Time Travel

No, there probably won’t be any time travel in our story.  It’s just so hard to make a good time travel theory that makes sense/holds up to scrutiny.  If you haven’t thought about different literary theories of time travel, check out this link: http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=56475

I personally prefer either the fixed timeline or multiverse theories when considering time travel in fiction.  A dynamic timeline (where you can go back and change something and then go back to the future and see the changes) bothers me because somehow you don’t change as you go back and forth, even though your meddling in the past would have changed who you are.  How can you go back and time and kill your dad?  It creates a paradox, and those never really get resolved well enough for me.

The fixed timeline still bothers me though (you went back in time to do a thing that already happened because you went back in time, like in Harry Potter 3), because the thing in your relative past wouldn’t have happened if in the future you hadn’t gone back in time.  The thing that makes you go back in time is often the fact that you went back in time already, which is another causal paradox that bothers me.

At least in the multiverse theory (infinite number of possible universes) you aren’t really messing with your past, you are just hopping to a different universe.  No real paradoxes here.

I’ve also read a book that I thought did a really good job of time travel without really making any paradoxes.  It was Pastwatch The Redemption Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card.  In this story a couple of people eventually go back in time.  They can only send themselves back in time (not back and forth), which effectively completely changes the entire history of the planet.  They exist still and remember their previous lives from before they went back in time, but going forward everything will be different because of their meddling.  Nice and clean, with no real paradox issues.  Kind of the only way besides a multiverse that I think actually makes sense.

Anyways, I’ve had this discussion before with some people, but other people don’t always want to have deep conversations about fictional/theoretical topics.  I’d love some discussion from anyone else who has thought about time travel before.  Any other good literary examples of time travel that make sense?