Science Fiction Newsletter- Oct 2010

October 1, 2010

Editor: EarlyHours-A Vigilante Ranger




1. About this Newsletter
2. Letter from the Editor
3. Special Feature
4. Editor's Picks
5. Ask & Answer

Do You Have the Time?

Time Travel is another one of the "Big Topics" in science fiction. But what is time? Does it move like a river, or ebb and flow like the tides of an ocean? Is it directional? Does it bend? Does it pass in quantum units or is it continuous? Contrary to what you might think, this newsletter probably won't answer all of these questions. Treating the subject fairly would require more space-time than a single Newsletter could provide. While the topic can be approached on many levels, this NL will focus on aspects of time travel that could be of practical interest to us as writers. This is not to minimize the importance of the scientific aspects and theoretical physics inherently involved, but just to push them a little beyond our scope for now.

"Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin,' Into the future." Steve Miller

Please Don't Step on the Butterflies

From a literary point of view, time travel is a great vehicle for telling stories and teaching lessons. After all, time travel has given us the original butterfly effect, a Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Morlocks, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and most importantly, Marty McFly. What could be cooler than being able to jump to any point in the past or future? Okay, maybe faster than light speed travel, but you could argue that that is time travel. Who would you visit? Or more importantly, who would your characters visit? Would they attempt to change history by interfering with the past, or would they be passive observers? There are all sorts of ways to play with time in science fiction, and the literature is riddled with a variety of approaches, having a mix of positive and negative results.

As science fiction writers, regardless of the science behind our time machines, we need a literary device capable of getting our characters back and forth across time. Here are a few methods, tried and true, which are guaranteed to be completely scientifically sound for your fictional characters to use:

Rewinding Time: In this method you keep your character stationary, and time rewinds all around him like a video running backwards. He can't interact with anything until stopped. H.G. Wells' Time Machine comes to mind here. Feel free to fast-wind in either direction.

Materialization: Your character just steps into a machine, disappears, and reappears in the past (or future). The majority of time travel stories rely on some form of this method, utilizing everything from DeLorians to phone booths to, dare I say, hot tubs. In many stories, the character can interact with, and even change history. Usually, upon returning to "present time," only the traveler notices the consequences of those changes. To everyone else, it's all just part of history.

Time shifting: Suppose you woke up tomorrow and it was 1999. You didn't do any time traveling but for whatever reason, the universe's time frame shifted around you. Now you are effectively in the past, still possessing your current-day knowledge. So what did the actual moving in time, you or the universe? Could it all be relative? Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novel Timequake was based on the premise of a quake in time, where everybody time shifted, but they could not act or do anything differently than the first time through. It's frustrating to say the least, but it gave Vonnegut the means to bring up the philosophical question of free will and determinism.

Body snatching: Your character can go back in time by transferring his essence into someone who lived "back then." Story lines can be built from his interaction with people of the day who think they know him. Quantum Leap did this. It is a method of dropping your character into a situation in the past without anyone questioning his presence.

Relativistic effects: The so-called relativistic effect can be used to make a character go into the future. When someone travels close to the speed of light, there is an associated slowing-down of time. To the traveler, time seems to progress normally, but upon returning home she finds that hundreds of years have gone by. This actually works, to a degree. Time does move slower (or differently) for bodies in motion compared to bodies at rest. This has been definitively proven by people that must not already have a permanent headache from thinking about this stuff.

Past Time Viewing: Not technically time travel, but being able to see into the past, or interact with it through technology, is close enough to include here. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days, explores this in detail. In this classic, the creation of past time viewing allowed everyone to see anything, anywhere, and any time. Privacy ended, governments ceased to function, and modesty disappeared forever.

In fiction, classic time travel refers to moving between points in time like one would move between points in space. The traveler disappears and reappears in exactly the same spot, because only the fourth dimension of time is traversed (not those pesky three spatial dimensions). But as science fiction enthusiasts, we know it's not that simple. When you factor in space with time, things can get complicated. For example, the simple devices don't take into account the motion of Earth between the date the time machine dematerializes, and the date it rematerializes. Since the planet (as well as the whole galaxy) is moving, time travelers must also traverse space in order to reappear in the same apparent position.

So I urge you to include at least a little science in your time travel stories, because you don't want your main character materializing thousands of miles away in deep space. I can tell you from experience, that's no fun.

"Time travel, it's a cornucopia of disturbing concepts." Ron Stoppable

Science Fact
(or is it?)

