Calling all TIme Travellers

I have done that exact thing RocketScientist. It's almost funny to read some of those books! I recommend "How to Build a Time Machine." That's a good one. I don't remember who wrote it. After reading that, you could write about a pretty believable time machine!

I don't know if I'm going to be righting a novel this year. I know my alter ego is though.

When working on planning this novel, I realized I am going to need a pretty detailed gragh on how this is all going to work. for instance, after the characters have gone back in time, they meet themselves, and have a big argument among each other. (It is necessary that there is a conflict here, if you knew these characters.) In their tussle, the characters (named Nanooks) from the past decide not to go out on their trip, because the Nanooks from the future tell them of the dangerous things that will befall them if they do (i.e. getting shot to the moon, lost in time, etc). So now what happens to the Nanooks from the future? They never set out on their journey, and thus could never have happened upon the Time Machine!! Then how did they get there in the past? Or do they just fade back into the present whenever that is? And then if the Nanooks from the past get convinced not to go on their trip, then how do they get into the past to convince themselves?

It's a never ending circle. Does anyone have any ideas of what the consequences would be to breaking these laws of the Universe?

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Wow! That sure is a pickle. Boy, I'd really like to read your novel!! Your characters are sure going to have a puzzle on their hands.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should write a novel or not this year. I probably wouldn't have any time travel in it, but I still remain fascinated with the subject. I'm thinking some sort of suspense/mystery novel, with a lot of global travel, and maybe even space travel! I don't know.

That's all I have.

Now, maybe the Nanooks from the future that go back and convince the past Nanooks not to go on their adventure suddenly find themselves in their home, back in the present. They never went on their trip and don't remember a thing. Would that be a likely solution? Except that if they never were there to stop themselves from going on the trip, then of course they were able to go on their trip, and end up stopping themselves, so I guess that wouldn't solve anything. Man, I don't know what you should do.

Well... rather than portraying time as a static line, indicate that it has infinite strands and loops. Each time a paradox like this occurs, you simultaneously have a branch of time where the paradox rights itself (where the future characters disappear and all is well) and a branch where the future characters remain because the time-travel already happened, regardless of the decision made in the present.

Yikes, I'm confusing myself here. I hope this helps.

"You expected me to choose between saving the world and pie?"

I see that there's another reply, but I can't see it when I go on this thread. So maybe if I reply again, I'll be able to see it. Is there a problem with this website? These forums are confusing me.

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There are three possible ways out of that, as far as I see it. One: the universe implodes on itself. Basically, that series of events creates a logical loophole which rends time-space and causes either complete chaos and a total breakdown of physics or simply annihilates all of existence. The other option is the idea of unchangealbe event path, in which no matter whta you did in the past it would have no effect on the future. For example, if you went into the past to try and kill Hitler, you simply wouldn't be able to.

The final and probably best way to approach this can be found in a video series called Red vs. Blue (completely hilarious, google it some time). In this series one character does go back in time and try to change things, but in the end he only ends up being the cause of everything happening the way it did in the future. For example, you go back in time to try to kill Hitler, but instead your attempts on his life somehow cause him to become a Nazi, and then it's all your fault. That would be the most practical solution, and probably the funniest.

I won't get into the natural problem with a time machine for now. Suffice to say that it is mathematically possible to create one, but it would be somewhat limited in its ability, would require an entirely improbably amount of energy, and would kill anyone traveling through it. But it is possible, at least!

The Gate of tomorrow is not the light of heaven, but the darkness of the depths of the earth . . .
~Vincent Valentine

I'm a time traveller this year!

I'm working with immutable timelines and the Novikov self-consistency principle right now.
I'd like to have a time loop or paradox at one point though. We'll see how that goes!

Lots of outlines and timelines are consumming my planning. Good times.

My story is kind of a time travel story. More of an unintentional time traveler who never actually leaves his own time.

My MC lives in today's time, somehow comes across an anceint artifact that sends him to South America to find a "lost treasure". Once he gets to South America though, he gets lost and ends up in an "ancient city", that has been cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years, they are unaware of the outside world and the outside world is unaware of them. This lost city is so isolated that it is as if time has stood still for them, and for my MC it is like he has stepped back in time into ancient Mesoamerica.

So, for my story I'm not in need of any time machines or portals or other such things.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity." - Albert Einstein"

There's time travel in my novel this year. The basic plot line starts off in the future where mankind has invaded alien planets. A man from the present travels into the future (Not sure how yet.) and gets stranded on an alien planet. When the aliens realise he's from Earth past they send him back with the instructions that he must make sure mankind goes out into space in peace, not in war.

