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Fight Club

The Return of Hobbes

Hobbes is reborn as Tyler to save "Jack" (a grown-up Calvin) from the slough of un-comic despair.

::: Galvin P. Chow

In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton’s character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give "Jack" more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. "Jack" is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It’s true. Norton portrays the grown-up version of Calvin, while Brad Pitt plays his imaginary pal, Hobbes, reincarnated as Tyler Durden.

Part I: The Hobbes-Tyler Connection

Picture this: a hyper, self-absorbed child initially concocts an imaginary friend as the ideal playmate, to whom more realistic qualities soon become attributed. This phantasm becomes a completely separate personality, with his own likes, dislikes, and temperament—and the imaginer and the imagined clash and argue constantly, though remaining fast friends. This pattern continues to the point where the child begins to perceive what was originally mere fantasy to be reality.

Just as Calvin has an imaginary jungle-animal friend named Hobbes, whom everyone else believes to be nothing but a stuffed toy, "Jack" in Fight Club has an imaginary cool-guy friend named Tyler, whom no one but Jack can see.

In both cases, the entity that began as the ideal companion soon took on a more realistic, three-dimensional quality. In other words, they became real. This is evident in that both Hobbes and Tyler also began to function as scapegoats for their creators. For instance, consider that Calvin often blames broken lamps and other assorted household mischief on Hobbes, and that Jack is inclined to believe that Fight Club and other various anti-society mischief is brought about by Tyler, not himself. Calvin claims Hobbes pounces on him every day after school; Jack believes Tyler beats him up next to 40 kilotons of nitroglycerin in a parking garage—the list goes on and on. The relationships between the two sets of friends are the exact same. Is this mere coincidence?

"There are eight rules of Fight Club."

Filling in the time-gap between Calvin and Jack, we can imagine the story as something like this: Once Calvin reaches the hostile environment known as the seventh grade, the constant teasing from the other students and the frustrated concern of his parents finally becomes too much, and a reluctant, disillusioned Calvin is finally forced to grow up, or at least begin to. This decision is sealed by one of the hardest things young Calvin will ever have to do in his life: un-imagine Hobbes, an act which to Calvin is essentially no different from murder. After being Calvin’s best friend for over a decade, Hobbes is packed away in a box, or tossed carelessly into a garbage bag, perhaps even stuffed under the same bed that once contained so many monsters. This is all, of course, very painful for Calvin, so much so that he represses it all in shame. Little does Calvin suspect that while he is busy growing up, deciding what "dinette set defines him as a person," Hobbes is also maturing in the recesses of his mind, waiting to be unleashed at an appropriate time.

It’s worth noting that during these twenty or so years, Hobbes never bears a grudge against Calvin nor wishes any ill upon him. Hobbes, remembering the depth of their past friendship, does not hate Calvin but rather hates the society that made Calvin put him away. Hobbes, residing in Calvin’s mind, sees and experiences all that Calvin does—and truly despises all of it. He witnesses a bright, superbly imaginative kid (with a genius-level vocabulary) reduced to nothing more than another nameless cog. Fighting off the tears wept for his conventionalized pal, Hobbes resolves to set Calvin free, paying special attention when Calvin idly looks up homemade-napalm recipes on the Internet.

Flash forward to the timeframe depicted in Fight Club. Calvin/Jack has reached an all-time low. He has done everything society has told him to do but is completely void of happiness. Hobbes, newly adjusted as "Tyler Durden" (after all, grown-up Calvin would no longer accept a jungle animal walking, talking, and eating canned tuna), re-enters Calvin/Jack’s life, determined to show Calvin everything he’s done wrong, whether he likes it or not.

Tyler to Jack: "I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I’m smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways you wish you could be."

Calvin has always idolized Hobbes. In Weirdos From Another Planet, he dresses up like a tiger and attempts to live in the woods. Like Hobbes, Tyler is cool, collected, and incredibly cerebral. Given this evidence, one can conclude that Tyler is Hobbes, reincarnated after being trapped inside Calvin/Jack’s brain for so many years. Just as Calvin is Jack, Hobbes is Tyler.

Part II: Marla Singer—Avatar of Susie Derkins?

Somewhere between the end of high school and beginning of college, uptight, grade-obsessed Susie Derkins lost her way. The pressure to get good grades, the pressure to succeed, simply became too much for her, and she snapped.

Marla remembers the girl she used to be.

Free from the protective bonds of her parents’ guidance and the bland safety of her suburban home, Susie loses her moral bearings entirely and sinks into a dark, seamy, grim world of sex, drugs, and eccentric Albert-Einstein-like hair. Her transformation is so complete that she no longer even remotely resembles the upright citizen that her parents and society wanted her to be: thus, she changes her name.

