Story Bone

Well, it's not so much of a bone as a thought process.

It probably has to do with the preponderance of time travel stories on Escape Pod, or the imminent arrival of "Sound of Thunder" (which, from what I hear, while an excellent short by Ray Bradbury, was a movie on full suck) on SciFi, but I've been thinking about time travel. Now, being an affectionado of Star Trek (in most of it's incarnations) I'm also no stranger to time travel functions. And in almost all circumstances, they get it all wrong (except "City on the Edge of Forever"). Not exactly the same curiosities as everybody else's "oo, what happens if we run in to something very historical, and then change it."

Sorry, not seeing it. More likely they would want to do the "if I only knew then what I know now" kinds of trips.

There's so many problems, physics aside, with time travel. "Terminator"? Go back in time to kill Conner? Why, transmit high end terminators back to a specific point at the beginning of the war and win decisive victory. Or at least a delaying movement, to build more terminators, to keep sending back to the same point, until victory is achieved. And why wouldn't both sides try to game the system this way? Armageddon.

The next major problem is the functionality of the time machine. Other than doing the short wormhole, then taking one end and using relativistic speeds create a short trip to the past through the wormhole (not exactly good fiction as the wormhole time trip is a fixed time in the past). So most other things you need to hand-wave your way around include becoming decoupled form the space time continuum in some fashion. The problem with that is the rest of the universe isn't exactly marking time in fixed areas of the space time continuum. The Earth revolves, and orbits in a non-circular path around the Sun. And the Sun isn't holding still either. and neither is the local cluster (yes, I could have teased it all out), so without powerful time mapping software, you're going to end up in the middle of the vacuum (odds are).

So if there is time travel, it'll be "magical tech" (ie. it has the Heisenberg Compensators and nanotech). And if the smallest thing can adjust the future, than just your presence there (breathing the air) will affect the future. Any trip back or forward will destroy the timeline. Most stories have the characters not trying to mess with the purity of time (even Douglas Adams eventually did a subplot on that), or preventing something catastrophic only to fail, or make it worse. I say, lets muck about in time. Since I now know that this one girl I knew whom I tried to get it on with, really liked "this" why wouldn't I go back and try to get my younger self laid (of which then I would have the memory)? Why wouldn't I go back and tell myself, "Don't sign that, don't go to this party, move faster here, slower there, and for gosh sakes, lighten up Francis." Why wouldn't I do my own version of Groundhog Day?