16 KiB
[Writing] £Time travel in Back To The Future£
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Author: u/MugaSofer *
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URL: http://qntm.org/bttf
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Score: 12
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Created: 2015-01-09T03:51:19
Post:
Comments:
u/libertarian_reddit [+4] (an hour later)
Wildbow should take a crack at a time travel story next. Wildboy does this like it's nothing. Wildboy eat complicated narrativeworld intrinsic laws and values for breakfast.
u/Lethalmud [+9] (3 hours later)
Wildbow would use some weird literary trick like he did with imp and ur.. Things like new chapters being added to old arcs or you just suddenly remembering you read the sequel five years ago.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (12 hours later)
Writing the chapters in random or non-linear order would be funny.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
I actually tried that with the opening of 2YE Book 2, and it was not popular. Fortunately, I realized pretty quickly that Book 2 was not about what I had thought it was about, and now I'm back to a linear structure.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Sort of like Homestuck is doing with the ret-John arc?
u/libertarian_reddit [+0] (3 hours later)
Lol
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
It's interesting that Back to the Future has an easy to understand system of time travel that works well with its story, while at the same time employing a lot of things that make close to zero sense. The "fading out of time" thing is the biggest culprit. Marty keeps looking at the photograph, where his siblings are fading out ... but his memories of them don't change, even though he and the photo were taken from the same moment? He sees his hand fading out of existence?
The reason to do it that way is visual impact for the audience, of course - otherwise you need establish the rules in some other way. I think the only reason that Marty has two siblings is so that they could do the picture countdown, which works really well as a "bad things" metaphor for the audience - but again, makes no sense.
It's possible to make "ripple effect" time travel work, though I don't really know of anyone that I would say has done it successfully (and like /u/sam512, I love time travel and have read/watched a ton of it).
Edit: The time travel model becomes truly incoherent in the second and third films, as much as I love them.
u/None [+4] (19 hours later)
[deleted]
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (20 hours later)
That's quite interesting - I never would have thought about that aspect of it. I suppose that them having their first child at 30 would be a little bit odd, though it didn't really occur to me because that's how old my parents were when they had their first child.
u/khafra [+3] (9 hours later)
By contrast, A Sound of Thunder has time travel of the "everything is broken, and you can't fix it" variety; and Harry Potter has the "the existence of time travel means only consistent, stable loops can exist" variety. Besides the multiple-worlds variants of the former, are there any other narrative varieties of time travel?
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (12 hours later)
You're missing:
- Time loops (as in Groundhog's Day)
- Two or more (fixed) timelines that create each other
- Time travel as universe hopping instead of literal backwards travel in time
- Time travel with the ripple model (changes to the time stream propagate forward at a certain number of seconds per second)
u/CopperZirconium [+3] (21 hours later)
And then you have "causality got drunk and can't remember what happened last night" à la Hitchhikers Guide.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (23 hours later)
Where does Doctor Who fit in?
u/eaglejarl [+2] (a day later)
Pretty similar to BTTF. Time tourism is ok, small changes can fix themselves. The one difference I can think of is that Dr Who has "fixed points in time" which absolutely cannot be changed, even by a Time Lord. There was one case (The Waters of Mars) where the Doctor tried his absolute best to change a fixed point and it...sorta kinda worked? It changed the way the events happened, but the same end point was still achieved. Specifically,
u/kaukamieli [+1] (a day later)
Except that The Doctor Lies and often just doesn't want to change stuff. I think that fixed points thing is just a lie, but might just not know better.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
Could be, but he did say that Jack Harkness is a fixed point, and that would fit well with Jack's "cannot be killed, at all, ever, by anything, even reforms if you blast him into red mist" schtick.
u/None [+3] (21 hours later)
The end of the first movie (at least, before Doc shows up again) has always bothered me. Marty steps into a life that's not his own, full of people that aren't the people he knew. Clearly he's still alive ... but he's taking the place of some other Marty. His brother and sister are virtually strangers to him, as are his parents. Even if history is kind to him, and the broad strokes are the same, certain things have to be different simply by virtue of the outcomes we're shown.
