Jonathan Moeller vs. Time Travel!

A reader emailed to ask why I’ve never written a story about time travel.

I have to admit that I don’t particularly care for time travel as a plot device. It seems to yank out a lot of the tension from a story. Like, the best way to make really interesting characters is to to have them make moral choices and live with the consequences of those choices. But if a character can travel back in time and undo the choice, then was it really a choice? It’s like reloading a saved computer game. The consequences aren’t really all that severe if you can undo them.

There have been time travel stories I liked. I think the key is consequences for the characters, and both a severe price for using time travel and logical rules governing its application. Like, in Stephen King’s 11/22/63, time travel is a key plot element, but it has a severe price. Every time you make a change in the past, it creates a parallel timeline you remember, and if you have too many parallel timelines in your head, you go insane. And the past itself is highly resistant to change, and if you try to make big changes, like saving JFK, the timeline tries to stop you by killing you through bad luck, to the point that a piano might drop on your head as you walk past a building.

So, it’s possible to do a good time travel story, I just don’t have any interest in attempting to write one.

That said, while I haven’t used time travel in my books, I have used time dilation several times. Time dilation is the idea that time passes at different rates depending on the vantage point of the observer. Like in the movie INTERSTELLAR, where one hour spent near a black hole means that seven years pass on Earth. The idea of time dilation has been fairly conclusively proven in physics, and it’s an idea older than modern science. Think of the Celtic stories of a man spending one night inside an elf-mound and a century passes for the rest of the world.

I’ve used time dilation in FROSTBORN, CLOAK GAMES, and GHOST EXILE (specifically GHOST IN THE INFERNO), and I like the idea enough that I’ll probably use it again at some point.

-JM