When you think of the most famous time travel stories, invariably your mind lands on a machine: Wells’ original Time Machine, Doc Brown’s DeLorean, the Doctor’s TARDIS. Whether those machines are propelled hundreds of centuries forward, or land in the recent past before heading back to the future, or simply bounce around in wibbly wobbly timey-wimey, they’re carrying their intrepid time travelers all across space and time, freeing them from linear time.
So—time travel occurs via technology and/or science, which allows us to peek into the future. Sounds like science fiction.
Except.
In Outlander, visiting the standing stones at Craigh na Dun at a particular time sends Claire backwards in time 200 years, to 1743 and a new love interest despite being married in 1946. Whenever Dana gets injured in 1976, she returns to the same plantation over the early 1800s, compelled to interfere in the goings-on of a slaver family in Kindred. And The Ancient One has young Kate happen upon the ominously named Lost Crater and its grove of incredible redwood trees only to be propelled 500 years in the past, where she wields a magic staff and helps an extinct civilization fend off a giant volcano creature about to blow.
Three time travel narratives that not only include no technology but also contain no real method for time travel aside from an ineffable magic.
So… is time travel fantasy, then?
It’s a question I thought I had an immediate answer for, but the more time travel narratives I consider, the more difficult they become to categorize. The “how” of time travel, at least, seems straightforward enough:
Machines, vehicles, genetic or mutant powers, wormholes, tesseracts, devices… science fiction.
Magic, spells, mystical artifacts, time turners, ancient beings, multiple lives, whole buildings, or simply no explanation offered… fantasy.
But even that attempt at a taxonomy is fraught, as it just creates more questions: Isn’t a time turner technically a device? Is it merely the magic that powers it that distinguishes it from something like the DeLorean’s flux capacitor, which runs on…
Well, it’s not actually clear what that runs on. This special box is responsible for “flux dispersal,” but that still doesn’t actually answer why 88 MPH is the target speed, or how the DeLorean jumps through the space-time continuum. It’s just one of those things that the writers of Back to the Future handwaved away, and we just accept that that is how time travel works in that particular universe.
So how much “science” do we need for time travel to be science-fiction? Even aside from time travel narratives, some sci-fi will go always the handwave route, while others create hard rules for the technology or science propelling the story. Take, for instance, the divide between Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Ditto for fantasy—writers can create in-depth, multi-layer magic systems with clear conditions and consequences, or describe a magic that just is. How do you have any hope of categorizing time travel as one genre or another when there seems to be so much gray area, when very little about it seems clear-cut?
Even though you would expect time travel to require hard rules, it seems to most often appear in both science fiction and fantasy stories that require a certain amount of handwaving on the details. We’re given some sense of how the TARDIS operates—the chameleon circuit, and the sometimes-isometric, sometimes-telepathic controls—but it’s best just to jump in and hang on. Similarly, there’s no clear explanation for the time travel in Kindred or Outlander aside from supernatural forces working outside of our understanding or control, forces that cause certain events to occur as part of some larger cosmic plan.
Regardless of genre, it seems, time travel is often treated like magic. So why does it feel easier to think of time travel stories as science fiction? And where do you fall in the sci-fi-versus-fantasy divide?
You could say the same about FTL travel through space.
How does warp drive work? Star Trek goes into great detail, matter and antimatter, yadda yadda…
How does hyperdrive work? Star Wars doesn’t care. It has a motivator, which presumably requires words of encouragement, a fist against the bulkhead, and/or the twist of a wire until it turns green.
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One thing you must also consider is this: Soft science fiction is essentially fantasy with spaceships. Thus, any time travel in soft sci-fi would likely be fantasy time travel, while more scientific approaches to the subject would fall under sci-fi. It depends on the hand-wavy factor, I suppose, and then the underlying executor of the time travel. So, if elf magic or phozons travelling at right angles to the speed of light are both equally fantastic, considering how unscientific and hand-wavy they are, while the time displacement that happens due to near celeritas travel is more science fiction (and to a degree, the FTL travel we see in things like Stross’ Singularity Sky in which you can arrive somewhere before you leave by going fast enough; screw causality).
