Time travel in fiction
Time travel is a common theme in science fiction and is depicted in a variety of media. It simply means either going forward in time or backward, to experience the future, or the past.
Literature
Time travel can form the central theme of a book, or it can be simply a plot device. Time travel in fiction can ignore the possible effects of the time traveler's actions, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or it can use one resolution or another of the Grandfather paradox.
Early stories featuring time travel
Although The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was instrumental in causing the idea of time travel to enter the public imagination, non-technological forms of time travel had appeared in a number of earlier stories, and some even earlier stories featured elements suggestive of time travel, but remain somewhat ambiguous.
- Urashima Tarō, an early Japanese tale, involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future,[3] and was first described in the Nihongi (720).[4] It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.[3]
- In Walter Map's 12th century De nugis curialium (Courtiers' Trifles), Map tells of the Briton King Herla, who is transported with his hunting party over two centuries into the future by the enchantment of a mysterious harlequin.
- Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden is mainly a series of letters from English ambassadors in various countries to the British "Lord High Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British foreign office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and describing the conditions of that era. However, the framing story is that these letters were actual documents given to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in 1728; for this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728", although the book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained these documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing "It would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the future", but also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present."
- In the play Anno 7603, written by the Dano-Norwegian poet Johan Herman Wessel in 1781, the two main characters are moved to the future (AD 7603) by a good fairy.
- Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving's 1819 story, is about a man named Rip Van Winkle who takes a nap at a mountain and wakes up twenty years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his wife deceased, and his daughter grown up.[3]
- In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism, written for the Dublin University Magazine by an anonymous author in 1838, as a very early time travel story. In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach which will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years, where he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the developments of the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were merely a dream.
- In 1843, the Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol depicts Ebeneezer Scrooge being transported back and forth in time to points in his own lifetime by a series of ghosts to visit Christmases Past, Present and Future.
- The book Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men) by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boiterd, published posthumously in 1861, in which the main character is transported to various prehistoric settings by the magic of a "lame demon", and is able to actively interact with prehistoric life.
- The short story The Clock That Went Backward, written by editor Edward Page Mitchell appeared in the New York Sun in 1881, another early example of time travel in fiction.
- Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris, which feature a protagonist who wakes up in a socialist utopian future.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain.
- Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (written under the pseudonym F. Anstey) was the first story to play with the paradoxes that time travel could cause.
- Golf in the Year 2000 (1892) by J. McCullough tells the story of an Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and awakens in the year 2000. The focus of the book is how the game of golf would have changed by then, but many social and technological themes are also discussed along the way, including a device similar to television and women's equality.
Time travel themes and ideological function
A number of themes tend to recur in time travel stories, often with enough variations to make them interesting.
- Changing the past: in this genre, a visitor to the past changes history using knowledge and/or technology from their own time, either for good or evil, or sometimes accidentally, creating an alternate history as a result. Examples of this genre include Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp.
- The Guardians of Time: in this genre, a group of people are charged with ensuring that time turns out 'properly' (or protecting it from changes by other travelers). This includes The Big Time and the other Change War stories by Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, Simon Hawke's TimeWars series, John Schettler's Meridian Series, Simon Lee's Timekeepers, and The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Another example of this concept is the Doctor Who sci-fi series, whose main character is a "Time Lord" called "the Doctor" who personally intervenes to fight the evil he encounters if he is called on to do so and whose people are essentially scholars and historians who usually only observe histories.
- Preventing a bad future: in this genre, the main characters learn, either by going to the future and returning or by the arrival of a time traveler from the future, that the future has not turned out well, having either turned into a dystopia or resulting in the end of the world. The characters then try to change something in the present which prevents said future from coming to pass. The Terminator franchise includes several stories of time travelers from the future, waging war to create or prevent a post-apocalyptic future.
- Unintentional change or fulfillment: in this genre, a time traveler intends to observe past events, or is taken to the past against his will and tries to return to his proper time. However, the time traveler discovers that his actions have unintentionally altered the future because of the Butterfly effect. A Sound of Thunder is an example of this genre.
The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out.
—Sean Redmond,
Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)[5]
See also
References
- ^ Encyclopedia for Epics of Ancient India - Revati
- ^ Lord Balarama | Sri Mayapur
- ^ a b c Yorke, Christopher (February 2006), "Malchronia: Cryonics and Bionics as Primitive Weapons in the War on Time", Journal of Evolution and Technology 15 (1): 73–85, http://jetpress.org/volume15/yorke-rowe.html, retrieved 2009-08-29
- ^ Rosenberg, Donna (1997), Folklore, myths, and legends: a world perspective, McGraw-Hill, p. 421, ISBN 084425780X
- ^ Redmond, Sean (editor). Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.
External links