A not-uncommon plot device is to have Our Hero suddenly sent back in time to his own past. Often this comes as a result of “magic,” and results in the memories of, say, a 40-year-old man awakening in the body of his sixteen-year-old self. Hijinks ensue, where Our Hero, whose life has been a disappointment or a disaster, uses his knowledge of where he went wrong to make better choices next time. Usually Our Hero is not someone who planned to travel in time via either science or magic, but Just Some Guy who got sent into the past through accident or some caprice of a supernatural being or artifact.
As wish fulfillment fantasy, this can of course be an appealing notion. I’d certainly like to be able to back things up a bit and make different decisions based on what I’ve learned. But there are definite problems that I haven’t seen touched on too often in such tales.
Right from the outset I’ll point out that the whole idea is of course ludicrous. If, tomorrow, I woke up with my current set of memories, but in my high school body on, say, October 7, 1986, my first thought isn’t going to be to wonder what interesting space-time event caused that. No, I am going to be pretty well convinced that my brain has finally broken, and that I’ve gone *insane.* It seems to me that going back in time to your younger body is *less* likely than you going back in time *bodily,* so that there is both a 40-year-old and a 16-year-old version of yourself side-by-side. But, let’s suspend disbelief in order to allow the story to continue.
I’ve often wondered about doing just this, what I would do, who I would tell what, that sort of thing. The assumption always is that I could avoid mistakes that I made, change relationships that worked out wrong, prevent other people from making the mistakes that they wound up making, and so on. But the engineer in me almost always immediately leaps to all the *problems.* And there are some serious ones.
The first obvious problem is that if you go back to your teen years (where a good fraction of such stories seem to go), who the hell is going to believe you? If you tell people but cannot convince them, they will think you a liar or insane. This would be a retrograde step, and could result in you being chucked into a looney bin for the rest of your life. So you’d have to carefully consider who to bring in, and how.
Second: I don’t know about y’all, but if I suddenly woke up on some random high school day, I’d be in some *serious* trouble in attempting to re-integrate. What was my class schedule? I have no idea. What was my locker number? No idea. Locker combination? No idea. What were my teachers names? Only a fragmentary list remains. How about homework? Papers I needed to finish?
These may seem fairly trivial compared to the whole idea of time travel… but if you are in high school and suddenly cannot carry out the most basic functions of your normal day, you’re in trouble. Because even though you might have a college education… you can’t prove it. Your Masters Degree in Quantum Mechanics or your PhD in Afrocentric Lesbian Quadriplegic Studies no longer exist. If your plans for changing your future require you to have a college degree, you still need to get your high school degree, and all of a sudden there’s a serious roadblock.
I found high school largely pretty boring the *first* time. I shudder to imagine the dreariness that would ensue if I had to read those awful novels and write crappy reports on them *again.* And today, I consider myself a passably good draftsman. Back in the day, I won some award or other in a state drafting competition (went to state competition, came in nowhere). But today, that drafting is all done on AutoCAD and the like. T-Squares? Pens? Hand-lettering? Gah. So plowing through the sheer mechanics of high school again would be problematic. Not to mention dealing with students and their “issues” that now would seem monumentally trivial. So you’d likely find yourself something of a social pariah even if you kept your time traveler status to yourself.
And after high school comes college. Do you go the same route or some other route? If the same route, you know what you were good at, what you weren’t. I’d know that I’d have to bang my head on the wall of calculus I and III, and I guess I’d try to find a way to slog through them more effectively. But you might decide to, instead, go some wholly different route. Once you do that, though, you no longer have much useful wisdom, and you’re starting from scratch.