Of course, taking into consideration our pear shaped universe, all negative time travel is effectively fantasy, at least how our current understanding of science presents the problem.
Completely in agreement here; to my mind it all depends on how consistent it is about the world created, both in the series’ internal consistency and in the cultural repercussions of time travel. Is it taken seriously or not? There’s quite a bit of what I would term hard sci-fi with dragons, and lots and lots of soft fantasy with spaceships.
Perhaps a better test for SF vs. Fantasy would be to ask what sort of expectations the speculative element sets up. If a machine takes the hero back in time, we might expect more inventions, but we’ll be upset if he/she starts using magic spells. On the other hand, if a magic wand takes the hero back in time, we’ll be upset if he/she starts mumbling about quantum effects. So I’d opt for a definition something like this:
Speculative fiction in which the speculative element (the “what if” of the story that demands suspension of disbelief) creates the expectation that events in the story could be explained (whether they are or not) by science and technology is science fiction; all else is fantasy.
I like this definition because it allows for the speculative element itself to be contrary to fact even for a fairly hard SF story. E.g. the positronic robots in Asimov.
You could just as easily ask, is space travel science fiction or fantasy? Mark Watney’s adventures on Mars were science fiction; John Carter’s adventures on Mars were fantasy. Is human transformation science fiction or fantasy? Transformation into a cyborg is SF, transformation into a werewolf is fantasy. Topic and genre are not necessarily the same thing.
Most time travel tends closer to fantasy, or at least science fantasy; even with a technological excuse, the actual science and logic behind how the time travel works is arbitrary and often physically impossible. And it’s usually fantasy in the sense of wish-fulfillment, tapping into the universal desire for the ability to undo our past mistakes or get a second chance at missed opportunities. Any tech handwaves are just in service to that goal.
But there are some time-travel stories that do, in fact, engage with time travel in a science-fictional way, both in the sense of using the story to examine the logical consequences and ramifications of time travel in and of itself and in the sense of grounding the time travel in credible, known science. Examples of this would include Gregory Benford’s Timescape, Robert L. Forward’s Timemaster, and Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships. The former two of those were written by actual physicists who based their novels on their own research into the theories involved. Stories like that are absolutely SF rather than fantasy. Hard-SF time travel is far rarer in film and TV than in prose, but maybe the movie Primer would count; the mechanism of time travel may be arbitrary, but the logic of its operation and effects is plausible and well-thought-out.
I would humbly submit my own Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock as being closer to the SF side of the spectrum. Trek time travel is usually quite fanciful and frustratingly inconsistent, but that’s why I wanted to do a novel that would wrestle all of Trek’s time-travel nonsense into some semblance of a coherent scientific model. So I researched temporal and quantum theory somewhat heavily (insofar as I could without any real grasp of the mathematics involved) and looked for real science I could use to rationalize the whimsies of Trek time travel. I was surprised how successful I was at this, how many things that I thought were utter nonsense could actually be more or less justified with real theory.
Of course, not all science fiction is hard science fiction. What makes a story SF is that it posits a hypothetical scenario and reasons out the logical consequences and impact it would have. That basic scenario can get away with being unexplained or improbable, so long as the exploration of its ramifications is worked out intelligently. (For instance, Bester’s The Demolished Man. Telepathy is fantasy, but the exploration of how human society would change if we had telepathy is smart and thoughtful.) After all, “science” does not just mean facts and figures. It means the process of seeking answers through the application of knowledge and deduction. So a time-travel story can be science fiction even if the mechanism or physics of the time travel is arbitrary, so long as it’s about exploring the logical ramifications of that time travel rather than just using it as a way to deliver the characters to another age. Maybe 12 Monkeys (the movie) or Looper or Edge of Tomorrow would count.
The idea that science fiction uses rivets and fantasy uses magic is an old one, applicable beyond even the question of how one defines a time travel story. But the deeper question is if time travel isn’t even possible, can any time travel story still be considered SF as opposed to fantasy? This prompted Larry Niven to write a series of stories in which a time traveler from the future using a machine keeps finding magical creatures when sent back in time to recover samples of extinct species.
