Thursday 6 August 2020

How To Improve Time Travel Fiction?

I question whether this is even possible but how might it be done?

Major works have been written by:

HG Wells
L. Sprague de Camp
Robert Heinlein
Ward Moore
Poul Anderson
Harry Harrison
Jack Finney
Tim Powers
Audrey Niffeneger

(Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court counts as American literature but is not, in my opinion, a major contribution to time travel.)

There is previous discussion of these authors on this blog and on Logic of Time Travel.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series presents:

many concretely realized historical periods;
discussions of historical processes;
speculative alternative histories;
clever circular causality paradoxes;
subtle treatment of the causality violation paradox;
narratives of different lengths and types;
increasing subtlety and complexity over decades of the author's career;
not only historical but also mythological writing;
original ideas - a quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy and a personal causal nexus.

For refinements of circular causality in a single immutable timeline, we can read three works by Heinlein and one each by Harrison, Powers and Niffeneger but also The Corridors Of Time, There Will Be Time and The Dancer From Atlantis by Poul Anderson.

So how might this be improved on? I don't really know. Please bear with me while I compose a further post.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would classify Wells' THE TIME MACHINE as a pioneering work of that sub-genre of science fiction, but not necessarily as one of its best examples. Trail-blazing works tend to be surpassed by successors. And I think it will be very hard for anyone to write better time traveling stories than the ones written by Anderson.

Ad astra! Sean