Like Calvin, Susie has become a misfit, one of society’s lost lambs. It is for this reason that she soon finds herself frequenting support groups such as "Remaining Men Together." Fate has brought her back to Calvin, whom she probably spurned back in junior high. But the two have changed so much that they no longer recognize each other!

The pink dress Marla wears in one scene slightly resembles something that "Binky Betsy," Susie’s favorite childhood doll, once wore: the doll that Calvin stole and attempted to ransom. While Calvin and Susie mostly teased and tortured each other, Hobbes was infatuated with the raven-haired beauty. Accordingly, Jack despises Marla, whereas Tyler takes an *ahem* sort of interest in her (definitely inappropriate for the Sunday Funnies).

When we are first introduced to Marla, she is but a tumor on Jack’s slowly deteriorating world. She is disenfranchised, morbid, socially apathetic—and Jack despises her because she is a mirror image of himself, his own female double. On the other hand, Calvin hates Susie because she is his exact opposite: Bright, obedient, demure—the unruly Calvin has every reason to hate her. However, certain strips definitely infer that Calvin has somewhat of a crush on Susie, and some even imply that Susie shares these latent feelings. But as a cootie-fearing grade-schooler, Calvin may only express these strange feelings through attention-getting antagonisms such as constant snowballs to the head, ransoming her dolls—and through his separate, conveniently more mature other personality—Hobbes.

Unlike Calvin, Hobbes has never been bashful about showing his affection for Susie. Calvin’s imaginary tiger-friend has called her a "cutie," worn swim jams to impress her ("Girls flip for guys in jams"), and even claimed he would betray their club’s secret code if she gave him a tummy rub (which is one of the key differences between Tyler and Hobbes). Naturally, all of this confuses and frustrates Calvin beyond words, even though Hobbes is really nothing more than a product of his own mind! And though Hobbes and Susie never consummated their love for each other (he’s a stuffed tiger and she’s a kid, you sicko!) this is, of course, the exact same deranged love-triangle that is shared between Jack, Tyler, and Marla, or at least a natural progression thereof. Perhaps Marla puts up with Jack/Tyler’s apparent nonsense for so long, because it’s the sort of thing she became used to as a child? And perhaps, in the end, Jack finds solace in Marla because it’s the exact same connection he should’ve made long ago, in his suburban youth. A connection that may have saved them both.

Part III: GROSS—Precursor of Fight Club

In a scene eerily reminiscent of Fight Club, Hobbes blithely informs a sulking Calvin that he decides his own level of involvement in G.R.O.S.S.

When you boil it down, the Fight Club that Jack and Tyler start is really just an odd sort of boys’ club—no ovaries allowed—where men can be men, and the so-called stronger of the sexes can take solace in the fact that, even in our politically correct times, some exclusivities of manhood still remain. (As a side note, imagine how much more controversy the movie would have generated if it involved scenes of men fighting women on equal ground!)

And clubs like this, of course, have their beginnings in backyards, tree houses, and garages all over America. Not surprisingly, Calvin started such a club when he was six years old. Little did anyone realize that he would construct another one much later in his life, again with the aid of an imaginary friend. For just as Calvin, Hobbes, and Susie have dark future versions in Jack, Tyler, and Marla respectively, G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS) has the same in Fight Club.

G.R.O.S.S. shares the following characteristics with Fight Club:

• Both have catchy names (although the "slimy" part of G.R.O.S.S. is redundant, otherwise it doesn’t spell anything).
• Both are co-run by a friendless male and his imaginary companion (Calvin is Tyrant and Dictator-for-Life; Hobbes is President and First Tiger).
• Both are exclusively male organizations, although Fight Club’s membership is considerably larger.
• Along with that, all members of both organizations are very loyal.
• The leaders of both organizations constantly engage in fisticuffs (but only in G.R.O.S.S. does a member receive a demerit for biting).
• And in said fights, in both organizations, there is only one fight at a time!
• Both are supposedly very secretive (though Jack never tells his mother about Fight Club).
• At least one leader of both organizations is fond of giving speeches (though Calvin never uses the term "space monkey").

G.R.O.S.S. and Fight Club both wreak havoc on their respective neighborhoods (G.R.O.S.S.’s target is considerably more focused, i.e., Susie). Clearly, the roots of Fight Club can be seen in G.R.O.S.S. Calvin shows his penchant for such male-oriented, destructive organizations. Also, just like cardboard-box-time-machines and water-gun-transmogrifiers, G.R.O.S.S. was likely created as an escape, a release—as, of course, was Fight Club.

Part IV: Moe Develops Karmic Bitch-Tits

Moe secretly seeks atonement for past sins.

Robert "Moe" Paulson, Calvin’s grade-school bully, becomes a six-time weight-lifting champion, and somewhere along the line develops large man-boobs as a result of testicular cancer. This of course leads him to his support group, where he is shocked to find Calvin.

