It’s all about time

If you think time is weighing more heavily upon you lately, then rest assured — it is. We are in the midst of a spiralling fascination with time travel that has been building for about two centuries and is now reaching one of its periodic crescendos. Sadly, it is also an intellectual boondoggle.

The warning signs have certainly been clear since last fall, when the unveiling of the current television season involved no less than three new shows linked to time travel (Timeless, Travelers, and Frequency). That was in addition to five other shows still in production from previous seasons (Outlander, 12 Monkeys, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and the wacky but eternal Doctor Who). While all this was unfolding, noted science writer James Gleick brought out his latest book, Time Travel: A History, which surveyed generations of cultural and scientific treatments of the topic. And, just in time for Christmas, the video game Assassin’s Creed, which features a murky sort of time travel (the accessing of ancestral memories) was converted into a movie.

If all that sounds excessive, it is in fact only somewhat unusual by the standards of time travel. In 2013, editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer brought out the most comprehensive anthology of time travel stories to date, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, comprising 66 yarns and almost a thousand pages.

Even what the VanderMeers achieved was the merest sampling, according to bibliographical work by engineer, science-fiction writer, and all-around time travel buff Paul J. Nahin. In 1993, Nahin released an astonishingly detailed volume about the science and science fiction of time travel, entitled Time Machines. Now regarded as a classic, it has gone through several editions, and the 1999 version lists roughly 700 short stories! It also lists about 200 novels, but Nahin ignored such things as 151 Doctor Who novelizations from the 1970s to the 1990s, as well as many fantasy works with significant time elements. Adding that material, plus whatever was published after 1999, likely brings the count to about 500 novels.

Yet the mountain of books is just a portion of the world of time travel. Going by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), film and television encyclopedias by Paul Hardy (1984) and Roger Fulton and John Betancourt (1998), plus the Internet Movie Database, one must conclude that time-related movies and television series number over 200 since 1905.

And there is still more. Over a dozen (at least) plays, musicals, and operas involving time travel have emerged since 1909. As for popular music, writer-musician Jason Heller has identified up to 40 pertinent songs and entire albums — ranging from heavy metal to rap — since 1970. In comic strips, time travelling has occurred since the 1930s. In comic books, Batman first time travelled in 1944, beating out Superman by three years.

So it is presently possible to spend one’s entire life immersed in nothing but time travel. That may be fun, but talk about a waste of time. And there are now indications that this situation has become pathological. Simply do an Internet search for “time travel proof” and view the parade of conspiracy theorists who are convinced that time travellers are actually among us right now. How did we get to this point?

Inevitably, one is tempted to blame H.G. Wells, whose 1895 novel The Time Machine gave us the very term “time machine.” However, that famous work was preceded by some curious developments in the 1800s. For example, time travel before Wells tended to be occult in nature, as shown by Rip Van Winkle’s magical experience in the eponymous 1820 Washington Irving story, Charles Dickens’s pesky ghosts in A Christmas Carol (1843), and H. Rider Haggard’s obsession with reincarnation in the 1887 novel She.

By giving time travel what looked like a scientific veneer, Wells seemed to be setting it on a more rational course, but that is not exactly what happened. As pointed out in an essay on time travel by Malcolm J. Edwards and Brain Stableford in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Wells’s novel had surprisingly little impact in Britain and instead exerted its main influence on the growing field of pulp magazines in the United States. That was a problem, because the pulps, with all their manic energy, could be eccentric. Sure enough, Nahin recounts bizarre and pointless pulp speculation, starting as early as 1929, over what would happen if you went back in time to kill your own grandfather. (For the record, Nahin insists nothing would happen: since you exist, that logically means you were unable to kill him, for whatever reason, and the family line carried on.)

Worse, the occult made a comeback. In 1927, one J.W. Dunne began unleashing a string of crackpot nonfiction books claiming a connection between dreams and time. Dunne beguiled many time travel authors, and vestiges of his nutty spell are still detectable today.

Dishearteningly, the world of higher learning was not helpful, either. According to both Gleick and Nahin, the logician and mathematician Kurt Gödel became a hero to wouldbe time travellers when, in 1949, he mapped out how — at least in theory — there could be a universe in which time looped back upon itself. This may have absolutely no application to our universe, but it prompted current arcane discussions about “closed timelike curves” and so forth. Nahin’s bibliography lists hundreds of scholarly papers in this vein, giving the impression of something that has gone astray.

After Gödel, the next dubious milestone was the 1960s, which witnessed the rise of entire business empires based on time travel. In 1963, Doctor Who was born. That same year, French author Pierre Boulle released La Planète des Singes, which initiated the Planet of the Apes franchise. Also in 1963, another Frenchman, Chris Marker, issued a strange little movie called La Jetée, which is the basis for the 12 Monkeys series in film and television.

During 1964, the creepy television show The Outer Limits ran a pair of time travel episodes written by Harlan Ellison. Although Ellison would later have to sue to prove it, those two episodes led to the Terminator franchise. Finally, in 1966, Star Trek was launched. Through a handful of time travel scripts — one of them written by Ellison — that show struck such a nerve that the Star Trek universe became closely identified with time travel for decades, creating a virtual franchisewithin-a-franchise that totalled three movies and some 30 episodes by 2005.

Thus, by the end of the 1900s, time travel was an industry, albeit one based on woozy thinking from three different sectors — pulps, the occult, and mathematics. But even if it made no sense, the momentum behind it was formidable.

In 2002, Scientific American ran an article entitled “How to Build a Time Machine,” which further legitimized the field. However, the VanderMeer anthology includes an essay by planetary scientist and NASA astronaut Stan Love, who takes a humorous and unconvinced view of claims that time travel is possible. As described by him, the best current ideas all involve such wildly impractical things as black holes, wormholes, infinitely long structures, and concentric spheres the size of a solar system. One might have better luck trying to harness the energy of H.G. Wells as he spins in his grave.