So Marty is left with all these unhappy memories of his parents fighting, when that presumably never happened in the new timeline. The film makes a point of things being different, but now Marty has to figure out a way to cope with that - hiding the fact that he's a Marty from another timeline, talking to people who aren't the same people he grew up with.
(My favorite ever fan theory, which doesn't work with the two subsequent sequels, is that there are in fact two of Marty, and each ends up in the other's timeline. Marty-One had a shit life, goes back in time, screws up his parents' meeting, gets them back together, and goes back to the future, having created Timeline-Two. Marty-Two is the one that Marty-One sees running off - he's the other Marty, the one with a good life and great parents, and when he gets to the past, he acts responsibly and doesn't interfere at all. Marty-Two spends an uneventful time in the past until the night of the lightning storm, then goes back to the future, having created Timeline-One. But the future he returns to isn't the one he left, because Marty-One and Marty-Two have effectively swapped places (also, Doc is probably dead in Timeline-One). It's a theory that got thoroughly shot to hell by the sequels.)
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
Triple post.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (59 seconds later)
Furthermore, each intuitively obvious bullet point is also clearly necessary to the story, because the alternative would be a different story with completely different themes, or even no story at all. The two are coupled: the model exists solely in order to support the story, and the whole story arises naturally from the model. Exactly which concept should come first in the writing process isn't important to the end product, although I believe that in this case it was the story. But the point is that story and model should be tailor-made for one another, they should fit like a hand and a glove.
This is not only true of time travel stories. This is a rule which can be applied to all science fiction, and arguably to all fiction not set in the present day of the real world - and even much of the rest.
u/Chosen_Pun [+2] The Chosen Ones (3 hours later)
They had me at
[chuckles indulgently, adjusts glasses]
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (13 hours later)
For a brilliant time travel movie, try Primer. It's...awesome, but also confusing since it's assuming the audience are geniuses. I highly recommend watching it with subtitles and have three hours free since you are going to want to rewatch it a few times to get everything that's happening.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (14 hours later)
Once you've watched the movie, you can read Time Travel in Primer by the same guy who wrote this article, or listen to his Primer fan commentary.
u/MugaSofer [+1] (2 minutes later)
Gah, what the heck? Those were supposed to be quotation marks, transmuted into pound signs somehow.
u/scooterboo2 [+2] Tinker 3: Embeded Systems (3 hours later)
Type them to me, I'll take a look at the bits.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (12 hours later)
£ here :) I copypasted one for you.
u/MugaSofer [+1] (13 hours later)
Here you go: "
u/kaukamieli [+1] (12 hours later)
"Chaos theory would suggest that as soon as a single molecule shifts out of place in 1955"
I somehow doubt moving some sand in some desert nobody ever goes does anything, really.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (14 hours later)
You change one molecule, you change everything that interacts with that molecule in any way - not just the molecules that bump into it, but every form of energy as well. You add in a molecule of sand, and that very subtly raises the amount of energy needed to heat the desert back up during the daytime, or cool it down in the night time. That in turn starts to make very small changes in the air currents, which in turn makes changes in the weather.
It's a snowball effect. Maybe nothing perceptible changes in the first month, or even in the first year, but eventually there are changes, and those changes compound into more changes. When those changes hit a person, the snowball gets big, fast. A variation in timing of a half second means that a different sperm gets to the egg, which means that a genetically different person is born - or possibly that no person is born at all.
So if you change a molecule in 1955, you should expect a fair amount of change by 1985 - maybe nothing world-shattering, but certainly a few different teenagers. The effects only grow as time passes. It's possible that you could find a molecule to change that has an effect that's perfectly canceled out, but I wouldn't count on it.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (17 hours later)
I would suspect that moving some sand in a desert would need way more time than 60 years or so to be noticeable. Sure, given enough time, but meh.
u/lolhaibai [+0] (a day later)
The end of the first movie (at least, before Doc shows up again) has always bothered me. Marty steps into a life that's not his own, full of people that aren't the people he knew. Clearly he's still alive ... but he's taking the place of some other Marty. His brother and sister are virtually strangers to him, as are his parents. Even if history is kind to him, and the broad strokes are the same, certain things have to be different simply by virtue of the outcomes we're shown.
