The essential elements of time travel.
TL;DR: I originally wrote this article for the January 2023 online edition of Mystery and Suspense Magazine—a superb online resource for all things science fiction and fantasy.
The machine, busting the space-time continuum, and immortality: three elements shared across a spectrum of time-traveling tales.
Futuristic visionaries weave complex time-traveling stories across a broad spectrum of sci-fi sub-genres for books, TV, and movies that rewrite history, thwart apocalyptic scenarios, correct injustices, or even a Bill and Ted-style comical lark. These visionary authors unlock Pandora’s boxloads of consequential changes and unforeseen implications by employing fantastical leaps to cheat the system, shift the paradigm, and bend the curve to send their characters surfing through space and time.
For audiences, the inevitable result is a brain-melting link chart stringing what-if scenarios to narrative dilemmas and massive plot holes large enough to drive a semi-trailer truck through. On the bright side, since the concept of time travel happens primarily within a sci-fi/fantasy realm, fans accept heaping doses of creative license and turn a blind eye to all but the most egregious narrative lapses.
Until time travel becomes a reality, the sky is the limit for creative minds to transport their characters through time. Yet, three components remain elemental to most time-travel stories:
a machine or mechanism,
busting the space-time continuum,
and the paradoxical concept of immortality inherent in mastering the fourth dimension, otherwise known as time.
The machine.
Anything from portals, gadgets, appliances, devices, and vehicles—even an entire island—can break the bonds of time and place. H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller [sic] built his magnificent machine using brass and ivory, among other weighty materials. His creation even had a plush seat because you may as well travel in comfort. The Time Machine remains one of the most literal time-traveling devices ever invented. A thing of beauty that staggered those fortunate few invited by the scientist to bask in his brilliance. We’ll leave the Morlocks and the Eloi for another time.
Section of the fantastic cover art of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Classics Illustrated, Issue No. 14.
Fast-forwarding to modern audiences’ gravitational tendency toward more relatable modes of transport, storytellers utilize everyday vehicles to achieve time travel. Let’s start with planes. On the hit ABC show, Lost, a mysterious island untethered from time waylays a routine commercial air flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. The stranded crash survivors are left to grapple with parallel universes and time-tripping narrative arcs that conclude after six seasons with a convoluted but satisfying series finale.
Part of a larger LOST fan art oil painting by the author showing Oceanic Flight 815’s final moments. If you are interested in seeing the entire piece, shoot me a message.
Not to be outdone and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that anything can work as a time travel machine if the audience buys into it, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure utilizes a phone booth. The witless duo travels back in time to pass their history test with the likes of Abe Lincoln and Genghis Khan along for the ride. Excellent!
Any examination of time travel vehicles would be incomplete without mentioning the iconic Delorean in Back to the Future and its incomprehensible yet believable flux capacitor powered by a plutonium reactor. As Doc Brown tells Marty in a hilarious opening scene, “When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you are gonna see some serious shit.”
Busting the space-time continuum.
The age-old expression, “If you break it, you buy it,” holds especially true for travelers encountering multifarious fates through time and space.
In a quintessential original Star Trek episode titled “The City on the Edge of Forever,” an overdosed, half-crazed Dr. McCoy travels through a time portal called the Guardian of Forever to 1930s New York City. Kirk and Spock follow in hot pursuit. In typical Star Trek fashion, Kirk falls in love with Joan Collins’ character but discovers he must let her die to reset the history McCoy altered so the future can be restored. Written by Harlan Ellison, the tragic episode won numerous awards and remains a classic example of how one act can irrevocably alter the future.
William Shater and Joan Collins stargazing in the iconic Star Trek episode. Original image courtesy Getty Images.
Another excellent illustration of time travel ramifications comes from none other than Homer J. Simpson. In the classic Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode “Time and Punishment,” Homer fixes a toaster with a spent nuclear fuel rod and turns the common kitchen appliance into a time machine. Transported back to a time “when dinosaurs weren’t just confined to zoos,” Homer remembers Grampa Simpson’s words of wisdom, “If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything. Because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can’t imagine.” Needless to say, Homer fails to heed his father’s sage advice. Comedy ensues. Eventually, Homer returns to a world that looks like home but discovers his family eating with reptilian tongues, leading the weary donut-loving time traveler to mutter, “Close enough.”