“Back to the Future II” included the idea of someone using their knowledge of the future – in this case, a stolen copy of a history of sports scores – in order to make themselves immensely rich. But with the younger-self version… you have to rely purely on your memory to do that. And what would you use? I don’t give a damn about sports, so I have no data on what team won what game with what score. So no sports betting for me. Other people, though, may well have that information memorized, and thus they could potentially do well. Lotteries are of course of no value… I have no knowledge of what numbers come up where or when, and I seriously doubt anyone else does either. Some historical events of course could be bet on… who is going to run for President, who’s going to run for VP, and who’s going to win. But these only come along just so often. What movies are going to be big hits, and which ones are going to bomb, you may know. Do you know how to profit from that? The Internet Boom of course provides some opportunities for investing, assuming you arrive in a timeframe meaningful for that (reawakening as your 16-year-old self in 1954 negates that possibility). Of course, some investment strategies may work negatively… trying to get in on the ground floor of Amazon or Google or Facebook might cause them to make different decisions, with the result being that the company flops. So… good job, I guess.
And how about The One That Got Away? OK, presumably you have some idea where things went wrong. And you are now well positioned to prevent that. But The Other One is still a 16-year-old mind in a 16-year-old body, while you’re a 4o-year-old mind in a 16-year-old body. And the difference between a 16 year old and even a 24 year old version of the same person can be pretty substantial. The 40 year old you might find that you cannot *stand* the 16 year old Other. The 16 year old Other may find the suddenly changed version of you (whether or not You and Other had actually met at 16) seriously odd or creepy. So in order to correct a relationship what done gone wrong, you’d have to get the relationship going in the first place… and this may require some substantial acting on your part. You might have to act much less mature than you actually feel, which would be a strain… and you’d have to act like the immature and probably vapid Other is actually interesting. And, hell, let’s face it, you’d have to act like the current popular culture is still of interest to you. “Oh, yeah… A Flock of Seagulls. Awesome,” or “Sure, Right Said Fred will last forever.” You might well have to put yourself through years of torture with someone you don’t like in order to be with them, years later, when they mature into someone you *will* like. But by that point, you’ve spent so long lying and torturing yourself that you well and truly cannot stand them. So… good job, I guess.
Time travel fantasies of this kind tend to focus on either the big things (preventing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, say), or gloss over all the problems and go straight to Our Hero setting all the wrong things right. It could be that my memory just isn’t that good, but it seems that the fictional time travelers always seem to have remarkable memories of the things going on in their lives decades earlier, and somehow skip right over the serious problems that I foresee.
11 Responses to “My problem with time travel fantasies”
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The only book I know of that uses this premise is _Replay_ by Ken Grimwood. He addresses some of the issues you discuss, but I’ll give my own take on them.
Never tell anyone! That would, as you say, be unwise. And what good would it do?
Investing: you don’t try to buy out Bezos or Zuckerberg, you just buy enough to ensure that you’ll do well. Knowing to sell out of Enron or Worldcom by 2000 would also be good.
The One That Got Away: well yeah, she probably won’t live up to your memories, but there will be others, and as an adult in a younger body you’ll have a better chance with any that you *do* find interesting.
School: Being older and, presumably, wiser means that you’ll be better as a student. Sure, some of it will be boring, but that’s life. You can take different electives in HS, and exercise better study habits in college if you decide to go to college (alternately you could jump on the Real Estate boom in CA and get rich fairly quick, then get out before the bottom falls out).
Anyway, while I agree that there would be unknowns and pitfalls, if offered the chance to do even the last 20 (though I’d prefer the last 25) years over again, knowing what I know now, I’d jump in with both feet and nary a look back.
Well it’s a very interesting premise. I wrote a story treatment along these lines about 30 years ago, the major difference being the protagonist is only back in time for one year (his senior year in high school). I assumed supernatural modality here and made no attempt to explain how the time travel occurred. The story revolved around making things right, but with only a year (actually 9 months since it was the school year) to do it.
As you note, fixing relationships could be problematic because the other person is immature, or more kindly, just not fully formed yet. Thus the kinds of reasoning one might attempt today as an adult in his 50s might not work if the other person is a 17-year-old prom queen, or the obnoxious bully that had terrorized him since the first grade. I did see the opportunities for humor in the sudden transformation of a teenage slacker into a model citizen around the house, as well as some emotion derived from seeing his deceased parents in their prime as younger, active folks. I left unfinished the discussion of whether the protagonist is happy or unhappy with the outcome once he returns to the present.
