Among my current PIPs (Projects In Progress) is a science fiction anthology, focused mainly on time travel; a sort of modern spin on the old Amazing Wonder Tales genre of pulp writing.
What really galls me is that I switched to that descriptive out of desperation. It became obvious even to their soulfully dedicated author (me) that these supposedly intense, thought-provoking works tended to morph into comic-book yarns by their final chapters.
Time travel never lends itself to concise parcels of resolution. No matter how well constructed the double-crux or triple-crux or however-many-crux of the ending… there's always a "but if."
But if he killed the murderer before the murder was committed, and the person originally the victim lives, then there's no longer motivation for a travel back in time to kill the guy who murdered him since no murder actually took place. But if you don't…? But if…
No writer has years and years to cover every angle, snip every conceivable loose thread, or even think of all the potential double, triple and quadruple-crosses made feasible by tampering even just once with a given timeline. Even if the writer only writes one time-travel story and spends decades backtracking and rerouting every misstep, some other will come along eventually with a "but if."
Quick, flawed solutions are an author's only hope.
If you race back in time and accidentally shoot your own grandfather before your parent is born, do you blink out of existence? And therefor erase your own act of grand-patricide? Thereby causing yourself to be born anyway? And race back in time again, and accidentally re-shoot your grandfather… and re-erase the act by re-blinking out of existence… and…
Or if you shoot your grandfather before your parent is born, are you still only born with a different hair color? A different ethnicity? A different sir-name? Was your soul waiting to emerge into the world anyway, and merely stepped into the next available timeline after you eradicated the previously original one?
Comic-book quick-fixes are to where all fantasy author's turn. Even the most intricately woven tapestries, by such "infallible" pens as those of H.G. Wells and others, are unwoven by a tug of a thread.
Some only make the journey to that implausible final chapter more entertaining than others do. They may even predict future events along the way, but the actual, plausible-no-matter-how-ridiculous destination of the trip belongs solely to we travelers of unglamorous reality.
The title of this upcoming attempt at flawless time-tripping is yet to be final. But watch this space! It's coming in the future.
"The future is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives!" – Criswell
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