Time Travel. A History

We have to ask these questions, don’t we? Is the world we have the only world possible? Could everything have turned out differently? What if you could not only kill Hitler and see what happens, but you could go back again and again, making improvements, tweaking the timeline, like the weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) in one of the greatest of all time-travel movies, reliving Groundhog Day until finally he gets it right.

Is this the best of all possible worlds? If you had a time machine, would you kill Hitler?

*1 Opinions vary. James E. Gunn (1958): “You are naked, because you can take nothing with you, just as you can leave nothing behind. Those are the two natural rules of time travel.”

*2 “…that the friend and companion who ran the household was the mother of one of these young people, that young Miss so and so, who played Badminton with a preoccupied air was the last capture of Hubert’s accomplished sex appeal. All this E. Nesbit not only detested and mitigated and tolerated, but…I think found exceedingly interesting.” Then again, Wells himself fathered children with various women besides his wife, and may have had an affair with one of Bland’s illegitimate daughters. Free love, after all.

*3 The book is dedicated to the British Museum’s leading Egyptologist, Wallis Budge.

*4 For example, Mr. Peabody solemnly explains that Isaac Newton had a brother, Figby, who invented a cookie.

*5 The reader may recall an entirely different Time and Again. There have been at least three. As the time-travel express got going, in the second half of the twentieth century, publishers must have had a panicky realization that they were using up all the possible titles. They run together in the mind: Time and Again — Time After Time — From Time to Time — Out of Time — A Rebel in Time — Prisoner of Time — The Depths of Time — The Map of Time — The Corridors of Time — The Masks of Time — There Will Be Time — Time’s Eye. At least four novels have been titled Time After Time.

*6 Rosenfeld then started a blog, The Counterfactual History Review, and embarked on a collection to be titled If Only We Had Died in Egypt!: What Ifs of Jewish History.

*7 In an odd coincidence, Le Guin had gone to high school with Philip K. Dick, as she realized later. “Nobody knew Phil Dick,” she told The Paris Review. “He was the invisible classmate.”

*8 She said to an interviewer, Bill Moyers, “The book is full of dreams and visions, and you are never sure which is which.”

*9 Indeed, it is the essence of doublethink. “This demands a continuous alteration of the past.” The literal rewriting of history was Winston Smith’s day job, remember, in the Minitrue RecDep (Ministry of Truth Records Department).

ELEVEN

The Paradoxes

This seems to be a paradox. But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

—Søren Kierkegaard (1844)

PROPOSITION: Time travel is impossible, because you’d be able to go back and kill your grandfather, in which case you, the murderer, would never have been born; and so on, and so on.

We’ve been here before. We are in the domain of logic, which is, let’s remember, a country distinct from the domain of reality. Its inhabitants speak a dialect of their own, resembling natural language and often quite understandable, but full of pitfalls. A thing can be logically possible yet empirically impossible. If the logicians give us permission to build a time machine, we may still not be able to build it.