Moe greatly regrets his bullying days, but, too ashamed to reveal his true identity to Calvin, he instead offers his ample bosom for him to cry on, as a measure of retribution.

Part V: The Root of Evil

Although we’ve already learned of the fates of Hobbes, Susie, and Moe, there are a couple of other people important to Calvin that are missing. People that are even more integral to his development than (arguably) Hobbes: his parents. Mr . . . uhm . . . , and Mrs . . . uh. . . . Okay, so they don’t have names. But then again, there is no need to know them. Because in the comic strip, they’re not supposed to be important characters in their own right. They only matter in regards to how Calvin is directly effected by them; an effect which, by the time of the film, doesn’t seem to have been very positive. From what "Jack" mentions, he’s not exactly close to his parents, particularly his dad, on whom he seems to pin many of his problems. And this matches perfectly with the relationship depicted in the comic, as well as with what happened afterwards (in Part I).

Calvin’s dad seems to have done quite a number on his son. As stated, it was probably at his urging that Calvin "grew up," that is, finally started to conform to society’s rules, which was the death of Hobbes. Of course, his father wasn’t without his playful side—good-naturedly teasing Calvin at every opportunity—but perhaps this is why "Jack" resents him so much. Maybe after Jack reached the end of his dutiful journey, only to find emptiness, he thought back to the day his father told him that the sun sets down somewhere in Arizona every night. "Maybe," thought Calvin, "maybe ALL of it’s been just another one of Dad’s cruel jokes."

In the "bathtub" scene of Fight Club, "Jack" and Tyler discuss their woeful parents. In this scene, crucial information is revealed, as well as some inconsistencies. "Jack" claims his father left when he was six, an age when Calvin’s dad was obviously still around, but this statement is contradicted soon after, when Tyler mentions his own dad telling him to get married when he was thirty, to which "Jack" responds, "mine said that too." The self-pitying "Jack" is most likely seeking to garner additional sympathy from his newfound friend by making his childhood sound worse than it actually was.

But even more interesting is Tyler’s hostility towards his father: when "Jack" asks him who he would fight, if he could fight anyone, he answers, "I’d fight my father." But, since Tyler is only a figment of Jack’s imagination, we can only assume he’s referring to Jack’s father. And while this hatred would only make sense given that the two are sharing the same brain, why is it that Tyler seems to hate Jack’s father even more vividly than "Jack" himself does? Maybe it’s because Tyler hasn’t forgotten who’s ultimately responsible for the un-imagining that took place years before . . . maybe he’s still not too happy about it . . . and maybe he’s got some pretty good ideas for revenge.

The role of Calvin’s father in all of this is no small one. Other than to "save" Calvin, it’s entirely possible that Tyler’s real motivation for taking down civilization is simply to get back at Calvin’s father. For by destroying the society that forced Calvin into repressing Hobbes, he’s also destroying the society that Calvin’s father, after all, epitomizes. And this of course allows Hobbes an indirect measure of revenge.

Part VI: Calvin—"I Am Jack’s Lost Youth"

Although the personality differences between Calvin in the comic strip and Calvin in the movie are pretty large, it can be explained as easily as taking Id and introducing him to Superego ("Jack" actually seems to have sort of a Super-Superego). Nearly all people go through the same thing when first confronted with the crushing grind of reality. But, as they say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall—and in terms of imagination and dreams, Calvin was a giant.

Still, it’s not as though common traits between Calvin-Calvin and Jack-Calvin can’t be identified at all. Besides a preference for imaginary friends over real ones, and an inability to express affection for girls, Calvin has never done well when forced to play by any sort of rules. Take, for instance, his utter inability in any sort of organized sport, compared to his unbridled joy while playing the make-it-up-as-you-go-along "Calvinball." Furthermore, even at age 6 Calvin never exactly thrived in stifling, authoritarian establishments (i.e., school), and he’s always had clashes with authority figures since the strip began (his parents, the doctor, his teacher, Rosalyn)—which actually may have initially planted the seeds for Tyler. Beyond that, his excellent vocabulary and way with words are still with him in the voice-over narration of Fight Club, and his rampant materialism that started with mail-order propeller-beanies ends with yin-yang shaped tables. As for the differences, they can be credited to the demoralizing effect of reality.

In the end, Calvin’s involvement with Fight Club and return of Hobbes can be boiled down to two words: "Personal Responsibility." For although Fight Club and Project Mayhem were both mostly Tyler’s doing, by the end of the movie, Jack readily accepts his own part of the blame, as Tyler is his creation. And by doing so, he also accepts responsibility for the undesirable condition of his own life—his father may have pushed him, but Calvin himself was the one who chose to obey. It is through this newfound self-accountability that Calvin/Jack is able to take control of his own life at last. As skyscrapers flash and crumble in the background, and blood oozes from the bullet hole in his head, Calvin says that he is "okay." And we are apt to believe him.