— Michael A. Burstein
As @1/CaseyJones and others have stated, if you apply this level of rigorousness to allow the label “Science Fiction”, you eliminate all but the hardest of hard SF (including anything involving interstellar travel in human timescales), and invite technical nitpicking on the rest.
The best SF asks us to accept one premise that is highly unlikely (trending to impossible) and extrapolates worldbuilding, plot, and characterization from there. (By contrast bad SF just makes stuff up to solve problems with those things). I’m perfectly OK accepting a stargate, or spice-aided FTL navigation, or ansible communication as SF, no thesis defense required, as long as it makes logical and dramatic sense. And I’d rather read a beautifully-written, psychologically-astute story centered around a scientific impossibility than a mathematically-rigorous hard SF story populated with steely-eyed heroes doing Right Things.
@6/ChristopherLBennett posits that the distinction can be a matter of whether the concept used is somehow based in real science or math, however theoretical. I’d argue that this is just a gussied-up version of Trekkian reverse-polarity technobabble. At core, real, accepted science says that time travel, like FTL travel, just ain’t possible.
In the end it’s a semantic argument, of course. I am just old enough to remember the late-’60s movement to recast SF as “Speculative Fiction” or “Suppositional Fiction” specifically to resolve the dilemma of “science fiction” that had no defensible scientific plausibility (and not coincidentally to incorporate the then-burgeoning fantasy, ESP, and supernatural horror works). That movement mostly failed, but not because it was not a valid way to think about it so much as it doesn’t much matter in the end — a thought-provoking, well-done story, set in an internally-consistent universe, is a fine thing whatever you call it.
@8/sardinicus: Actually my point was that it’s not just about basis in real science or math. That’s the standard for hard science fiction specifically, but hard SF is just one subset of SF and it’s a fallacy to equate it with the whole thing. Like I said, science is not facts and figures, it’s a process of analytical thought and examination of ideas. Good SF can start with a totally impossible premise and still explore it in a science-fictional way by approaching it logically and examining its ramifications.
Then again, that can apply to fantasy too. I think it was Richard Matheson who said that the best way to approach fantasy was to include exactly one impossible element and make everything around it as grounded and realistic as possible, to facilitate suspension of disbelief. There’s no hard line between fantasy and SF; they’re regions on a spectrum, and they overlap a lot.
“At core, real, accepted science says that time travel, like FTL travel, just ain’t possible.”
Actually, real, accepted science says that both of those things are theoretically possible, but only under extreme conditions that are prohibitively difficult. But it also allows for the possibility that those prohibitive difficulties could be surmounted by a sufficiently advanced technology. It also says that if they could occur, there would be certain hard limits on what they could do. For instance, no time machine could send anything further back than the moment of its creation. And time travel could never “erase” an existing timeline; it would either be a self-consistent loop where the time travel is just part of the existing history all along (as in the movie 12 Monkeys or the Gargoyles animated series), or it would result in the creation of a parallel quantum history that would coexist alongside the original, unaltered history. (Indeed, a quantum treatment of time travel would require a time-traveling particle to follow every allowable path simultaneously, so that a traveler would both succeed and fail in altering history.)
So yes, in practical terms, time travel is very likely impossible. But, as with FTL, we know enough about the physics of what it would require and how it would work that a story about it can be told with only a comparatively minor concession to impossibility.
I like fiction that treats all its premises with rigor, whether it be fantasy or SF. The best stories establish their baselines and then stick to them. This might be a system of magic or scientific rules. For SF, scientific laws should not be ignored. But speculating on new scientific breakthroughs, or new understandings of the world around us, is within bounds.
I doubt time travel, at least the way most stories present it, will ever be possible. But it is still fun to guess what might happen if it were possible.
At least FTL and Time Travel usually get in-universe explanations. Most SF seems to pretend that the Laws of Thermodynamics are mere guidelines without spending a word on where their waste heat goes.
