by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
I love a good time travel story.
My elementary school library had an old pulp adventure story in which some teenagers somehow ended up back in the time of the dinosaurs. I read it straight through three times. I’ve been hooked pretty much ever since.
There are lots of types of time travel stories, but the time loop is probably my favorite.
The best-known version of the time loop story is the 1993 film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray is forced to relive February 2 over and over again. But we get new cinematic twists on the time loop every few years.
Bruce Willis is sent back in time to be assassinated by his younger self in the appropriately named Looper (2012). Tom Cruise repeatedly dies fighting aliens in The Edge of Tomorrow (2014). A college student tracks down her murderer in Happy Death Day (2017). Andy Samberg and Christin Milioti relive a friend’s wedding in Palm Springs (2020).
A common theme in these types of films is that the lead character is kind of a jerk at the beginning of the film. Protagonists escape the loop once they overcome their character flaws, emerging from the process as much better people.
It makes for a great story. But it’s not how time works.
David Lewis, who taught philosophy at Princeton, wrote a journal article titled “The Paradoxes of Time Travel,” in which he argues that time travel doesn’t violate anything that we know about the nature of time. There Lewis praises some time travel stories for having “thought the problems [of time travel] through with great care” and producing stories that “are perfectly consistent.”
One such story is Robert Heinlein’s “ ‘—All You Zombies—’ ,” which introduces us to an infant girl who is abandoned at an orphanage in 1945. In 1963 that child, now an adult, is seduced by an older man who then abandons her.
Nine months later, our protagonist has a difficult childbirth, during which doctors discover that she is intersex—a real, albeit rare, condition in which a person is born with both male and female reproductive organs. Because childbirth rendered our protagonist’s female reproductive organs unviable, doctors performed a gender reassignment, leaving our protagonist a man. To make matters worse, the infant was kidnapped from the hospital.
In 1970, our protagonist—understandably bitter about the whole thing—vents about his past to a sympathetic bartender, who in turn offers to take our protagonist back to 1963 so that he can prevent the scoundrel from seducing his younger self.
You probably see where this is going.
Our protagonist seduces his younger self. Meanwhile, the bartender jumps ahead a few months, kidnaps our protagonist’s infant girl, where he abandons her at an orphanage in 1945.
The bartender then collects our protagonist and takes him to 1985, where our protagonist becomes the newest recruit for the Temporal Bureau. The story closes with the bartender in 1993, as he inspects his scars from childbirth and gender reassignment.
The story presents a paradox—there is but a single character, who is his own mother, father and daughter.
Lewis argues that the paradox is unproblematic because time is fixed. Time travel does nothing to disrupt the past because the past already happened. Whatever the time traveler does in the past has already happened. The world is as it is because of the time traveler’s actions.
Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” plays with that same sort of understanding of a time loop that creates itself. The film is worth watching both for its clever play on time travel and for Gilliam’s willingness to let Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt shed their movie star personas in favor of some quirky character acting.
Films like “12 Monkeys” and “Predestination” (a 2012 adaptation of “ ‘—All You Zombies—’ ”) get time travel right, but let’s be honest—they’re pretty bleak. Time travel stories are fun because they let us imagine a way of fixing the past.
Finding out that you can’t fix the past even with a time machine is depressing.
So, I usually stick with time travel stories that break the rules of time, but that at least hold out the possibility of a happy ending.
The library’s new arrivals shelf contains one of my recent favorites— “How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying,” by Django Wexler. It plays with a few tropes—Davi is whisked from our world to a fantasy realm where she is to be the Chosen One who saves humanity from the Dark Lord and his horde of monsters.
Only Davi fails. And then wakes up and starts the entire quest again. And again. And again.
The book opens with her deciding that since she can’t beat the Dark Lord, she’ll just become her.
It’s a fun read.
Stop by your local branch and explore some time loops—or whatever else you’re interested in!