If time travel were possible, it would be easier to go to the future than the past. Based on theoretical physics, and math that is well over my head, it would be easier to go to a future time that hasn't yet been determined, and has many possible states based on probabilistic outcome, than to return to a past that has already occurred, been observed, and therefore has a low probability of changing. Besides, entropy (disorder) constantly increases in the universe, creating a natural unidirectional arrow. Our brains measure subjective time in the direction in which entropy (disorder) increases, creating a perceived sequence of events. Would returning to a past time involve reducing universal entropy? Good luck with that! So far, I've only been able to do that with very small singularities that I make in my garage workshop.

Manipulating the space-time continuum is fair game in science fiction, as are classic time machines. But no discussion of time travel would be complete without a mention of the Grandfather Paradox. Paraphrased, the paradox is this:

If a man traveled back in time and killed his grandfather before his parent was conceived, then he would not have existed and therefore would not have been able to go back and kill his grandfather.

The paradox simplifies down to someone going back in time, and by whatever method, doing something that later prevents him from going back in time in the first place. This has been proposed as an argument against the viability of time travel.

Stephen Hawking, in his A Brief History of Time, proposes two resolutions to this type of paradox. The first, he calls "The Consistent Histories" approach, which says you could not go back in time unless history showed that you had already arrived in the past, and while there, had not done anything that would conflict with your current situation in the present. This suggests that, in the past, you wouldn't have free will to do what you wanted. The second resolution is the "Alternative Histories" approach, stating that upon traveling to the past, you create an alternative history that differs from recorded history. In this scenario, you do have free will, and therefore can affect recorded history. Back To The Future played with this idea. Physicist Richard Feynman speculated on another paradox resolution, describing an infinite number of timelines, each with its own probability. When you time travel back and "change things," you just start another timeline. You could jump back in your own timeline and start a new one, but not jump directly from one timeline to another that's already in progress. The so-called, "Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics," describes a very similar scenario. The characters in the late 1990s sci-fi TV series, Sliders, jumped across parallel worlds based on this concept. It gave the characters the opportunity to interact with parallel versions of themselves, providing the writers with many interesting opportunities for plot ideas and twists. A writer could use this device to help a character explore the "what if" question. What if I was a famous rock star? What if I was the President? Just hop over to a parallel world, and see how it would work out!

Most modern time travel discussions are based in Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which describes how space and time are curved and distorted by matter and energy in the universe. So as time travelers, we either have to find a wormhole that connects one region of space-time to another, or simply bend space-time back upon itself until two regions touch, and walk across. If you do this, be careful not to get caught in a space-time loop, and end up in a Groundhog Day predicament. I hate when that happens. If you do this, be careful not to get caught in a space-time loop, and end up in a Groundhog Day predicament. I hate when that happens.

"Yesterday, I went to the future and here I am!" Sean Carroll

The Time and Time Travel theme of this Newsletter is well represented by this month's Picks. Some are insightful, some are humorous, and some are informative, and all of them are very entertaining. Enjoy!

ID: 1300260   (Rated: E) A Copper-Plated Time Machine  Would it be all that wonderful to fly into the future? by Shaara

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ID: 394804   (Rated: E) A Jump in Time  Time travel gone wrong ...? by Sophy

ID: 1370314   (Rated: E) Got Time?  Published in the Tessmann Planetarium Spectator. by D. R. Prescott

ID: 1679701   (Rated: E) Dilation  Time is all in the details... by EvilDawg - A Vigilante Ranger!

ID: 1689950   (Rated: E) Only Time Will Tell  Time travel? Maybe or maybe not. by Wally Setter

ID: 1639511   (Rated: E) The First Time Machine  a young boy....invents a time machine? by k0s

ID: 1513630   (Rated: E) THE CARRIAGE  A visitor to London discovers H.G. Wells’s time machine and is accidently stranded. by Eugene Lawrance

ID: 1555378   (Rated: 13+) Mr. Rivera's Wondrous Machine  A story about a time machine... sort of. by Raison

Space-Time Poetry: If you have the time, this is the space:

ID: 889700   (Rated: 13+) It’s All In Your Viewpoint  A storoem about an 1870's view of the 21st century. by Harry

ID: 1655805   (Rated: E) Warped  Nonsense poem about time travel by Pastoral

ID: 759381   (Rated: ASR) Terran Rembrances  A lilibonelle about love, space, and time travel. by Shaara

ID: 1020051   (Rated: E) Of Time and String  contemplations of the possibilities found in string theory by sue sue

A time travel poll:

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Open For Discussion

Here is a list of some of the purported best time travel stories ever written. Think of this as a trip back into the past, as we stroll through the history of time travel literature. I have read some of these, but not all. And, of course, the list is by no means complete:

Rip Van Winkle (1819) by Washington Irving. Rip Van Winkle sleeps for 20 years, but when he wakes up, the world is very different. Is this time travel? Maybe to Rip.