@10/AlanBrown: I agree. I like the kind of fantasy that approaches magic logically as if it were just another science, following consistent rules and limits rather than just being an arbitrary device that does whatever the writer needs at a given moment. Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series is like that. Diane Duane’s Young Wizards, Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, and Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence have an element of that too — magic coexists with physics and has to deal with its realities (like thermodynamics and energy transfer) rather than being a cheat to do anything.
Really, I dislike fiction that treats science and magic as mutually incompatible or inimical forces, because that’s misunderstanding science as something finite and fixed. Science is the process of discovering how the universe works. If there’s some part of the universe’s workings that science doesn’t cover, then it can expand to encompass it. Like, when quantum theory was first proposed, it seemed beyond anything that science recognized, and even seemed bizarre and magical in some ways. But since it’s really part of how the universe works, it could be confirmed and observed through experiment, and it was, and now quantum theory is at the heart of modern science and is used routinely in everyday technology (like the transistors and diodes in the computer I’m writing this on). Thus, by the same token, in a universe where magic existed, it would be part of the rules of that universe, and so science could expand to encompass it. There would be a science of magic.
@9/CLB: Then while we might disagree somewhat on the science*, you and I mostly agree on our answer to the question posed by the original post.
I do maintain that the answer doesn’t change depending on how much effort is expended trying to justify the impossible bit, in fact the best stories usually just present it as a fait accompli.
Perhaps in mentioning specific stories that do try to handle time-travel in a hard-SF way, your point is that if there is a theoretical underpinning, stated or not, it becomes easier for the author to generate that elusive sense of internal logic. That I would agree with but it seems the real-world viability of the theory has no bearing on that kind of result.
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*Or at least I am less willing to shade the difference between “theoretically possible but prohibitively difficult” and simply “impossible”. I have a friend who, every time there is some new particle discovery, reads the popularized articles and says to me “see? Warp Drive!” and I have to say um, no.
According to science, FTL is time travel, at least from certain frames of reference.
@13/sardinicus: The point is, hard science fiction is not about whether something is genuinely possible in real life. That’s not science fiction, just science. Hard SF is about verisimilitude — conjecturing something beyond known science, but otherwise treating it in as scientifically rigorous and convincing a way as possible. The goal is not for it to be actually possible, but for it to convince a reasonably science-savvy audience that it’s plausible as a part of the story.
Hal Clement liked to say that hard SF was a competition between the writer, who was trying to make a hypothetical premise convincing, and the audience, who was trying to spot the scientific flaws in the premise. The writer “wins” by minimizing the flaws the audience can find — by selling the conceit as persuasively as possible.
This is a subset of a more general point, the difference between reality and realism. Realism is the fictional style that attempts to create a convincing illusion of reality. That doesn’t mean actually being just like reality; it just means feeling realistic to the audience. Even realistic fiction is still fiction, still more structured and stylized and artificial than genuine reality, but it’s got enough of the flavor of reality to give it a feel that approximates reality to the satisfaction of the audience. Hard SF is realism for science. Not actually real, just feeling real enough to be plausible.
Time travel is real! Most of us are traveling forward in time at a rate of one second per second, other than those high on mountaintops or in orbit. :-)
@6/CLB:
By that definition, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child should qualify as SF, but Dune perhaps does not. I think that illustrates the essential futility of creating rules to distinguish SF from Fantasy, given that both were marketing labels developed without much of a rigorous set of underlying criteria in the first place.
In my view the more interesting (and fruitful) path of analysis of stories involving time travel lies in distinguishing those in which it is an essential element of the plot from those where it is merely a narrative device. If the characters need to know, or figure out, something about the nature of time or the mechanics of time travel in order to resolve a plot point, then you probably have SF (assuming that the characters’ learning process develops in some sort of plausible way). But if only the effects of time travel are important, then…well, in that case the time travel itself doesn’t really tell you a whole lot about the story’s genre. Where things tend to go wrong is usually either inconsistency in the use of time travel, or else overly detailed, ad-hoc explanations of the mechanics of TT when it merely being used as plot device (see Star Trek for an example of what happens when both mistakes are made!).