And for me it’s doubly interesting because I wrote this in my 20s and now I’m that guy in his 50s. But I’ll tell you I wouldn’t go back to high school for all the money in the world.
I gave it some thought, too. When I was 14 I had, during my second week in high school, an epileptic seizure. That would have been the perfect time to make the switch. After a seizure, some confusion is usually evident, and sometimes memories are lost. It would offer a built-in excuse.
I was pretty much an outsider at the time, and my friends tended to be sci-fi readers who’d play with ideas, so they *might* have been approachable. I know I’d bet on the Moon landing and on the problems with Apollo 13, but there’s not much else I remember well enough to profit. I was seldom clear on who was President, for example. Sports? Well, no; but no one would expect that of me.
Getting the One Who Got Away? I’d not bother. There are plenty of other women. I’d like to have done a couple of specific girls, admittedly just out of curiosity, and with my current level of experience they’d have been easy.
Math class would be the worst. That would be complete hell. I’d be automatically looking for my calculator. (This has inspired me to look for my book that explains how to calculate square roots manually.)
Part of the problem, after coping with the mechanics, would be fitting into society. Assuming success at working out the mundane details, would a traveler fit better into a different group? Overall, it seems to me that what might happen is that the average traveler might lose his edge in order to conform to the standards of the time.
My university degree? The degree is Information Systems. No one in my family or my high school would have any idea what the hell I was talking about. Even worse, when I got to college, I’d have been thrown in with the folk who designed the computers, and I just don’t know all I’d need to know in order to compete with them. My degree is long on application and short on invention. (That’s a concept that probably worthy of more thought than it’s been given.)
I think I’ll pass. Unless it gives me a shot at Liz and Anna.
Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr did a take off on that them in their book “The Household Gods”. Single-mom, put-upon junior lawyer happens to make a wish to a Roman plaque she has hanging in her house. The gods hear it and send her back in time to inhabit the body of a ancestor in what is now Austria during the time of Marcus Aurelius.
Not a bad book and makes you grateful for what you have now.
I agree that there would be many unexpected pitfalls, but in my case the known FUBARs are extensive enough that I’d be willing to risk it. As for “the one that got away”, I have an unfortunate inability to tell when the opposite sex in “dropping obvious hints” that they are interested in me. Several times, I had someone who I admired from afar tell me years later that they had a crush on me, but thought I wasn’t interested when I ignored their hints.
Right from the outset I’ll point out that the whole idea is of course ludicrous. If, tomorrow, I woke up with my current set of memories, but in my high school body on, say, October 7, 1986, my first thought isn’t going to be to wonder what interesting space-time event caused that. No, I am going to be pretty well convinced that my brain has finally broken, and that I’ve gone *insane.* It seems to me that going back in time to your younger body is *less* likely than you going back in time *bodily,* so that there is both a 40-year-old and a 16-year-old version of yourself side-by-side. But, let’s suspend disbelief in order to allow the story to continue.
I’ve often wondered about doing just this, what I would do, who I would tell what, that sort of thing. The assumption always is that I could avoid mistakes that I made, change relationships that worked out wrong, prevent other people from making the mistakes that they wound up making, and so on. But the engineer in me almost always immediately leaps to all the *problems.* And there are some serious ones.
The first obvious problem is that if you go back to your teen years (where a good fraction of such stories seem to go), who the hell is going to believe you? If you tell people but cannot convince them, they will think you a liar or insane. This would be a retrograde step, and could result in you being chucked into a looney bin for the rest of your life. So you’d have to carefully consider who to bring in, and how.
The First Law of Intertemporal Transposition is the same as the “T Law” of Naval Nuclear Reactor Operations: TELL NO ONE. Seriously. No one needs to know. Just start making your plans and keep the lip zipped.