Part VII: Conclusion

Calvin’s world in the comic strip is pure, romanticized idealism, whereas in the movie, he lives in gray, bleak reality. Within the safety of the panel, Calvin is perpetually six years old, terrible things can never happen, and no matter how crazy a stunt he pulls, everything always returns to status quo. Because of this, our hero is free to do as he wishes, free to chase his dreams as wildly as he desires, never having to worry about tomorrow because there essentially will never be one—unless it’s part of a continuing storyline. This makes the reality of Fight Club all the bleaker, because it depicts what happens when you take someone weaned on dreams and limitless possibilities and jam him into a cramped cage confined by rules and regulations. It probably only took poor Calvin a few years in the adult world (or growing-up world) to fully make the sad change.

This transition from gleeful Calvin to dull "Jack" is not uncommon. Little Nemo became a banker, Peter Pan became a lawyer, and Garfield was caught and butchered by the chef of a Chinese restaurant. (One exception is Charlie Brown, who from all indications was mentally middle-aged at the time of his birth.)

The moral of the story is that reality bites, kiddies. Calvin and Hobbes in Fight Club are proof of this sad, sad truth.

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Discussion Questions:

1. In the film, Calvin and Hobbes actually reversed many personality traits as Jack and Tyler. Is it possible that Calvin is the personality that got repressed and Hobbes is the one that did the "growing up"? Discuss.

2. Tyler wears a fur coat near the end of the movie. What is the significance of this garment, given his past incarnation as a jungle animal? Discuss.

3. If Calvin really wanted to change things, why didn’t he just dust off his old cardboard-box time machine and hop in? Discuss.

4. After the end of Fight Club, when Calvin realizes he’s effectively killed Hobbes twice now, do you really think he’ll still be "okay"? Discuss.

A Wrinkle in the Space Time Continum

or

A great article I copied and posted 10 minutes from now...


Thank you Paul Levinson for the link on your facebook page. I enjoyed the books so much I had to post it on my Blog.