Many (most?) time travel stories elide the space part of space-time continuum. One exception is Doctor Who, which often acknowledges that the machine is also a spaceship (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space). But the archetypal time machine story by HG Wells has it staying in place, ostensibly just moving forward and backward in time, nevermind that the earth’s orbital location is not the same at each point in time the traveler lands. He could/should be materializing in the vacuum of space.
Side note: can we consider the movie Arrival as a time travel story? The protagonist doesn’t move in space (like many time travel stories in the past), but learning the alien language allows her consciousness to perceive the flow of time, perhaps to move thru it.
I would say that the answer to this question is yes…
Hard SF plays just as fast and loose with science as does soft sf; my conclusion has been that hard sf views the hardware or the technology as the center of the story and soft sf concentrates on the people. There is not a real dividing line between the two, and any given work is somewhere on a continuum. If I were to go full techno-nitpicky mode, nothing that has FTL, most forms of STL, or even quick and easy travel between planets within the Solar System would be “hard,” nor would anything with easy transplants (Varley, Niven), uploading consciousness, or accessible “pocket universes” with different physical laws would remain within the “hard” category, and that would leave roughly nothing in the “hard” category. Ursula K LeGuin’s books in the Hainish cycle are probably harder than a lot of the “harder” books by her contemporaries, but since the hardware isn’t prominent, they’re not hard sf.
Similarly, the line between fantasy and sf is not well defined.
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Back to time travel: the easy bopping back and forth in space-time of Doctor Who is fantasy, not sf. Stephen Baxter may have had some time travel within the known laws of physics, is exceptional. Elsewhere, time travel is pretty much outside of the realm of science as, for one thing, creation of closed time-like curves (“time travel”) needs a large rapidly spinning cylinder of neutron-star density, and one of the constraints is that you can’t travel in time to before the time machine’s creation. Time travel may be within the realm of sf, not fantasy, but where it falls in the fantasy-sf continuum may be saying more about the person making the distinction than about the story.
@19/swampyankee: “Hard SF plays just as fast and loose with science as does soft sf; my conclusion has been that hard sf views the hardware or the technology as the center of the story and soft sf concentrates on the people.”
That’s been the stereotype of hard SF for generations, and in the past it was even somewhat true, but I think that if you read the kind of hard SF coming out from modern authors like Greg Egan or Alastair Reynolds or Joan Slonczewski, you’ll find it’s no longer a real distinction. Plenty of modern hard SF puts just as much care into the characters as the concepts. I’ve certainly always aspired to that in my own writing.
The distinction put forth by Stanley Schmidt, the longtime editor of Analog who gave me my first break in the business, was basically that hard-SF stories are ones that cannot be told without the speculative scientific/technological element, while soft-SF stories are ones where the science and tech are more of a surface trapping whose absence — or whose substitution with elements of another genre — wouldn’t change the story that much. For instance, if Star Wars were set in a medieval fairyland and C-3PO was a prissy palace servant and R2-D2 his pet gnome, it wouldn’t make the story very different. You could take the fact that they’re robots out of the story without really changing anything about the story. But take the robotics out of the movie Ex Machina and you’ve got no story at all.
In your subsequent comments, you’re making the same mistake about hard SF that I already addressed above. It’s not defined by reality, but by realism. That means it doesn’t have to be limited to stuff that’s actually known to be possible — on the contrary, it’s not science fiction without some speculation beyond known reality. It’s just that the speculation has to be reasonably plausible, to provide a convincing-sounding explanation for the things that go beyond reality, at least enough that the science-savvy reader isn’t yanked out of the story by a blatant absurdity. The term is verisimilitude — literally “resemblance to truth.” Not actually being truth, just looking reasonably similar to it. Like the saying goes, “The key is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
As for your comments about Doctor Who, yes, on the main it’s blatantly science fantasy… and yet, amusingly, the specific points you raise actually are kind of addressed within it. TARDISes are powered by the Eye of Harmony, a black hole that the great Time Lord engineer Omega captured and bound beneath Gallifrey ages ago. A rotating black hole can certainly give rise to closed timelike curves, and if it was a primordial black hole, then it would be nearly as old as the universe.
