Science fiction author Michael LaVoice answers the call! He joins us today to discuss time travel paradoxes and the many horrifying side effects and unintended consequences the genre is known for. Buckle up—it’s a wild ride through the time machine.
One of the staples of science fiction has been the time travel story. Just about everyone who has read the genre has run across one or two, and most who discuss time travel have at least heard of the argument for killing baby Hitler in his crib as a preventative measure. I, myself, if I had to pick a side on that one, would prefer not allowing him to leave World War One alive, but there’s a hidden danger even in that. No Hitler equals no Nazi party, and then what would people losing arguments on the Internet call each other?
Time travel, a staple of science fiction
In a Ray Bradbury short story originally published in 1952, “A Sound of Thunder” (a great synopsis of which can be found here), time travel safaris are a thing as long as the hunter doesn’t wander off the path, and the dinosaur they kill was going to die anyway. Everything works just fine—until it doesn’t.
A panicked hunter wanders off the path, and inadvertently crushes a butterfly, which has echoing repercussions down through the ages that completely alter the future for the worse. This is not to be confused with the Butterfly Effect, which is a mathematical model and part of Chaos Theory. This story illustrated a kind of domino effect that made sci-fi fans question the wisdom of time travel for a couple of generations.
That story greatly affected me as a youngster when I read it in school, and while a lot of sci-fi writing has been dedicated to the various mechanisms of time travel, what always fascinated me were the various rules of time travel and their potential side effects. These effects include, but were by no means limited to, paradoxes, altering future history, the creation of alternative timelines, and the possibility of changing one’s present by changing the past. All of these intrigue me and make for some highly entertaining sci-Fi stories across multiple media from novels, to comic books, animation, and film.
Some of Hollywood’s stand out contributions to possible time travel outcomes range from the trusted trope of fixing a future that the main character’s trip through time itself damaged (Back To The Future), to the ridiculous idea of Fred Ward becoming his own great grandpa (Time Rider). The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has taken the time stream split theory of time travel and expanded it to the point that each departure from the original creates not only its own timeline, but a brand new pocket universe. The multiverse theory is alive and well, though one could argue that DC did it first, and maybe better with their infinite Earths idea, but that didn’t involve time travel.
Splitting time streams in TimeWars by Simon Hawke
Perhaps one of the best treatments of the time stream split theory came in the 1980’s when Simon Hawke introduced his TimeWars series. The premise itself was interesting enough: the invention of time travel allows the cessation of “war in our time” (our time being the 27th century), by delivering modern soldiers to infiltrate armies of the past. Whichever side of the conflict in the present lost the most soldiers in the battles of the past also lost their conflict in the future.
While the premise may be simple, Hawke underpinned his series with a terrifying take on the time stream split theory. Simply stated, the theory postulates that time runs in a forward moving stream, and temporal disruptions of no great significance are the equivalent of tossing in a pebble. There are ripples that will be felt “downstream,” but the stream is self repairing in that it eventually absorbs those ripples. A large enough temporal disruption, however, is the equivalent of dropping a boulder into the stream, forcing it to split around the obstacle and creating two distinct time streams that flow independent of each other…for a while. Later on, they rejoin with catastrophic results.
In Hawke’s series, a terrorist organization called the Timekeepers works to cause temporal disruptions in the hopes of either causing enough disruptions to force the public to demand a cessation of the TimeWars, or create a time stream split outright. Like most terrorist orgnizations, they never seem to fully think the outcomes of their actions through. Working against the efforts of the terrorists are the time commandos of the First Division, lead by Lucas Priest, United States Temporal Army. Priest and his team spend their on-duty hours “clocking out” to foil the efforts of the Timekeepers and other malcontents.
One of Hawke’s interesting twists on time travel, as presented in the series, was the idea that much of what we thought of as fiction turned out to be actual history, such as the story of the Three Musketeers, or the existence of the Nautilus and Captain Nemo. This allowed Hawke to pay homage to some of the stories he loved, while retelling them by adding a sci-fi flavor that was undeniably cool. To this day, I credit him with introducing me to the story of The Prisoner of Zenda, which remains a favorite classic adventure tale of mine.
Over the course of the TimeWars books, it is eventually revealed that not only was there a time stream split at a point in the past that no one suspected, but the time commandos of that alternate timeline—doppelgangers for the heroes of the series—have been actively working to end the original timeline.
Why? What was their motivation to wipe out an entire timeline, and billions of lives?
It all boils down to an invention of an obscure scientist named Dr. Darkness (Think Q from James Bond, but cooler) called a warp grenade. The warp grenade allows the user to focus all the terrifying power of a nuclear explosion down to an area as small as the head of a pin. Any excess energy was to be sent to the Horsehead Nebula via an Einstein Rosen Bridge.
Small problem: it didn’t work as advertised. The excess nuclear explosions were being sent to the alternative timeline. That’s right, they had been unwittingly waging nuclear war against their doppelgangers for years. Is it any wonder they tried to fight back?
The doppelgangers also wanted to avoid the two timelines eventually merging because the end result was unknown, but assumed to be bad. The ultimate solution to all of this took twelve novels to get to, and teenage me loved every minute of it. The time stream split theory as portrayed in Hawke’s TimeWars series stuck with me, though, and I enjoyed seeing different iterations of it through the years, including the expansion of the concept in recent shows from the MCU in Loki and Spiderman: No Way Home.
For my money, though, the idea of two separate timelines not only waging war against each other, but trying to avoid what looks like an inevitable and horrific reunion stands out as a uniquely frightening entry in the genre. A childhood friend of mine, who read the books with me as they came out, still mentions them from time to time, and sparks great discussions of time travel do’s and don’ts according to the rules of time travel as laid out by Hawke’s character, Dr. Albrecht Messinger, the father of time travel and inventor of the Chronoplate.
The whole series is available on Amazon Kindle (affiliate link) for anyone interested in reading them. If you enjoy them, you might also consider Hawke’s other genre works such as the Psychodrome series, and his fantasy series The Wizard of Fourth Street, which gave birth to a one off cozy mystery fantasy novel about a magic private eye cat named cat’s eye Gomez, an unlikely but fun read. He also wrote a series of novels set in the Dark Sun Universe.
To my delight, while researching this article, I discovered that Simon Hawke revisited the TimeWars universe for a short story in 2001 entitled “The Sumpter Scenario.” So now I have something to hunt for.
If Mr. Herron lets me come back to these pages again, maybe we can discuss the unique take on “unique ancient alien methods of travel between stars bequeathed to a universe that barely knows how to use them,” as seen in the John Dechancie series “Star Rigger.”
Until then, GO EXPLORE!
Michael LaVoice lives in West Tennessee with his wife, the last two of seven kids that haven’t yet left the nest, two dogs, and a cat along with the endless cast of characters in his head that populate his stories. He has ghostwritten science fiction, LitRPG, and military sci-fi, and published a fantasy short story in the anthology Where Giants Fall. He is currently working on a space opera series involving Earth criminals turned loose in space. You can find him on Facebook.
Leave a Reply