So Marty is left with all these unhappy memories of his parents fighting, when that presumably never happened in the new timeline. The film makes a point of things being different, but now Marty has to figure out a way to cope with that - hiding the fact that he's a Marty from another timeline, talking to people who aren't the same people he grew up with.
(My favorite ever fan theory, which doesn't work with the two subsequent sequels, is that there are in fact two of Marty, and each ends up in the other's timeline. Marty-One had a shit life, goes back in time, screws up his parents' meeting, gets them back together, and goes back to the future, having created Timeline-Two. Marty-Two is the one that Marty-One sees running off - he's the other Marty, the one with a good life and great parents, and when he gets to the past, he acts responsibly and doesn't interfere at all. Marty-Two spends an uneventful time in the past until the night of the lightning storm, then goes back to the future, having created Timeline-One. But the future he returns to isn't the one he left, because Marty-One and Marty-Two have effectively swapped places (also, Doc is probably dead in Timeline-One). It's a theory that got thoroughly shot to hell by the sequels.)
u/lolhaibai [+0] (a day later)
The end of the first movie (at least, before Doc shows up again) has always bothered me. Marty steps into a life that's not his own, full of people that aren't the people he knew. Clearly he's still alive ... but he's taking the place of some other Marty. His brother and sister are virtually strangers to him, as are his parents. Even if history is kind to him, and the broad strokes are the same, certain things have to be different simply by virtue of the outcomes we're shown.
So Marty is left with all these unhappy memories of his parents fighting, when that presumably never happened in the new timeline. The film makes a point of things being different, but now Marty has to figure out a way to cope with that - hiding the fact that he's a Marty from another timeline, talking to people who aren't the same people he grew up with.
(My favorite ever fan theory, which doesn't work with the two subsequent sequels, is that there are in fact two of Marty, and each ends up in the other's timeline. Marty-One had a shit life, goes back in time, screws up his parents' meeting, gets them back together, and goes back to the future, having created Timeline-Two. Marty-Two is the one that Marty-One sees running off - he's the other Marty, the one with a good life and great parents, and when he gets to the past, he acts responsibly and doesn't interfere at all. Marty-Two spends an uneventful time in the past until the night of the lightning storm, then goes back to the future, having created Timeline-One. But the future he returns to isn't the one he left, because Marty-One and Marty-Two have effectively swapped places (also, Doc is probably dead in Timeline-One). It's a theory that got thoroughly shot to hell by the sequels.)
u/None [+0] (a day later)
The end of the first movie (at least, before Doc shows up again) has always bothered me. Marty steps into a life that's not his own, full of people that aren't the people he knew. Clearly he's still alive ... but he's taking the place of some other Marty. His brother and sister are virtually strangers to him, as are his parents. Even if history is kind to him, and the broad strokes are the same, certain things have to be different simply by virtue of the outcomes we're shown.
So Marty is left with all these unhappy memories of his parents fighting, when that presumably never happened in the new timeline. The film makes a point of things being different, but now Marty has to figure out a way to cope with that - hiding the fact that he's a Marty from another timeline, talking to people who aren't the same people he grew up with.
(My favorite ever fan theory, which doesn't work with the two subsequent sequels, is that there are in fact two of Marty, and each ends up in the other's timeline. Marty-One had a shit life, goes back in time, screws up his parents' meeting, gets them back together, and goes back to the future, having created Timeline-Two. Marty-Two is the one that Marty-One sees running off - he's the other Marty, the one with a good life and great parents, and when he gets to the past, he acts responsibly and doesn't interfere at all. Marty-Two spends an uneventful time in the past until the night of the lightning storm, then goes back to the future, having created Timeline-One. But the future he returns to isn't the one he left, because Marty-One and Marty-Two have effectively swapped places (also, Doc is probably dead in Timeline-One). It's a theory that got thoroughly shot to hell by the sequels.)