I wonder where
1. The Time Tunnel and 2. Quantum Leap fit?
Both have a machine which send the protaganist(s) in time. The first is closer to blundering about in time, whereas Dr Sam Beckett expressly is supposed to ‘put right what once went wrong’.
@21/Philippa Chapman: Both The Time Tunnel and Quantum Leap were basically fantasy, without any real scientific credibility. Although TTT, for much of its run, stuck with the relatively plausible fixed-timeline model, where nothing the characters did could alter the past. For the majority of the season, that was treated by the characters as a given, after their attempts to change things early on were perpetually unsuccessful. The only circumstances in which they had a chance to make a difference were those where history didn’t already record what happened. But the concepts got sloppier over the course of the season, and eventually there were episodes driven by the attempts of the villains (such as aliens or time travelers from the future) to alter history, which was treated as a genuine threat even though it never actually succeeded. And a couple of episodes had a bizarre conceit that anyone from the past who was brought into a time after their death would be invulnerable to harm, because they were “already dead.” Although somehow this never applied to Tony and Doug when they were sent into their own future, otherwise there would’ve been no sense of peril for them. There was also the occasional dose of pure fantasy later on in the series, as it fell prey to the conceptual drift typical of Irwin Allen shows; there was an episode involving a haunting by Nero’s ghost and one in which Merlin the Magician used sorcery to force the time travelers to come to his time and help protect the young Arthur Pendragon.
Quantum Leap, meanwhile, tossed about scientific terminology without a trace of understanding or accuracy. I was particularly annoyed by their repeated references to the “neurons and mesons” of the brain, considering that mesons are subatomic particles that only exist for a fraction of a microsecond. And it basically had a pseudo-mystical underpinning, with the strong implication that God or destiny was guiding Sam’s journeys. (“God or fate or whatever” was the phrase they tended to use.) There was even an episode where they went up against the actual Satan, and a Christmas episode with a seemingly genuine miracle at the end.
I dearly loved Time Tunnel when I was a kid. I built a ship out of cardboard boxes, with a Viewmaster projector that provided the display on the control panel. When I wanted to travel in time, I used Time Tunnel discs for the display. When I wanted to travel in space, I used Tom Corbett, Space Cadet discs.
What impressed me about Time Tunnel was how the spacetime continuum restored their outfits to their original condition every time they tunneled through time, so they always arrived for the next episode wearing the exact same clothing that they started with.
Time travel is all fantasy except in books by Bob Forward.
@23/Alan: I figure that since the time vortex was timeless, all moments within it were one, so the state Tony and Doug were in when they first entered the Time Tunnel was sort of locked in as their permanent state whenever they were in the vortex. So not only did their clothes reset when they were drawn back into the vortex, but any injuries they sustained were healed. Had they been stuck in time indefinitely, they probably would’ve never aged.
@25 I was just watching them on disc a few months ago, and they hadn’t aged a day! ;-)
I’ll take Doc Brown’s DeLorean for a spin. I got to go back in time anyway. Go back in style.
@27/wichael: Meh. If you want to travel in style, forget the DeLorean, hold out for the steampunk hover-train.
Lots of people have made good points about the overall scale of rigor in both stories labelled as science fiction and stories labelled as fantasy. In the particular case of time travel, I find it interesting to look for stories that do manage to introduce a consistent frame, since it is very easy to have totally implausible situations like the scene at the end of Back to the Future where the protagonist starts fading out because his parents don’t meet. (Just how is the causality supposed to work there?)
I appreciate the reminders of examples above. I’m surprised no one has mentioned Primer yet as an example. The movie doesn’t spell everything out, and it takes a significant amount of thought, but there is a clear model behind everything that happens there.
Another example worth thinking about is The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson. The model behind the time travel there is spelled out a little less fully, but it’s clear that chaos and overlapping timelines are intimately involved, and the whole thing feels quite real to me.
(Of course I can also enjoy a good romp like Doctor Who or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.)