No films stand as a better testament to shunning the noise, confusion, and clutter associated with time travel in all its manifestations than James Cameron’s first two Terminator films. In the first installment, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a humorless and deadly automaton dispatched backward in time by future robots on a relentless mission to kill Sarah Connor, whose future son, John, is destined to become humanity’s savior. That is as complicated as it gets. Though integral to the script, the scenes depicting traveling through time are almost an afterthought, minus Arnold’s chiseled form poised in a bodybuilder’s pose on a trash-strewn, smoldering macadam. Terminator 2: Judgement Day flips the script with Arnold returning in a similar naked style, but this time on the side of the angels. A transformed Linda Hamilton’s badass Sarah Connor steals the show, realizing what needs to happen to change the future and stave off the apocalypse before time runs out. Both films’ laser-like focus on an edge-of-your-seat, protracted chase scene filled with carnage and mayhem leaves no time to navel-gaze the vagaries of time travel, to which the enthralled audiences said, “I’ll be back.”
The immortality paradox.
While time travel is waiting to be discovered, used, and, no doubt, commercialized to the nth degree, enriching its founding purveyors with unimaginable wealth and glory, immortality awaits those who dare to shed the constraints of time and ride the cosmic waves.
In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a team of astronauts led by Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway is dispatched through a wormhole near Saturn to check out planetary replacements for an Earth on the brink of devastation. Taking liberties with Einstein’s Special Relativity, which states that the greater the acceleration, the slower an object—like a spaceship—moves through time, Nolan packs the film with heady nods to physics and loads of mind-bending philosophical implications, complete with an interdimensional library. In a poignant final scene, a youthful-looking 124-year-old McConaughey reunites with his daughter, now an old woman at death’s door, for the first time since leaving behind her 10-year-old version on their dusty farmhouse front porch to venture across the universe.
It is no surprise that the master of the techno-thriller, Michael Crichton, devoted his immense talents to time travel, writing the novel Timeline. (Second on my Michael Crichton book list—more in a future blog.) After inventing top-secret quantum technology that dissolves people to a sub-atomic level and rebuilds them at a pre-determined point on the historical timeline, an ethically-challenged corporation convinces a group of young archeologists to travel back to 14th-century France to rescue their colleague. With plenty of culture shock and gruesome deaths at the hands of the surprisingly sophisticated denizens of the year 1357, the hook to immortality lies in the crumbled vestiges of past civilizations, stark reminders that while we are mortal, time marches inexorably forward.
Speaking of crumbled vestiges, nothing surpasses the shock awaiting Charlton Heston’s Taylor in the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes. Before settling in for a long sleep in the movie’s prologue, aboard a ship traveling near light speed, Heston muses to anyone who may be listening, “… Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely. That’s about it.” (A classic line with Heston’s masterful deadpan delivery.) Awakening to ear-splitting claxons as the crashed ship sinks in the middle of a deep blue lake amid a vast desert, Taylor notes the year 3978 before abandoning the shipwreck with his fellow surviving crewmen. Unfazed and ready to take their place at the top of the local food chain, the bearded, rugged trio venture forth with all the hubris and swagger that comes with outliving everybody and everything they once knew and held dear. Two thousand years old and still going strong, even after his mates succumbed to the sharp-edged scalpels of the apes’ experimentation, Taylor has his infamous revelatory moment on the lapping shore of an oddly familiar sea. Indeed, his immortality came at the burdensome price of being the only human survivor of a former world.
Out of time.
Venturing backward or forward in time is a familiar plot device across a spectrum of classic science fiction and fantasy. Iconic creators in the veins of H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and Michael Crichton, to silver screen heavyweights like Robert Zemeckis, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron, to name a few, provide entertaining glimpses into the limitless potential of time travel. Through a diversity of ingenious machinations that bust through space and time and lead to immortality, their creations continue to captivate and excite our imaginations while provoking more questions than answers.
One more thing.
Check the time. You are in a future world from when you started to read this article. I know. Weird.
I lied. Here’s another.
If you enjoy reading this kind of engaging content, with a keen focus on pop culture with a cinematic sci-fi flair, then be sure to join the fun. As Chuck Heston’s Taylor might say, “Why not?”
