Time Travel discussion

Hello everyone,

In my opinion there are two kinds of time travel story: "Ooh, isn't the past pretty?" and "Let's break the universe!"

The novel I'm currently working on fires square into the second category. More specifically focusing on paradoxes and the fun that comes from making causality weep. I love paradoxes and stories that really mess with the mechanics of time, so I was wondering if anybody would like to help me come up with some paradoxes or unconventional uses of time travel to play around with?

The structure of my story is strictly short-range time travel using a portable self-powered time device. Time functions in a similar manner to the Back to the Future films (delayed ripple-effect in a singular timeline), but with a bit more rigid structure (changes can be made but they will resist and undoing changes becomes increasingly harder). I've already got a plan for the grandfather paradox and have a ton of ideas for playing around with stable and unstable time loops, but I'd like to see what others have to suggest.

I'd really love to get in and demolish the universe without actually destroying it (so no instant time-crash ... At least not right away). I'm hoping to make this story as mindscrewy as possible while still having it make sense. I look forward to hearing what people come up with.

I remember one time travel movie where the missions were VERY simple (but of course something goes wrong).

For example, one mission was to go back in time and put a quarter in a parking meter. Why? Because otherwise the owner of the car will be in the court house a month later, settling the ticket, and die when terrorists attack.

Oh, so simple. Right? :)

Adam, the possibilities are nearly infinite. How short range is that device of yours? If you can go back to the early 20th Century, then you will have a lot to pick from, like:
- Go foil the assassination of JFK (kill the shooter before he gets into place).
- Go sell/give to the news medias copies from the future of the Nixon Tapes...before those are even known to exist, then watch the political storm that will follow.
- Use past editions of the Wall Street Journal to go play with the New York Stock Exchange and make millions while throwing off a few stocks.
- Do the same with horses races and bet big on the horses you know will win.
- Send anonymous tips to the police that will stop in advance or uncover one or more infamous serial killers in recent USA history (like John Malvo, aka the Washington Sniper).

I could go on for quite a while in the same vein. Take your pick.

Michel wrote: "Do the same with horses races and bet big on the horses you know will win."

Won't work well. Horse racing uses parimutuel pools. So the more you bet, the smaller the payout.

You may be able to find someone that pays track odds that doesn't pool your bets, but they will usually limit your bet size. Especially on long shots.

And some of the big time bookies used to have people at the track to make sure horses wouldn't go off at more than 20-1.

And if you use a bookie, they're going to be curious why you're always winning, because those winnings are coming out of their pockets. Not a good outcome down the road.

Plus, if there is corruption or manipulation going on at the track, your big bet may change who wins. :)

Michel wrote: "- Go foil the assassination of JFK (kill the shooter before he gets into place)."

A new Twilight Zone episode had a historian go back and prevent the JFK assassination. It ends up causing WW III, with nuclear annihilation.

I remember one plea to time travelers to NOT assassinate Adolf Hitler, as someone more competent may take his place. :)

I had actually started a new book months ago about Hitler and most of his top minions dying in an airplane accident in 1940, early during the Battle of France. I believe that my premise about the outcomes was quite valid and plausible, but I got so depressed about writing about the Nazis invading Great Britain that I stopped writing that novel and put it aside. In particular, I was worried that some readers would react badly to that novel and would brand me a neo-Nazi, which I am certainly not.

Michel wrote: "Send anonymous tips to the police that will stop in advance or uncover one or more infamous serial killers in recent USA history (like John Malvo, aka the Washington Sniper)."

There was another new Twilight Zone episode where a professor would go back in time and kill serial killers before they had killed anyone.

It was an interesting moral dilemma, as it meant they were "innocent" of any crime at the time she killed them. Would it have been more correct to have tried to "rehabilitate" their future behavior? Or is murder just the "easiest" solution?

By short-range I mean restricted to the lifetime of the user and due to a mess I'm planning to make in my character's past the limit drops to around eleven years or so, but I was thinking more mucking around inside the span of days, weeks at most. Really more of "I have a time machine, let's have fun" than "Let's kill Hitler" levels.

Also going to be playing on the four-dimensional nature of time travel a bit. The character has a time machine and will keep using it, so there is an entire future of time travel ahead that will be reflecting back even when they do manage to change events.

One of the things they are using it for is to run an unlicensed detectives agency and helping prevent accidents.

I'll explain a little bit of the plot.

It's about a girl who stole her father's time machine and accidentally caused her own death when she was six. She can't go back and undo it without being grandfathered in a rather nasty way, so she has to keep tangling her timeline to keep from being erased. To give her life meaning in a timeline where her father is missing and she officially died at aged six, she sets up a business using time travel to subtly alter the past.

Need a few ways to break time and cause paradoxes without going too big and breaking everything.

Anyone familiar with Prince of Thorns

I know its not a time travel book but the Protagonist is an Antagonist....The main character being an anti-hero. A real bad guy.

So with that said, why change the past for good by causing paradoxes...change the past for bad and worse...or even chaos.

Some scientists predicted colliding electrons in the Large Hedron Collider would create a black hole and destroy the Earth...even with this possibility they went ahead with it.

Wholesale of political manipulations, markets, campaigns, drug lords, mafias, terrorists groups, gun running, In a word you could become the most powerful single individual on the planet. Often this would make you a dictator of a country, but what if you didn't just have influence on a local or regional scale, but a global one. Also, if your goal is break the universe, drive people crazy by not laying out your intentions for the world...

Have people doing things for you out of fear of others...and than turn the entire story into the main character trying to stay alive because despite his power he will be universally hated.

Already have a villain in mind that hits most of those marks. A time traveller who went nuts and decided they were god of time and space. Got a few ideas on how to achieve wholesale carnage from as little a half dozen eggs. Hoping to play with a lot of time travel tropes and paradoxes before I'm done.

I'm currently writing a book where time travel causes a breakdown in multiple universes. It gives me an opportunity to expand an exploration of a multiple universe scenario with time travel. So, in my case, I'm literally breaking the universe.

Putting it back together again is the hard part. Which ending do you want? Cautionary tale (we're so depressed), happy Hollywood (big explosion and setup for a sequel), Scooby-Do (I would have gotten away with it, too if it weren't for those darn kids), Star Trek (everything's back the way it started), obvious (we saw this coming in chapter one), Alice in Wonderland (are you insane?) or obscure (what???)?

I know how I'm ending mine, but I don't think my solution would work for others. The fix (or failure) at the end is usually the high point of a time travel story. How would you like to end yours?

Ubiquitous wrote: "I'm currently writing a book where time travel causes a breakdown in multiple universes. It gives me an opportunity to expand an exploration of a multiple universe scenario with time travel. So, in..."

I've already go my ending in mind (probably falling towards Happy Hollywood right now), but what I want to do is break the universe a little on the road to that ending. I might be aiming to big but I want the story to be as much about paradoxes as it is time travel. I also want to have fun while doing it.