I find the soft Sci-Fi and Fantasy more enjoyable in general. Hard Sci-Fi is interesting, but I find it gets depressing if I read only hard Sci-Fi. Hard to dream of the stars, when we can’t escape Earth’s orbit.
Time travel is little different. Doctor Who is fun, like most time travel shows, because it treats causality like a cosmic punchline (“Trashcan. Remember the trashcan!“). We want to go back in time and meet those who came before us. We want the option to change the future by going into the past. Fantasy. I love that. I could read that all day.
That said, here are some more “realistic” fiction I’ve enjoyed:
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is a fun read, and applies some modern theory to time travel. I’ll leave it there, lest I reveal too much of the plot.
Poul Andersen’s Tau Zero also offers a more realistic version of time travel – as characters move closer and closer to the speed of light, they lose any connection to the time and space they left behind. Most compelling in Andersen’s story is his focus less on the technology, and more the impact on those involved – a very human story. That to me makes the story much more realistic, even if the premise is a fantastic one.
Lastly, although they don’t really touch time travel, I want to mention the Mars series, as well as Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. Great examples of hard, speculative sci-fi, these books tend to focus so much on the challenges, it can make space travel seem overwhelming and impossible.
When I think time travel, I think science fiction, but it really depends.
If it’s brought about by machines and science, then sci-fi for the win. (Examples: Back to the Future and The Time Machine.) But, if it’s brought about by magic, it’s fantasy. (Examples: Harry Potter and Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children.)
I think when people generally consider time travel and its real world ramifications and possibilities, they do so in terms of science. No one expects to come across a time traveling power, but people speculate that someone can, hypothetically, discover the science that would make time machines possible. I think because of that, it’s generally viewed as science fiction. But it definitely isn’t exclusively science fiction.
@31/Josh Redlich: I believe that taking your idea just a little bit further can explain a lot about how stories that are otherwise structurally indistinguishable are sorted into “sci-fi” and “fantasy”; the dynamic seems akin to CLB’s mention of how the degree of verisimilitude aligns with the ‘hardness’ of SF.
Tell someone in real life that you can go back in time by turning a particular hourglass, or perform some other amazing feat with a special incantation or the help of some mythical creature, and in most cases you will be (rightly) accused of a hoax or delusion; classifying a fictional story based on such elements as ‘fantasy’ thus follows quite naturally. With regards to technological explanations for phenomena, however, people have long encountered and used a wide range of technologies that operate on science and engineering principles they do not themselves fully understand, yet those same people have confidence that such concepts are knowable. Hence, if an author decides the principles underlying a technology are not relevant to the story then it can feel right to consider the lack of detail no more notable than the lack of understanding how a smartphone works; if that story heavy relies upon vehicles, droids, and other purpose-built objects, then the existence of systematic physical principles underlying their operations are implied and create a more ‘sciency’ feel to the work as a result.
The irony, of course, is that sometimes the authors of fantasy works (e.g. Tolkein, Jordan, Rowling) have put more careful thought into creating coherent sets of principles and rules governing their phenomena than some of the creators of so-called sci-fi (e.g. Roddenberry, Lucas) seem to have put into the laws governing their universes.
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Moving back to time travel more specifically…it occurs to me that the question in this post’s title presents a false dichotomy. What about works like 11/22/63, The Time Traveler’s Wife, or even Slaughterhouse-Five? None of those seem to properly qualify as either sci-fi or fantasy; magical realism, I suppose?
@31 & 32: The thing is, people tend to equate technology with science. But science isn’t gadgets, it’s a way of thinking, a process of asking questions and searching for the answers. A story with technology in it can be pure fantasy — like Star Wars, which is basically a sword-and-sorcery Western WWII samurai movie dressed up with outer-space trappings.
