The Rules of Engagement with Time
Einstein and Gödel disagreed about the nature of Time, but they both agreed that Newton’s idea—that Time moved in a straightforward direction throughout the universe—was wrong, at least on a quantum level. So writing about Time is fair game, and many good people have tried their hand at it, with varying degrees of success. And now I have, and along the way I learned some Rules of Engagement.
1. Be consistent. There will be contradictions and paradoxes and lots of very smart people will be judging how well you deal with them. So deal with them. Have it clear in your mind what is happening, what has just happened and what will happen because of the first two.
2. Play fair. There is only one way to get your reader to go all the way to the end without throwing your book at the wall. Have an idea how Time works in your story, and stick to it. Convince the reader that it might actually work and your reader will go along with you, if only out of curiosity. Which is wonderful.
3. Your idea about how Time works had better be a good one. In The Shimmer, I deal with the various Time Travel Paradoxes by stealing from a much better mind, and it belonged to Hugh Everett.
He believed—on the quantum level—that each event in Time that could have gone either way actually went both ways, and when it did, a second parallel universe was created, one that was very slightly different from the previous one.
If you take Everett’s view, you dodge the usual paradoxes about how screwing up the past will screw up your own future, because what you are doing is creating a new world that is very much like your previous one, but not quite. So that is the time travel idea in The Shimmer.
Jack and Clete and Selena and Annabelle and Pandora aren’t changing the future they left, they’re changing the one they’re headed for.
Which, by the way, is what we’re all doing, whether we realize it or not.
Carsten Stroud
New Year’s Day 2018
Destin, Florida