One by one the Penguins steal my sanity

Wow, lot's of creative time travel plot lines! I don't know how creative mine will be; the biggest things I'm focusing on is how the time travel works, and how the characters resolve the temporal impossibilities! I most definitely want it to sound reasonable and believable to a degree.

As for how the Time Machine in my story works, there are millions of theories and designs for actual time machines, so I'll take a few and modify and customize them for my story! Yes, I also strongly recommend "How to Build a Time Machine" for those of you that are designing your own time machine.

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Here are a few ideas I had for a fictional time machine:

-A concoction of condensate matter is stored within an enclosed container where an electromagnetic field is generated by sending electricity through the condensate matter. A positively charged thermal is connected to the positve end of the dethermalizer, and opposite that, the negatively charged thermal is connected to the negatively charged dethermalizer. Because such a powerful force is traveling through the condensate, the thermals charged by the dethermalizer grow very cold (because they contain exotic matter) to the point where abolute zero is reached, and time stops. outside the condesate matter container, a capsule carrying a pilot rolls across a track over the container. Underneath the container, two more electromagnets pulse (not exotic matter) powered by positive thermalizers that are perpendicular to the other electromagnets. This causes an electromagnetic clash, which opens up a hole in space-time in an exact calculated location along the track above the condensate container, which the piloted capsule rolls through. Depending on whether the hole opens up on the forward half of the condensate container or the back half the pilot will travel into the future, or past, respectively. This is determined by how strong the positive matter electromagnets' pulse is.

But that one is too complicated maybe. It's especially hard to describe in one paragraph. Anyone else have a better idea?

Some time travelling stories don't have an emphasis on how the time travel works. It just happens, and the characters then have to deal with it. This is a good idea, because no one can describe a time machine that actually WOULD work. Or, like in The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, he describes what the time machine does, and what it looked like and all that, but he never really describes how it does what it does.

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Good point.

I once had an idea for a time travel story, where some organization like NASA develops the first time machine, and the astronaut... well, chrononaut I guess they would be called, selected to be the first time traveller, sees a man in ragged clothes running out and waving his hands as they are going out to the time machine on a transport. The chrononaut then goes in the time machine, but when he lands, he can't remember a single thing. As he exits the time machine, he finds himself in a vast desert, with no water. He aimlessly wanders around for one or two days until he spots a vehicle in the distance. He flails his hands and shouts to try to get their attention, but they only stare, and drive by.

Then I'm not sure what should happen. I just sort of abandoned this plot at this point. The people who drive by in the vehicle are the chrononaut and the scientists behind the mission, as they go out to the time machine.

Makes perfect sense. In one of my novels, a guy absolutely had to go back in time to ensure that he was able to be brought forward in time (long story). Anyway, for various reasons he absolutely refused to do it. Everyone sat around for a bit wondering if the universe would implode, and when it didn't, one of my characters got the brilliant stroke of genius: "You can't beat time." Eventually he went back anyway, because, well, he had obviously done it before. Causality; effect preceeding cause.

But then, you have to wonder: if you met yourself coming from the future, then in the future you went back and met your past self, and then your past self went back to meet his past self, would it just keep going forever?

"I am usually amazed (and pleased) at what comes out of the typewriter. Which is why I write so much. I am eager to see what I will say next."
~Isaac Asimov

What are some other Time Travelling stories out there?

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I've done some more planning in my novel. Some things are starting to smooth out, but there are still kinks in the plot that need fixing. The only way I could see to plan for this novel was to make timeline. Each line that is not the timeline indicated a rift in space-time and time travel took place there.

Here is a chronology of my novel, in the order that the events happen, but you probably won't fully get the concept until you study the timeline.

The original way time played out:

-The Nanooks go out on a vacation.
-A mad scientist appears in the woods with a Time Machine, and leaves it to explore
-The Nanooks discover a Time Machine in the woods
-The Nanooks set out into time where they travel into the future
-A mad scientist is building a Time machine
-The Nanooks show up in a Time Machine, and the mad scientist has to fix it for them when it breaks
-The mad scientist finishes his Time Machine and goes back in time
-The Nanooks go back in time to before they set out on their vacation and...

The second scenario:

-The Nanooks decide on going on a vacation
-Two more Nanooks show up right when they're about to leave and convince the Nanooks not to go out on a vacation
-The Nanooks stay at home.

I'm going to try to upload my timeline in my next post. If it doesn't work, oh well.

If anyone spots any errors or reasons why this couldn't work, I would be appreciative to be notified of them. Thanks!

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Timeline

Nopedy. Didn't work. Maybe I'll try later.

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Trying to figure out a way to post to this thread yesterday, but it's not working. Oh well ;)

Yep, I'll be going very heavily with TT this year, very heavily. The whole background of the plot is a timeline so heavily steeped in paradox that no-one's even certain when time travel was invented any more, or even if the continuity for it exists. History has been re-re-re-rewritten, over and over again. With a few exceptions, very little is stable.

