The Time Traveler's Almanac

As a broad survey it’s invaluable, and in one way this book can be seen as a cultural almanac. Charting how we’ve used this infinitely malleable tool of time travel to engage with the changing landscape around us is a tempting method for mapping our recent history. A back-to-back reading of Wells’s “The Time Machine” with Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” makes your stomach drop, as within a few quick pages we plunge from the scientific advancements of the late 1800s that were opening the world up for mankind to those of the 1950s that were threatening to bring the sky down onto his puny head. Flip a few more pages into Reagan’s 1980s in Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which the enemy (and focal point of the story) is no longer technology at all but a vision of a utopian society rising from the mythologies of the past to crush what makes modern man human.

Sci-fi attracts armchair tinkerers. I know that I’m one myself. It makes sense that the take-it-apart-and-see-why-it-works (or if-it-works) instinct is drawn to this impossibly broad realm of fiction whose one unifying element is some degree of world-building. The one thing you know when you pick up a science fiction story is that there will be some sort of geared mechanism at its core that you can take apart and analyze, whether it’s a PKDish thought puzzle or an Asmovian interplanetary society. If you’re denying your healthy (and encouraged!) flipping instinct and are still reading this introduction in a few paragraphs I’ll passionately argue that this is not the essential appeal of great sci-fi, but it’s a biggie. When it comes to time travel stories this tinkering instinct kicks up into a higher gear, but is also (to badly mix bad metaphors) a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, the pleasure of time travel dissection is a beautiful and necessary thing. If someone hands you a kinked-up slinky, what do they expect you to do with it? Turn it over in your hands and appreciate the beauty of the tangle? Nuts to that. “Let’s see if we can untangle and make sense of this thing” is part of its purpose, and a good time travel story will have an interior logic that encourages and stands up to untangling, and smoothly slinks down the stairs when you’re finished. However, with time travel stories there’s also a unique danger to this untangling. There is, I believe, a right and a wrong way to do it, and the wrong way can very easily lead to becoming “that guy.” You know the guy I’m talking about. He’s the guy who can talk to you for an hour at a party (in a tone pitched between the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and a Whit Stillman character) about why this or that slinky is well tangled or isn’t, but doesn’t seem to actually enjoy playing with them.

When we’re talking about whether or not a story’s “time travel logic” makes sense, it is important to remember that every story builds its own framework for its own logic. In that sense, time travel is more of a fantasy-based story element than a science-based one. Time travel does not exist in the real world, and any broadly accepted rules for how it can and can’t work were derived from a bunch of “that guys” talking about time travel fiction. There is no “makes sense” in the universal sense – that is to say, criticizing a time travel story because its rules do not line up with rules in the real world is akin to dismissing the Harry Potter books because the conductive properties of wood could never sustain the energy required for spell casting.

Approaching a time travel story with a dogmatic measuring stick in hand also denies the unique pleasure that the genre affords tinkerers. A good story’s internal logic is flawless, and everything in between its first and last word makes sense on its own terms. In that way, it presents the tinkerer with the literary equivalent of an Escher drawing. Internally, step by step, the logic of Escher’s staircase makes (or makes you believe it makes) nefariously perfect sense, and its dissonance with what we know to be possible is not something you have to “just accept and get over to enjoy it,” but is the very source of what’s enjoyable about it.

For all its pleasures, though, the untangling-game cannot sustain a story, let alone a sub-genre that has thrived for so many years. Something about the concept of time travel snaps into our selves like a jigsaw-puzzle piece, just like invisibility or the power of flight. It is wish fulfillment on a primeval level of the psyche. When I fly in my dreams I’m not doing any of the “wouldn’t it be cool to…” things that our conscious minds wish for, like saving time getting across town or arriving at parties through the window or having lunch on top of the Empire State Building. In my dreams I’m just flying, and just that feeling of soaring through the air feels like it scratches some deeply rooted itch.