MIND MELD: The Tricky Trope of Time Travel
In which we get a lovely and diverse panel to discuss the best and brightest genre uses of time travel.
Q: Time travel is one of the trickiest SF/F tropes to use well. Why use it at all? What stories have used it to the best effect?
Paul Levinson
Paul Levinson's The Silk Code won the 2000 Locus Award for Best First Novel. He has since published Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His science fiction and mystery short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), and Cellphone (2004), have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into nine languages. New New Media will be published in 2009. Paul Levinson appears on "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "The CBS Evening News," the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" (PBS), "Nightline" (ABC), and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog. Paul Levinson is Professor and Chair of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.Why use time time travel in stories? That part is easy: it's because time travel, written about properly, engenders the most exquisitely intellectually pleasurable paradoxes that a cognitive being can experience. All paradoxes do some of that. Consider "this statement is a lie". If it's true, that means it's a lie. But if it's a lie, that means it's true." You struggle, like a fish trapped in a net, to break free. But you cannot. And, for some people - like me - your eyes water with tears of pleasure as you continue to struggle.
Time travel's paradoxes are just a tad less inextricable, and that adds to the fun. How can an older, familiar-looking man appear to me, to tell me how to time travel, when I am that man? One way out is you can posit two universes. In U1, someone other than my older self teaches me how to time travel. That turns the universe into U2, in which my older self goes back in time, and teaches my younger self. Both universes exist, simultaneously. In another enjoyable, well-known scenario, I go back in time, and prevent my grandparents from meeting. So, how did I come to exist in the first place, and travel back in time? One answer: In Universe1, my grandparents meet, and I am eventually born. I travel back in time, prevent the meeting, which creates Universe 2, in which I was never born. At that point, I am Version1 of myself, living in Universe2.
In all time travel stories, there is the question of whether or not trips to the past can change the future. If they can, then part of the fun is shaking up all of the characters in the future, and mapping out the new universes that come to exist. The other approach - that nothing can be changed - leads to one of my favorite kinds of time travel stories, in which an attempt to change something bad in the past actually is the thing that makes the bad event happen.
In writing, Asimov's The End of Eternity and Heinlein's Door into Summer are the best time travel novels, in my view. Heinlein's "By His Boostraps" and "All You Zombies" do it for short fiction. In movies, 12 Monkeys takes the paradoxes the most seriously, and the most enjoyably. Deja Vu does a pretty fine job too. In television, "Yesterday's Enterprise" from Star Trek: TNG, and the "The City on the Edge of Forever" from Star Trek: TOS are the single best time-travel episodes on any series. I also thought Journeyman, last year, had some superb time travel episodes near the end of its too-short run, and Lost this year and last year has had some outstanding time travel threads - see my http://InfiniteRegress.tv for detailed reviews.
I'll leave it to the public to decide how well I handle time travel in The Plot to Save Socrates, in my Loose Ends story saga, and, some time in the future, in The Genesis Virus on the screen.
Maureen Kincaid Speller
Maureen Kincaid Speller is a reviewer and critic, as well as being a former administrator of the British Science Fiction Association and a former Clarke Award and Tiptree Award judge. She earns a living as a proof-reader and copy-editor, but is mostly a graduate student which is why so much of her life seems to be 'former'.I think time travel is, or ought to be, such a great science-fictional device. The trouble with using it in a novel is that it too often becomes difficult to see beyond the device itself. More than any other literary device I can think of, a very precise set of conventions have accrued to time travel, and it is all too easy for the reader to become distracted by the need to check that all the chronological loose ends have been tied off, and to be distracted if they haven't. It often seems as if the only way for the writer to get past this dilemma is to acknowledge it by trying to do it as well as possible. which can lead to a very self-conscious kind of fiction. Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife is beautifully constructed in the way it moves back and forth through time but even its final chapters are inevitably predicated on the reader knowing that there are loose ends to be tied off, during which the novel fell off the cliff of restraint and into the abyss of sentiment. I think Niffenegger uses time travel with considerably greater panache than many writers, and I especially liked the way she deals with the immediate difficulties of her male character's plunges through time (though not the 'scientific' explanation for them), but the constructional problem remains.
The big question, of course, is what is time travel for. The SF Encyclopedia talks of it as a 'literary convenience', and there is this sense of it being a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I personally find that very problematic. Wells used time travel to go into the future, to speculate about the collapse of society, and William Morris's protagonist in News From Nowhere travels into the future to make a plea for (ironically) a return to the kinder ways of the past. Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder' seems to me to be emblematic of the kind of time-travel story in which a tiny event can have huge ramifications much later on, though one wonders why it is invariably bad; are there any stories where someone treads on a prehistoric insect and comes back to find that a liberal regime now pertains? No, I couldn't think of one either.
However, I think time travel too easily and too often ends up being an excuse for a jolly romp in the historical past, with the plot driven by a need to ensure that the future is not damaged by the past being disturbed. There is something inherently conservative about that form of time travel, in that it looks constantly towards either restoration or restitution of the perceived status quo, and you ideally get a nice little history lesson along the way (though both Wells and Morris touched on precisely the same sort of thing with their movement into the future). Didacticism and time travel often go too closely hand in hand for my taste.