Nor are the causes and effects of changing history very easy to spot. The slightest change might make a vast change, or no change at all. Events from history might be erased, altered, or break off into their own little alternative timelines. Or even break off into little loops of their own, similar to Lance Parkin's Eleven Day Empire, where the eleven days removed from the Gregorian Calendar are preserved, and a faction of time travellers base their operations in the London those days contain.

Fragmented remnants from vanished timelines might pop up in unexpected places, Victorian cellphone technology being discovered in a Roman archaeological dig. These are considered a sort of chronological scar tissue or waste product , Which I've dubbed 'paradoxide', because I hate horrible puns, and hence the title of the novel.

I might add that I hesitate really to call my story science fiction, because I have absolutely no intention of trying to explain the technology people use to travel through time, and in several cases they won't be using technology at all. Prepare to witness Clarke's Law in all its glory. After all, everyone's familiar with the concept. The journey itself should be more interesting than the vehicle.

Beyond that, it's all a bit fuzzy at the minute. But from what I hear, the trick to NaNo is to not have too clear a picture of what's going to happen in the story, because that might take some of the fun out of it. We shall see.

Greetings

I like the whole "fish out of water" aspect of accidental time travel. Placing my characters in places situations that test them.

I guess I'm on the soft SF side, I treat it as a 'MacGuffin' no explanation, it just is with my MC is flummoxerd by the event and the result ;)

In Time Slip its a lightning strike in a big storm that sends him and others through a rift to discover a patchwork of various eras thrown together by a cosmic event.. In Wild West, its an original structure as a portal back to the frontier timme with a coin dropping acting as catalyst. And in Blood and Iron, a key in a mantel place transports a cabin into a paralel dimension.

I'm not much for the paradox thing so its just straight ahead adventure i guess.

Enjoy the journey

Warlord

"The RowanTree" - a novel of fantasy and stream, say it with me: "Steampunk dwarves"

Read WarLord's NaNoWriMo BLOG http://warlordsnano.blogspot.com/

Oh yeah, another Time Traveler here.

For me it happens because of a freak genetic mutation. There's just a certain amount of people suceptable to "temporal instability." Since most people are, at least initially, unaware of the ability and in no control of it, an agency called Timewise has taken over the task of regulating and policing the timelines. They recruit those people who can travel through time as their operatives. They have a strict hands off policy towards past events and those who try to change things are severely punished. Of course the war with the mysterious alien Tikkers make that rather hard to maintain.

Timewise classifies itself as the present (2400) and everything before it as the past. My MC, Tyler is actually from 2007 so that's quite a concept to him. He's got about 300 years of "past" history to catch up on.

The story itself centers on Tyler's partner, Zane Tucker going rogue. Tyler's part of the team tasked with finding him and taking him in. On the way, Zane tracks him through paradoxes and attacks but Tyler's starting to realize that his motives aren't as malevolent as he had originally thought.

So, yeah, I've got rules of Time travel. These and loads more in a file somewhere. But this is a story about breaking those rules and what happens next.

I'm surprised no one here has read Anne McCaffrey here, she found a rather simple explination for the problem. To put it simpley, you can't alter the way things played out. For example, you can't go back in time to stop you dady from being shot because if you had he would still be alive. you can g back in time, but the past is set snd cannot be altered.

On the other hand, there could be a few instances of people returning and fighting with themselves and they die. The result would be that they dissapear forever. That could even be the reason so many people end up missing, they accedentally erase themselves from existance. the fabric of the universe just reolved itself around the missing thread (perhaps that is how the universe is falling apart. Maybe your MC can find a way to stop that, repair time and keep people from self erasing).

Bu Bottom line, you can go back in time to do things only if it has already been done.

I hope that helps.

In my time travel story, my MC goes back in time to a part of her town's history, a murder. It will turn out that she was the mysterious visitor in town at the time, so her role was already there, so being there was her destiny. The change will be that what she discovers will affect events when she returns.

There will be two storylines:

1) What happens when she shows up in town 20 years before (She's 17) in the week before the murder that she knows about. The murder hasn't beed solved yet so the murderer has never been found.

2) What happens in the current time when they find out that she went back. This will be taking place in the week before the 20th anniversary of the event.

The ideas I have for this are the most exciting I have had yet!

To cover this I'll be trying to do about 100,000 for the month. Wish me luck.

2006 (Won) Title: I Can't See Myself! -- SciFi/Fantasy -- invisibility
2007 (Won!) Title: The Amber Pendant -- SciFi/Fantasy -- Time Travel Murder Mystery

You know, everyone keeps saying that these paradoxes can't happen.. because Time would get stuck in a loop...