Second: I don’t know about y’all, but if I suddenly woke up on some random high school day, I’d be in some *serious* trouble in attempting to re-integrate. What was my class schedule? I have no idea. What was my locker number? No idea. Locker combination? No idea. What were my teachers names? Only a fragmentary list remains. How about homework? Papers I needed to finish?
Ferris Bueller time: first, call in sick. Aask the front office to have yor best friend pick up yor homework assignments for you. Spend the day in your room, rifling through your papers for data. Then, after school is out, call your best friend (on a land line phone) and ask him to “bring you your homework”. Once he’s there, tell him you fell and hit your head while dong something cool/forbidden and are having trouble rememering things. You don’t want to tell your folks or go to the doctor for obvious reasons, so you get him to give you your class schedule locker number, etc. The next day, check in at the school office and tell them a prankster put Krazy Glue in your locker’s combination lock and now it doesn’t work. The school will send a custodian with bolt cutters to cut off the lock. You put on the new lock (the one you bought at the convenience store next to the gym on your way to school). Locker problem solved. By then your best friend will have spread the sad story of your wicked cool memory-loss accident around the school. Make use of this social capital to glean teavhers’ names, offers of homework assistance, and possibly some sympathy trim from some of your girlfriends.
I found high school largely pretty boring the *first* time. I shudder to imagine the dreariness that would ensue if I had to read those awful novels and write crappy reports on them *again.* And today, I consider myself a passably good draftsman. Back in the day, I won some award or other in a state drafting competition (went to state competition, came in nowhere). But today, that drafting is all done on AutoCAD and the like. T-Squares? Pens? Hand-lettering? Gah. So plowing through the sheer mechanics of high school again would be problematic. Not to mention dealing with students and their “issues” that now would seem monumentally trivial. So you’d likely find yourself something of a social pariah even if you kept your time traveler status to yourself.
I was popular in school so I can’t help you here. I also enjoyed the novels you found dreary. What you could do is use your accident as a pretext for your sudden transformation from happy-go-lucky slacker to a motivated, Asian-level grind.
Eff sports. Gambling has a lousy ROI, and the scores will probably start to drift from what you do remember due to timeline divergence. Instead, get two after-school jobs, don’t date, and use the money to buy stock. I recommend buying and holding APL,T, and FDX.
And how about The One That Got Away?
Dude, you have 25 years of lovemaking experience in the body of a 16-year-old. To use that combination as a tool of seduction against a teenage girl would be the act of a cad, and contrary to the moral law as well. However, qualms ignored, one night is all you’ll need to become a legend. By the end of your first year you’ll likely be boning the One That Got Away, her sister, her mom, and that French teacher with the short skirt, who is now fair game.
Hmmm… I think I’d fare better than most. My father was an investor and taught me how to invest, also I read the investor’s magazines. With that kind of incentive, I think I could remember some of the best performing stocks in the annual review articles. Knowing the ’82 recession and the ’87 stock market hiccup were coming I could position myself to profit from them.
I’ve heard there are folks who made fortunes buying and selling Apple Computer stock on its price swings in the 80’s and into the 90’s. I could join them.
I’d try to save a friend from a car crash. Keep him busy so he’s not in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’d save myself from a head injury I sustained on July 2, 1979, shortly after graduation.
I’d pick a different major in college this time around, get the benefit of two educations.
I wouldn’t get married. At least not to the one I did.
Also, I’d know what DIDN’T happen… no nuclear war, no asteroid strike, no total collapse of the country, and so forth.
Interesting thought experiment.
H. Beam Piper got here way ahead of you. But you probably knew that already. Due to copyright failure, most of his stuff is available free on Gutenberg.
Time travell never been success in this century
Had anyone travelled in time -no .
It is/was only a imagine of some scinetist and people. i think time travell only will success when we could travell more than speed of light .. Thats why donot west ur time for time travell. Gud bye brothers and sisters
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