples through time will create something that is hardly credible — like our character returning to the present to find everyone transformed into lizards.
The advantage of the force field concept
I can go soft or hard with this approach. The introduction of the force field focuses the story on the mechanics of the machine rather than on time itself. If I wanted to be very careful, I could explain how the environment interacts with the machine. For example, I could describe a bird flying through the bubble, which is technically another segment of time. Perhaps a hunter on the ground sees the bird disappear — then reappear a moment later. The bird doesn’t know what happened; however, the hunter on the ground is very confused.
But I don’t, strictly speaking, have to do this because the force field itself is establishing the setting of the story. Everything outside of the bubble is as relevant or irrelevant as I want it to be. The force field can be as big or as small as I want it to be.
What about leaving the force field?
I could make leaving the force field a cardinal sin because nobody knows what will happen if a person steps into another time and starts affecting the environment. In that scenario, time is a full soft magic system with a mystery element. So, in this case, that’s how I’m going to treat the subject. The force field is small, and everything inside it is safe. Everything outside of the force field is the unknown, and to step outside of it is like opening Pandora’s box.
Overall, the direction I go in, as a storyteller, should be determined by the kind of story I want to tell. I’ve gone into so much detail here because there’s a specific way I’m choosing to implement the rules. I’ll explain more once I’ve finished putting together the plot.
The next big question
So, now that we’ve established how our traveler is traveling, we need to ask why he’s traveling. Let’s say he’s just seeing the sights. He doesn’t need to dress for the period because nobody can see him in his time machine. The force field acts like a one-way mirror; as long as he stays inside it, he doesn’t risk the unknown, even if he observes significant historical events. But there is still a problem. I’ll address that in my final article in this series next Saturday.