Well... LET IT!!!

Let time get stuck in a loop, let everyone replay the same moments over and over and over and over and over.. That could be a whole book right there (hell, they made a movie about it, Groundhog Day =) )..

Maybe one character suddenly starts remembering little tidbits of the previous "Cycle" and tries to break free of the loop...

Hmm, come to think of it, ST:TNG did this aswell, when Frasier piloted a starship from the past that got caught in a temporal loop, only Data was able to remember the number 3, enough to give him a clue as to what to do to get out of it.

Here is the diagram of my novel. (I finally figured out how to post it)

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I love time travel. :)

The way I work out the paradoxes is to decide what the story needs, and see if I can follow the laws to their logical conclusion. I don't worry about the science so much; I just go with what Picasso said about art: "We know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." Even if your time-travel system is completely implausible, it's just something that's there to tell a story.

The basic problem is that if you can change the past, you could end up preventing time travel from being invented, or at least delay it many years. If this happens, when time travel is finally invented, you have the same problem all over again--an infinite loop that delays time travel indefinitely. Some have suggested that this is why we do not have time travel.

Some get around this by saying you can't go back to before the time machine was invented. Others use a government agency (commonly called the Time Patrol. Still others claim that if you go to the past, you have to do what has already happened (in other words, you're a puppet of destiny).

Or maybe the time machine is just a ride in a museum (bonus points if you know what movie I'm talking about) ;)

um, well I have enough understanding of the issue in physics to not find the topic so puzzling. The idea of paradoxs in many cases resolves quickly to no such thing when you embrace ideas of multiple worlds and alternate realities. Mostly it removes a lot of the tension from the idea.

Theoretically I could kill my parents before I was born and then still exist lingering in that world line unaffected. then it's just a matter of a murder mystery. Finding other ways to play with the idea are more interesting. other then changing your life and murder what else could,would you do with time travel?

What type of situation could you come up with and whose perspective do you tell it from? I just had one pop into my head.

a childs parents are mystriously lost in some kind of situation and they are claimed by a relative (really themselves from the future) who raise them. But the relationship is strained by the guardians bizarre desires to do things a certain way and make the young ones life better.

Chuck Palahniuk's 'Rant' has a (sort of) similar idea, but the whole idea contained in there is a pretty ambiguous plot device; as well as the rest of the story forcing a head scratch.
Nonetheless, it's a pretty neat way of implementing time travel.

I'm thinking of using time travel as a plot device involving genetic manipulation. When the body is exposed to certain conditions (internally and externally, blood pressure, adrenaline, temperature, etc.); an implanted program would 'trigger'. Something like an internal time bomb.
I'm having one character unknowingly have a 'trigger program' that resets time back about 10 years if she would happen to die.
The last villian ends up killing the rest of humanity with a satellite cannon and her program resets time in an attempt to go back and kill that villian before he converts to an android.

There are lots of very interesting ideas mentioned here. I also have a penchant for time-related stories that deal with alternate histories.

In one story, there is no time travel as such, but rather time manipulation. Scientists have invented the means to delete small segments of time from history, and they use it to prevent the conception of Ottoman Turkish sultan Bayezid II, one of the sons of Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople. Since he no longer exists, Mehmet's successor is his bellicose son Jem, who continues his father's invasion of Italy in 1480, leading to the capture of Rome and the general invasion of central Europe by the Ottoman Empire. Men like Christopher Columbus end up fighting the Turks instead of discovering the New World -- which is discovered and colonized by the Turks instead, spreading Islam into the Americas and spurring the development of Native American Muslim empires like the Iroquois. All of this is opposite what the scientists are working for, of course, and they end up living in what is, for them, a scientific dark age.

My other story involves time travel by Israeli agents who wish to kill Hitler in order to prevent the Holocaust. Their only opportunity, however, is to kill him in the 1890s, when he was only a small boy. Once there, the assassin realizes that the young Hitler is not guilty of the crimes committed by his adult self, so killing him would be morally wrong. (The assassin is a former rabbi.) He therefore takes Hitler with him into the future and adopts him as his son; while the Holocaust still happens under the leadership of Rudolf Hess, he has at least prevented Hitler from being responsible for the Holocaust. In this story I didn't explain how the time machine worked, but I did use a "Time Vault" that was constructed to help the agents know what changes had been made in the past. Otherwise, of course, they would have been unaware of what had changed from mission to mission and thus unable to figure out what progress they had been making.

The Hitler time-travel story started as a 100-word story, which I expanded into a regular short story. Now I'm thinking of expanding it further as a novel or screenplay.