It is also very difficult to get away from the historical romp, with the pleasure theoretically deriving from watching historical events being twisted and restored; the only novel I can immediately think of which uses time travel and manages to escape that is Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, which starts very badly in terms of 'romp' but eventually becomes one of the most harrowing novels I've ever read as a 'modern' protagonist comes face to face with the full horror of medieval plague. Much of time travel into the past is about verification (and the Willis works for me because it so graphically illustrates how much history and reality can be at variance, even if you do the research), whereas travel into the future as a modern literary trope seems to me to be ...not pointless, precisely, but why would you do it when you can set your fiction in the future to start with?
My current favourite time-travel story is Ted Chiang's 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate', which explores the philosophical implications of time travel with exquisite precision, and frames the concept itself in very different fictional terms to those we are used to. As a contrast, and as a comment on the ludicrousness of so many time-travel stories, I point to Garry Kilworth's 'Let's All Go to Golgotha', where the audience at the Crucifixion turns out to be mainly comprised of time travellers who've come to see the Crucifixion rather than locals. I leave people to unpick the implications of that one for themselves.
Gwyneth Jones
Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, who also writes teenage fiction as "Ann Halam". She lives in Brighton UK. Her latest novel is Spirit, Gollancz UK.I don't really know what's wrong with time travel as science fiction, I just know I have a resistance to the idea. In our current science, "we" don't understand what time is; or why the forward arrow dominates one set of circumstances and vanishes in others. All we know about time travel as a potential real-world phenomenon is that (rather curiously) nobody has turned up talking to the evening news about being a visitor from 25090, or telling the tabloids they were snatched from their bed for a visit to the past or future. In short, sfnal time travel is like aliens: why not? You never know, it could become possible one day & in some way that explains why "they" never came "here". Yet messing around with time has never caught the public imagination the way aliens have & maybe that's telling us something.
The only no-kidding science fiction time travel story that ranks highly with me is a novel, Gregory Benford's Timescape, an intense lab-procedural about escaping the inescapable, involving more tachyons than an entire season of Dr Who, but I never for a moment read it as fantasy, in fact, it's remained one of my all-time greats.
On the other hand, I also read and write teenage fiction, a genre where time travel stories are hugely popular, no more scientific than Narnia, and I love them. It's a way of opening a magic door onto the past, and experiencing history vividly, through the eyes and the emotions of characters from your own present day. My favourite is A Traveller In Time, Alison Uttley: a UK classic in which a girl (young woman, we'd call her now) goes to stay at an ancient farmhouse in Derbyshire, and finds herself slipping in and out of the sixteenth century; where she gets involved in one of the doomed conspiracies to rescue the imprisoned Mary Queen Of Scots. Wonderful.
Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang's short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards. He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.I think that there are, broadly speaking, three reasons for using time travel in fiction. (Obviously, more than one may apply to any given story.)
The first reason for using time travel is to gain easy access to a wide variety of settings. If you want your characters to interact with dinosaurs, or Julius Caesar, or Shakespeare, then time travel offers a convenient way to do it. If this is the only motivation for using time travel, then it's acting as an enabling device in the same way that FTL is an enabling device for stories set across interstellar distances. In such cases, I'd say the story uses time travel, but isn't really about time travel.
The second reason for using time travel is to investigate the philosophical questions it raises, most of which (I claim) boil down to the question of determinism vs free will. To oversimplify, a story in which it's possible to change the past and create paradoxes can be taken as an argument that we have free will and that our decisions matter. Conversely, a story in which it's not possible to change the past can be taken as an argument that certain outcomes are predestined and that we can't change our fate. And while we as readers might get bored of seeing particular paradoxes over and over again, the question of whether we are free or constrained remains interesting.
The third reason for using time travel is to examine the problem of regret. (This is sort of the emotional counterpart to the intellectual questions described in the previous paragraph.) All of us can think of past decisions we'd do differently if we had the chance, but unfortunately, real life doesn't offer "do overs." And while time-travel stories can act as simple wish fulfillment in this matter, they don't have to. In the same way that SF/F in general can use impossibilities in order to help us understand what it means to be human here and now, stories about time travel can offer us perspective on how to live with the mistakes we've made.
As for recommending specific time travel stories, I'll skip that and instead offer a non-fiction title: Time Machines by Paul J. Nahin, published by Springer Verlag in 1999. It's a pretty comprehensive survey of how time travel has been handled by philosophers, physicists, and fiction writers.
Robert Charles Wilson
Robert Charles Wilson is the Hugo winning author of Spin. Other works include Mysterium (Philip K. Dick award), Darwinia (Aurora award), and The Chronoliths (Campbell Memorial Award). His latest novel is Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd CenturyTime travel may be tricky, but it's also one of the keystones of the SF genre. H.G. Wells used it first (and perhaps best), but it's too fascinating and useful a premise for other writers to leave alone. Time travel lets us de-privilege the present moment -- it reminds us that "all times have been modern." The year 2009 is someone's dazzling futurity and (if we're lucky!) someone else's quaint, primitive dark age. H.G. Wells showed us how to mine that wonderful and frightening truth for both drama and humor, and as SF writers we're all standing on his literary shoulders.
Veronica Hollinger
Veronica Hollinger is a professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Her science fiction conversion experience happened in the mid-1970s, when she was given a copy of Samuel R. Delany's incomparable novel, Dhalgren. She co-edits the journal Science Fiction Studies and currently is fascinated by ideas about the coming technological Singularity.In 1895 H.G. Wells introduced readers to the idea of a machine that could control travel in time, but The Time Machine wasn't by any means the first time-travel story. One of my favourites is the somewhat earlier tragicomic fantasy by Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which time travel is induced by a blow to the head. In many cases, time-travel stories are fantasies about controlling destiny - a good recent example is Ted Chiang's story, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007), in which characters move backward and forward in time as they try to nudge their own lives in more positive directions.