A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens. Who could forget how Scrooge learned his lesson by being dragged through time by the three Ghosts?

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain. Hank Morgan is knocked out, and awakes in 528 A.D. He then works to modernize Camelot and the Kingdom of King Arthur. Of course modernizing to the standards of 1889 leaves a lot to be desired.

The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells. What could be more classic? A time-traveling carriage takes a scientist through time, where he discovers the Eloi and the Morlocks.

A Sound of Thunder (1952) by Ray Bradbury. Demonstrated how changing the past might affect the present in unpredictable ways. The term "Butterfly Effect" got its start from this story.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Optometrist and WWII soldier, Billy Pilgrim, gets "unstuck" and travels back and forth through time, becoming fatalistic when he finds out how he would die (in the future 1976).

Timescape (1980) by gregory Benford. One of my all-time favorites. Tachyons are used to warn scientists of the past about an upcoming disaster. And while they're at it, they may as well warn them about a few other things. Separate and different timelines, existing simultaneously, in resonance with each other... gotta love it!

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) by Douglas Adams. Part of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the restaurant, Milliway's, is located in the very last future time of the universe, and time travel is required to reach it and then to return back to original time.

To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997) by Connie Willis. A time machine is developed but has some pretty strict rules, like No bringing back anything from the past! But, of course, there's always some joker who tries to bring a cat from the 19th century to 2048.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger. This is part science fiction and part romance. A man has a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably. His wife has to deal with his frequent absences and dangerous experiences.


This list is incomplete at best. Do you think you know other great time-travel stories? Write in to this Newsletter and let me know. I'll include them in the next Newsletter! Post them at: "Science Fiction Newsletter Forum" .

Last month's Newsletter topic was Aliens and Invasions

In response to the question, "What do you think aliens would think of us?" LJPC - the tortoise sent in a great response: "I figure they'd be pretty amazed that a (pseudo) intelligent race would be squandering its natural resources with no regard for the consequences. Unless of course they'd already done that on their world and were coming to our world to take our stuff!"


The Newsletter also received general feedback about aliens and invasions:

Joy : "Thank you for this informative newsletter.
Although I am not a sci-fi writer, I can use all the information I can get.
"I really like non-humanoid aliens." Me, too. On the other hand, maybe readers or viewers can relate better to those with human assets.
Aside from the shifters, those who may visit us worry me. What if they see us in the same way as we see cockroaches?
Thanks again."

Michael : "One small correction--Ben Bova's metal eating bacterial "bugs" were in the atmosphere of (and novel titled) 'Venus', not 'Jupiter.'"
You are absolutely right! I stand corrected! - ed.

LJPC - the tortoise : "The general consensus is to imbue aliens with human-like feelings and tendencies to make them more accessible to the reader. While I have accepted this necessity, I don't like it. I would like to see truly alien beings who have entirely different outlooks and bear no similarity to humans - something completely original."

Thank you so much everyone! I really appreciate the feedback from readers. Keep it coming! - ed.

Don't Be Shy! Write Into This Unofficial Newsletter!

Reader feedback and comments is important to the Unofficial Science Fiction Newsletter (USFNL). As we go forward, much of the Newsletter's content will be based on reader feedback and discussion. Feedback can always be sent directly to EarlyHours-A Vigilante Ranger , but to make discussion even easier, a USFNL Forum has been set up. Feel free to post and interact at the Forum; some of the discussion may end up here! And don't forget to add the Forum (below) to your list of Favorites, and post often!

ID: 1703191   (Rated: 13+) Science Fiction Newsletter Forum  Discussion of NL Topics, Reader Feedback, Ask & Answer by EarlyHours-A Vigilante Ranger

Please check out our "sponsor":

ID: 1617315   (Rated: 18+) The Sci-fi Writers Guild  Collaborations, discussions and reviews - Welcome to the Sci-fi Writers Guild by EvilDawg - A Vigilante Ranger!

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!