Why Time Travel is Fun, Yet Horrible to Write About in Fiction.

            Let’s begin with very simple things. If you went back and time and killed Hitler no one would know you had done something good. And now, at what age would you kill him? Worse, if you murdered Hitler when he was twelve, you might be arrested and executed, then you wouldn’t exist to travel back in time to kill Hitler.

            That went poorly. Let’s try this: You travel back in time to tell your ten year old self what stocks to invest in, who will win the Word Series, and to get the hell out of New Orleans before Katrina hits in 2005. Then you travel back to the future, where you arrive to find you lost the use of your legs in a plane crash when you were fleeing Katrina in 2005, and the past looks nothing as you remember it.

            Hmmm, this isn’t easy at all. Okay, then this: You travel back in time to tell your ten-year-old self how the world might unfold, desktops, laptops, nothing precise, but an idea of what inventions to invest in. He pepper sprays you and calls the cops. You get arrested, and hopefully, you were smart enough not to have any ID or cash on you. But then what?

            Take Three: As a child, you are fascinated with time travel, and at age sixteen, you meet a man who hands you a piece of paper with the phrase, “You did it. The machine works,” which is exactly the phrase you made up as a kid to your future self in case you invented time travel. You then go back to the future, and all is well, right? But if you went back into the past and found you were there, it stands to reason that once you leave the past and get to the future, you will also be there. Every timeline you visit will have you in it, wouldn’t it?

            I think the most exciting part about time travel in fiction is how difficult it is.