And once again, we need to remember that there’s a whole scale of “hardness” for science fiction. In hard SF, the science and technology are based on realistic principles and have relatively realistic limits; there may be some bits of them that go beyond strict scientific accuracy, but those breaks from reality are rationalized convincingly enough that the reader is able to imagine that they just might be actually possible for some future science. In really soft SF, though, the science and technology are arbitrary and can have abilities that are effectively magical. The difference between soft SF and fantasy sometimes just boils down to whether the extraordinary phenomena are justified in-story as the result of science or magic. For instance, saying “Dr. Bruce Banner was exposed to gamma rays that made him transform into a giant green rage monster” is functionally no different from saying “Dr. Bruce Banner was put under a magic curse that made him transform into a giant green rage monster.” It’s just as fanciful either way, since gamma rays don’t actually do anything like that and the transformation is physically and biologically impossible. But science is used as the excuse. At that extreme, you’ve gone beyond soft SF into pure science fantasy. (George Lucas’s preferred term for Star Wars is “space fantasy.” He’s never claimed it was science fiction.)
I once saw this discussed by a scholarly sort of my acquaintance as a difference between syntax and semantics. Syntax is the structure and logic of a story, while semantics are the terms and “vocabulary” that it uses. Star Wars uses the syntax of a high fantasy (Western WWII samurai) story with the semantics of space opera. Sean Connery’s Outland has the syntax of High Noon and the semantics of science fiction. And so on. Outer space, high technology, genetic mutation, and things like that are the semantics of SF; the syntax of SF is more about characters actually doing science and solving problems with their intelligence, or about the exploration of the ramifications of scientific and technological progress on society and human nature, or about projecting a known trend to its possible extreme as a cautionary tale or social commentary.
@33/CLB: “The thing is, people tend to equate technology with science. But science isn’t gadgets, it’s a way of thinking”. Yeah, that’s the key point, innit? Having gone to grad school for astronomy and spent the intervening years in IT, I’m acutely aware of—and frequently frustrated by—the myriad ways in which our culture and media misunderstand science and technology. Yet this thread has made me realize that the tech-equals-science mentality at least provides a somewhat rational basis for the frequent application of ‘sci-fi’ to works where perhaps it shouldn’t apply. That rationale might be fundamentally wrong, but it’s systematic and thus has a subversive appeal to my scientific side! :-)
Thanks for mentioning the ideas regarding syntax-vs.-semantics as applied to storytelling mechanics. Combining them with verisimilitude seems to provide a really good framework for putting SFF works (well, probably any fiction, really) into context.
My time travel tales include a time machine (Sugar Time and Flashback), time portals (The Doorway and Guard Dog [sequel]). I like alternate dimensions too.
My mind was captured at an early age by Poul Anderson’s There will be Time, in which time travel is genetic, so I don’t think of machines at all when it comes to time travel. However, whereas the book does try to provide a quasi-scientific explanation (time travelers are sterile except with each other and their offspring cannot travel in time, which shows some thought about the genetics of the case) and there are limitations, it’s basically hand-waving. So, I think this bleeds into the edges of fantasy. You could think of it as a super power.
The book is a must-read for any fan of time-travel, though, as are most of Anderson’s time travel stories (his Time Patrol stories, The Dancer from Atlantis, and The Corridors of Time being a few).
While reading this, I was reminded of The Shadow Rising, where Rand sees the history of the Aiel. But was that simply the magic of Rhuidean, or were the glass columns in the city some sort of device for recording memories and then relaying them to others later? Or, are they devices that do this but can only be activated by the use of the One Power(i.e.Magic)?
I think I tend to lean toward saying this is magic, and therefore Fantasy. What do y’all think?
Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander books, has been very insistent that the stones do not work by magic. If you’ve read all of the books, there is a science-based theory being developed to explain how the stones act as portals (because there are such stone portals all over the globe). Consequently, you should remove Outlander from your list of fantasy examples of time travel — it belongs in the SF category.
@24, there, too.
There are hypotheses or, perhaps more accurately speculations, that travel in the time dimension of space-time is possible within a black hole. Since passing information out of a black hole is impossible, and tidal forces will shred sub-atomic particles, traveling in time wouldn’t help with, say, getting tomorrow’s winning PowerBall tickets.
@38 For those of us who haven’t read the books, what is that scientific theory?