Time travel: putting the spanner in
the works in SeaRISE
Everyone
dreams of time travel, and fantasizes about when they would travel to if they
had the chance to step through a time portal, don’t they? It’s the kind of
escapist trope that crops up again and again in science fiction, and makes for
some hugely compelling plotlines. Growing up, I for one was a big fan of
stories like Tom’s Midnight Garden
and Charlotte Sometimes, where the
characters by virtue of a grandfather clock striking thirteen or an old brass
bed in a boarding school, are transported back to another time. Nowadays, the
control system for time travel itself is often the focus in science fiction
movies like Time Code, Adjustment Bureau and Looper. I like to think of Groundhog Day, one of my favourite
films, as a kind of ‘stalled’ time travel movie.
When
I came to write my own time travel tale, The SeaBEAN Trilogy, I knew I’d have to confront the age-old conundrum
which has dogged concepts of time travel, sometimes referred to as the ‘grandfather
paradox’. That is, how can you go back in time and affect things without destroying
the possibility of your own existence, as happened to Marty McFly in Back to the Future when he notices that unless
he makes his parents fall in love with each other, he’s gradually disappearing
from the family photo he’s carrying in his back pocket.
In
SeaBEAN, when the main character
Alice comes across a mysterious black cube – the ‘C-Bean’ – on the beach she
has no idea it has the potential to travel through time. Her first challenge is
to get inside it, and as she slowly figures out how to control the C-Bean and
make it go somewhere, she also learns that she can communicate with people across
time and even affect events to change how things turn out.
Because
this is complicated enough for most readers, I needed to keep my time travel
rules quite straightforward, because I got completely lost when I read The Time Traveller’s Wife, and
eventually gave up on it, which is not something I usually do with a book! For
example, if Alice spends an hour back in 1851, she is missing for an hour from
her present. I also wanted to instill the idea that if time travel is possible,
it comes with a health warning and some possible side effects. So in the second
book, SeaWAR, Alice and Charlie start
noticing they feel ‘rearranged’ once the C-Bean is updated to a Mark 4, where
the time travel algorithm is more aggressive on the human body.
But
most important of all, rather than depict time travel in a gratuitous
we-can-do-anything kind of way, I needed to convey the sense that it is a
privilege and a responsibility. Having harnessed the C-Bean’s powers, Alice realizes
she needs to take care to bring about change that is beneficial and not harmful
to our existence. And by the end of SeaRISE,
we get to see the final outcome of her actions.
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