As a reader, I’ve always had mixed feelings about time travel stories. On the one hand, I enjoy the anachronisms and playing with answers to the questions of “what would they think of us?” and “what would we think of them?” On the other hand, the storytelling aspect seems fraught. How can we, as readers, ever give ourselves over to the storyline, knowing that at any moment, the author may swoop in and change it on us with a sudden, arbitrary jump around the timeline?
Still, as a writer, I couldn’t resist. The Gaia Twist series is partly about exploring diverse worlds, and I was seduced by the idea of treating present-day Earth as another world, and then experiencing it through the eyes of my characters. Besides, time travel would give me an excellent opportunity to explore one of my favorite meta-questions, and one of the best questions science fiction can ask: so what? What if we could travel in time and thereby edit our past actions? So what? What difference would it make, and what does that say about our present choices, actions, and sense of identity?
After I had sold myself on time travel for its thematic opportunities, I felt the need to tend to the storytelling challenges by setting aside, as best I could, the worrisome threat of deus ex machina plot surprises. That turned out to be harder than I thought, because I still wanted the worlds to interact throughout. I thought it wouldn’t be nearly as fun or revealing if, say, half the book were set in the past and the other half in the future. So I did end up with a fair amount of jumping back and forth, but I did my best to make the jumps nontrivial and well-motivated. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how I did.
One final note to those readers who see the “degrees in physics and electrical engineering” in my bio and wonder if my fiction has any basis in science. Short answer: not much. Slightly longer answer with respect to time travel in particular: not even a little!
DOUG WALKER WRITES 