Time Travel Fiction: Ideas and Musings
Time travel is probably one of the most complicated tropes in fiction. Unlike with fantasy, where almost anything can happen with no logical repercussions, and other sci-fi technologies, where one only needs to explain mechanically how it’s done for it to be at least somewhat believable, time travel affects the world around characters in ways that we have no real insight into. There are many common interpretations of how time travel to the past would affect the future. One is the simple linear version, in which things that happen affect the future that is returned to. Another is the cyclical approach, where no changes were made to the future since the characters had traveled to the past “already”. A common example of this is the Harry Potter one, where we see explanations for how things happened as Harry and Hermione had experienced them earlier. Another yet is the idea that traveling to the past and changing something creates a new timeline instead of changing the original. There’s another version in which time travel could never exist in teleportation form, but more in the way we move through space. We can only move forward, but we can do so at “slower” or “faster” paces by quickening or slowing our own bodily processes so that we experience the world at a different rate and age at that same rate. So, you could visit the future, but it’s only because you aged twice as fast. And, there’s yet another theory in which if time travel was achievable, humans simply couldn’t comprehend the ways in which it would work. Humans evolved only living through time as we know it, and human logic simply can’t compute any other flow of time.
The ideas for this post all came from me chastising the decision of Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part III to give his ancestor the Colt Peacemaker to sell immediately. While bringing it back to the future with him would likely be shot down for moral reasons in the same way the almanac was, there was a missed opportunity to tell the early McFly’s to keep the gun as a family heirloom and only sell it if they needed to, as it would become expensive later. Then, when he returns home, he could find the gun hanging on his wall, showing how much the McFly family really trusted “Clint.” That got me thinking about possibly traveling to the past to purchase something that’s incredibly expensive now for its antiquity and rarity. Then, that thought led to our first topic.
Scalpers from the Future
Most of us have something that we really, really wanted at one point in our lives that was incredibly difficult to procure because of the demand for that product. Waiting in long lines and scouring places for the product, only to find it insanely marked-up sometimes is an absolute chore. With the dawn of the Internet, one of the biggest and most needless reasons for this predicament are the scalpers. They buy as many of a product as they can to sell for a ridiculous upcharge, knowing the presence of other scalpers will only raise the price they can sell it for by lowering supply even more. The only real bane of the scalpers’ existence is unexpectedly failed products.
In other to successfully get something to then sell, it has to be bought almost immediately in some cases. Meanwhile, in others, you have to beat the peak and fall of whatever fad caused this thing to be popular all of a sudden. As a fan of the console gaming industry, I’ve certainly heard of a few examples of scalpers losing a lot of money due to buying a new product in bulk only for it to fail miserably. The only solution to this problem would to be to know whether the product will succeed or not. I think you know where this is going.
Another benefit of a time travel purchase would be being able to go many years into the past to buy a product at standard retail price, then selling it when its popularity suddenly surges. Many, many games were relatively unknown and few copies were produced in its time, but some sort of popularity increase multiplied its value by ridiculous amounts.
The one struggle in doing this would likely be procuring the proper currency you needed to buy it. If attempting to buy that old Colt Peacemaker, for example, you would need money from centuries ago, which is expensive on its own in today’s economy. This would, of course, be a little easier for products from only a few years ago, as one would just have to filter through the bills in their wallet to find bills from that year. Or, maybe just take a loan from your past self by using a debit or credit card that was active at the time. In the case of bills though, this could create an interesting conflict in a time travel story. If enough of those bills from the future ended up in circulation, duplicates of that bill would then exist in circulation. They might be passed off as incredibly impressive counterfeits, but even that might cause problems for our main character, as it may become law that businesses must register all bill IDs they have in their possession, instantly catching duplicates attempting to be used. If one person turns in too many duplicates, chances are they’re related to this scheme. As for the old-fashioned money, the best way to procure it would likely be to get a job in that time period, especially since it was easier back then to just earn a quick coin from a stranger. No background checks, paperwork, or ID were really expected like it is now to do a simple task once or twice a week, from what I can tell, at least. It might be a bit difficult to find a job that would be in your modern skill set, though. A programmer would have to resort to unskilled labor, and, if they weren’t strong enough to perform manual labor, finding that might be difficult.
Disease and Time Travel
So, if a time traveler’s body isn’t equipped for the labor expected of the past, how about the diseases? There are many diseases nowadays that have been nearly eradicated in developed countries due to modern medicine and nutritional standards, but if you were to encounter it in the past, that might be the end of you. And then, there’s the other ways disease could ruin your time vacation.
Bringing a disease back from the past could also be an issue. There are many dangerous strands of diseases that simply don’t exist anymore. They would likely eventually be able to be treated, but if a disease from the 1400’s suddenly started making the rounds, there would likely be a bit of surprise and confusion from the medical field.
Plenty of stories of discovery and immigration in the colonial era had diseases from other countries killing native populations suddenly. Diseases from the future would certainly do that. Just imagine someone brings back an advanced strain of a contagious disease that no one had ever seen before. It has evolved to fight against vaccines and other treatments that wouldn’t have even existed back then, possibly wreaking an insane amount of havoc. The 2020 pandemic could be completely prevented by someone going to the past and spreading COVID-19 to that population, giving people knowledge of it and experience with it so the shutdown would have never been deemed necessary, for any number of more specific reasons.
There are plenty of other time travel effects that have yet to be explored in popular depictions, but those are two I pondered. Since I don’t have any time travel story ideas, I thought I might share them with the world. Use them and change them to your heart’s content.
More of Me
If you liked this and think my writing might be interesting to read, you can check out my free fantasy story Call of the Blue. You can also find me on Twitter as @sirendroid. Happy writing!