I particularly like the way that juxtaposition works in so many time-travel stories as they jump-cut between and among past, present, and future space-times. The jump-cut from 1895 to 802,701 lets Wells compare, in a very immediate way, the vibrant present of Victorian industrialism and the devolved far-future of the barely human Eloi and Morlocks. In Connecticut Yankee, time travel lets Twain develop bitingly satirical comparisons between fifth-century England and nineteenth-century New England.
As far as I'm concerned, the most devastating use of this technique is in James Tiptree, Jr.'s Hugo-Award-winning novella, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976), the story of three twentieth-century astronauts who fall through a temporal fault and find themselves trapped three hundred years in the future. This is a lesbian-feminist future - a sort-of utopia - from which men have long since disappeared. This future can't afford the presence of these all-American men and, the story implies, they're put down: "We can hardly turn you loose on Earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems."
Robert Reed
Robert Reed has published more than 180 stories and several novels. His novella, "A Billion Eves", won the Hugo in 2007. Another novella, "Truth", published last year by Asimov's SF, is on this year's Hugo ballot. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter. Why time travel?
Today wasn't a school day. I spent the afternoon at the university museum, walking beside my seven-year-old, the two of us examining ancient bones and mock-ups of life in Nebraska stretching back two billion years. At least fifty times today, I thought, "If only I could see these extinct beasts for myself." Which of course is one of the main reasons to write and read time travel stories: To put my eyes on lost vistas, if only as a mental experiment dipped in a useful plot.
On a more personal note, I first toured that museum when I was a boy. Morrill Hall was a central reason for my passionate interest in dinosaurs. I also attended University of Nebraska, taking classes in the lecture hall in the museum's basement. Still more years later, I taught gifted high school students at UNL, and I made sure to force them into dreary marches past dead elephants and stuffed whooping cranes. These pieces of my life are past, and besides some increasingly cloudy memories, unreachable. But wouldn't it be nice to have a fancy chair carrying a whirring blade--an ungainly Victorian machine that would carry me back a decade or two? Wouldn't it be lovely to hold your life like a book, flipping back and forth, living again whatever chapter struck you as interesting that day?
It's pretty to think so, and that's all it is. Thought.
Which is probably for the best. If go back to any past, and even if I'm a very careful tourist, I'm afraid that something will go wrong--a misplaced mote of dust, or a molecule put out of my place, and in one terrible fashion or another, my seven-year-old will cease to be.
Paul Graham Raven
Paul Graham Raven is a freelance writer, editor, publicist and web-presence manager to busy independent creatives, and PR guy for PS Publishing, the UK's foremost boutique genre press. He's also ed-in-chief of near-future sf webzine Futurismic, a learning fictioneer and poet, a reviewer of books, music and concerts, a cack-handed third guitarist for a fuzz-rock band, and in need of a proper haircut.
Why use it at all? Well, the innate appeal of time travel stories is pretty easy to guess at - which of us hasn't at some point thought that they'd like to move forwards in time to an anticipated moment, or go back in time to change what seems to be a pivotal decision or event (be it personal, like making a phone call that went forgotten, or more global in scope, like killing Hitler)? Time tricks us, teases us, teaches us, builds us and breaks us down. Playing fictional games with it - a luxury that, until recently, only sf has really had access to - is inevitable; it's one of the few things in life that is so intrinsically wrapped up in the way we perceive reality that it will never be an irrelevance. Unless we someday somehow transcend our current one-way experience of time's arrow... but that would be a sort of epistemological singularity, I think.
The problem with time travel as a stand-alone trope is that it's almost impossible to do well, as you point out in the question. There's a very simple reason for that: the pure idea has been explored about as fully as it can be without either introducing more variables and assumptions or stepping outside the frame of reference that time itself forms. The latter is technically impossible, so the former has to occur. Heinlein pretty much owned the pure time travel paradox idea in the written form, and that was a good long while back; the last three decades of cinema have made time travel a household cliché way beyond the borders of original sf. So where do you go instead for that same brain-kick?
The logical extension of time travel is the many-worlds idea - you know, every event causes a probability branch in history, leading to a panoply of possible realities which differ from the 'baseline' reality to a variety of degrees, so on and so forth. This may have something to do with relativity (you can't travel in time without travelling in space, and vice versa, or something like that; ask a physicist, because I don't fully understand it and I've probably got completely the wrong end of the stick), but it's more due to its utility as a literary device. It makes explicit the "what if?" question that lies at the heart of much sf writing.
Time travel fiction quickly begat and/or blended into and enhanced 'alternate history', which is to my mind very closely related to Singularity/metaverse fictions (a post-Singularity or metaverse setting implies a completely new rule-set in the same way that a branched-reality setting does, though by leaping forwards instead of sideways or backwards) as well as being, in some respects, modern written sf's baseline mode. Alternate history speaks to modern cultural concerns, as we discover the slow influence of our own actions at the scale of decades and centuries; the success of the form beyond the genre ghetto in recent years makes this plain (Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Plot Against America, etc etc).
As such, I can't think of a favourite story or novel that uses time travel as a pure trope. But I can think of one that uses a very limited and one-way form of time travel as a central enabling trope... which means that yet again I'm going to get on my soapbox and remind everyone that Julian May's Saga of the Exiles is one of the most ambitious and well-constructed sf series of its era, and repays close re-readings many times over. Go and read it... if only so Adam Roberts and I have a third person to enthuse about it with.
