Why
Write
About Time Travel?
It's
fascinating to think that one could travel through the time space
continuum to a land of the past or future. Just think about it, to
see the things we missed by being born in a different decade, century
or
even millennium would be so awesome. To learn how we evolved as
humans and to see how we will evolve as creatures in space. I chose
Time Travel for my novels because I felt
that
the genre of fictional, historical romance needed a face lift. A
rejuvenation of sorts. Time travel is a popular theme in fiction and
has been depicted in a variety of media from television to
advertising. It can be the central theme of the plot, or merely a
plot
device
to set the story in motion.
In
some science fiction stories, time travel is included in the plot or
then again normal time speed has been slowed down. Hard science
fiction may
restrict
time travel by examining the causes and effects of time travel
paradoxes; soft science fiction, fantasy and science fantasy may
ignore
these
aspects and focus on fantastic wonders and adventures. I love Regency
and Victorian era romance novels, always have, but something was
missing,
the
element of wonder and awe. To be able to be a character who is in the
modern world and travel backwards or forwards in time seemed like the
ultimate read to me.
Others
don't see it that way. They see erotica, contemporary romance,
science fiction and horror as the money makers. This may all be true.
But for this author, time travel
is
the ultimate in cliffhanging and plot theory creation. I hope you
will enjoy some facts that I dug up regarding time travel.
Sources:
Although
The Time Machine (by H. G. Wells, published 1895) was instrumental in
moving the concept of time travel to the forefront of the public
imagination, non-technological forms of time travel had appeared in a
number of earlier stories. Some even earlier works had featured
elements suggestive of time travel, but remain somewhat ambiguous.
•In
ancient Hindu mythology, the Mahabharata, written around 700 B.C.
mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to a different
world to meet the creator Brahma. The King is shocked to learn that
many ages have passed when he returns to Earth.[4]
•Another
very old example of this type of story can be found in the Talmud,
with the story of Honi HaM'agel, written in 300 A.D., who went to
sleep for 70 years and woke up to a world where his grandchildren
were grandparents and where all his friends and family were
dead.[citation needed]
•Urashima
Taro, an early Japanese tale, involves traveling forward in time to a
distant future,[5] and was first described in the Nihongi. The tale
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 is in ruins, and his family
long since dead.[5]
•In
Walter Map's 12th century De nugis curriculum ("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 the
documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing, "[i]t would be
stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to
show a traveler arriving from the future", but he 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 into the future (AD
7603) by a good fairy.
•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 it,
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. There 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. However, the things he sees are merely "shadows";
he and the Ghosts do not interact with them.
•The
book Paris avant les hommes ("Paris before Men"), by the
French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard (published posthumously
in 1861), has the main character transported to various prehistoric
settings by the magic of a "lame demon", and who is then
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, each 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 (and written under the
pseudonym F. Anstey), was the first story to explore the paradoxes
that time travel might cause.
•Golf
in the Year 2000 (1892), by J. McCullough, tells the story of an
Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and awakened 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 devices similar to television and women's equality.
Themes:
•Changing
the past: in this genre, a visitor to the past changes history using
knowledge and/or technology from his or her own time, either for good
or evil, creating an alternate history as a result.[citation needed]
Examples of this genre include Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de
Camp and the 2009 Star Trek film.
•The
Guardians of time: in this genre, a group of people are charged with
ensuring that time turns out "properly" (i.e. protecting it
from changes by other time travelers).[citation needed] Examples of
this genre include John Schettler's Meridian series and Simon Lee's
Timekeepers. TimeRiders, a series of novels by author Alex Scarrow,
tells the story of three people who have been rescued moments before
death and recruited into a secret organization in order to prevent
time travel from unraveling history.
•
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 resulted in the end of the
world. The characters try to change something in the present which
prevents that future from coming to pass.[citation needed] The
Terminator film franchise includes several stories of time travelers
from the future waging war with each other so as to create or prevent
a post-apocalyptic future. In the TV series Terra Nova, humans travel
85 million years into the past in an effort to prevent a later
disaster from occurring.
•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.