Tom Purdom
Tom Purdom's entry in the 2008 edition of Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction was a time travel novelette, "The Mists of Time", which appeared in the August, 2007 Asimov's-- exactly fifty years after his first published story appeared in the August, 1957 Fantastic Universe. The editors who have bought his work include science fiction legends like John W. Campbell and Frederik Pohl and currently active editors such as Sheila Williams and Eric Flint. For the last twenty years, he has mostly been writing short stories and novelettes which have ended up on the contents pages of Asimov's.
Time travel presents the writer with a number of intriguing possibilities. One of the most interesting, to me, is the opportunity to bring people from different eras into direct and immediate contact. What would the eighteenth century look like to a visitor from the twenty-second? How would a visitor from the future look to a courtier in Louis XIV's Versailles?
Many literary writers have been attracted to this aspect of time travel in the last thirty years. The literary devices they use accomplish some of the same ends as our time machines. The movie version of The French Lieutenant's Woman contrasts the life of a contemporary couple with the life of the couple they play in a historical movie. In A.S. Byatt's Possession, scholarship substitutes for a time machine; two twentieth century scholars fall in love as they ferret out a Victorian romance hidden in documents and published works. Bharati Mukherjee's lesser-known novel The Holder of the World combines conventional scholarship with a science fictional device: a computer program that intergrates all our knowledge of a period and generates a detailed simulation of past events.
In science fiction, Connie Willis' Domesday Book contrasts the era of the Black Death with a twenty-first century response to an outbreak that could have been just as devastating. I consider it one of the most successful and powerful time travel stories ever written. Poul Anderson's short story "The Man Who Came Early" pits an ordinary modern with a gun against the successful merchants and political leaders of a pre-gun society-- and the ordinary man discovers a technological marvel is no match for high-level social sophistication.
The time travel story can also serve as a kind of meditation on history. This is one of the strengths of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. Anderson built the series around a rather conventional series-hero structure but he permeated it with his profound sense of the irony and tragedy of history.
The time travel story lies on the outer edges of science fiction. Many people feel it shouldn't be considered science fiction, since we can come up with good reasons why time travel violates the laws of physics. But we really don't know very much about time. Why does it exist? Why does it only move in one direction? We take the flow of time for granted. But should we? A good time travel story can intensify our awareness of the fundamental mystery at the heart of the physical universe.
David Brin once noted that many of the science fiction writers he knows read about science but all science fiction writers read history. He suggested the field should really be called "speculative history." I liked the idea as soon as I heard it because it bundles the time travel story, alternate history, and the story set in a possible future into a single genre, tied together by a unifying preoccupation. Time travel and alternate history have become permanent fixtures of the science fiction genre because they deal with basic science fiction subjects such as time, change, and the way big-picture historical events affect the day to day lives of the individuals who have to live in the societies we humans create.
Stefan Ekman
Stefan Ekman is a doctoral student at Lund University, Sweden, writing a dissertation on the environment in fantasy literature. He's also fantasy specialist at Sweden's main fantasy publisher; technical translator; and free-lance lecturer on all things fantastic. In his copious free time, he enjoys volleyball and cooking (and is investigating ways to do both simultaneously).
Determinism and time paradoxes - two demons of time travel stories. Regrettably, it seems that careful planning is no sure-fire way of avoiding either; in fact, a carefully constructed story runs just as great a risk of suffering from these as a sloppy story. (At this point I should mention that I've chosen to believe in free will; determinism thus annoys me. So, by the way, does "pretend time travel" where the journey is really to a parallel universe based in quantum mechanics.) Elaborate explanations of the nature of time tend to create elaborate paradoxes and, at worst, unravel not only the story world but any sense of wonder that world brought me. And stories which constantly have the time traveler do what has already been done, confirming the immutability of the time stream, simply say to us: doesn't matter what you do, it's all gonna end up the same way anyway.
But the topic of time travel is fascinating, and the best way to discuss it seems to be by not taking it seriously. Embrace the paradox, as it were. In fact, my favourite time travel writer is Jasper Fforde, who, in the Thursday Next books, throws any number of paradoxes at the reader, happily admitting them to be paradoxes, and explaining that the nature of time is incomprehensible (even to the ChronoGuard, who are charged with policing the time stream). Confusing, certainly, but wonderful.
Fforde's disregard for temporal paradox and cogency is uncommon but not unique. Douglas Adams, in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, similarly ignores the need to establish a comprehensible nature of time. Like Fforde, he revels in paradox. The very phenomenon of the restaurant at the end of the universe is defined by its defiance of traditional temporal impossibilities, and the only explanation of the nature of time (illustrated with handy tableware) is never concluded.
There is an alternative to heaping the plate with paradoxes, and that is to simply ignore them. Time travel is useful, after all, when we want a story where modern sensibilities clash with those of the past (or the future). An excellent example of such a story is Octavia Butler's Kindred, where there is no explanation for how the protagonist is hurled back in time. The story simply gets on with the important stuff instead, and we're too intrigued by how a modern-day African-American woman handles the slavery of the 19th century South to miss esoteric discussions about the inner workings of time. In a way, even Well's Time Machine works like this: little enough time is actually spent on trying to explain how the temporal velocipede works, more on exploring the future of the world.
So ignore or embrace - that's fine by me. As long as I don't have to read yet another sleight-of-hand explanation of the nature of time

Originaly posted on http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/04/mind-meld-time-travel/
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