Finding the Plot

May 2, 2022May 2, 2022 / Rick Ellrod / 6 Comments

Getting Started

When we start reading a story (or watching one), we usually have some idea what it’s about. Chances are we picked it up based on a back-cover blurb or advertisement, or a review. But the blurbs and ads are often “teasers,” aimed at drawing us in and getting us to start the story. They may not really tell us where the plot is headed.

The genre may also give us a clue. If the tale is presented as a mystery, we expect a crime (generally a murder) which will be solved. If it’s a thriller or action epic, we’re prepared for physical challenges and victories. In a romance, we anticipate a successful love affair. But the details are unknown. And in stories without a strong genre identification, we may be less sure about where the story is going.

Consider the James Bond movies. Typically the film opens with an action sequence that may have little to do with the main plot. We can get quite a few minutes into the film before we know what the real plot is. There’s no danger of deterring us from watching; we all know what a James Bond story is like—that’s why we’re there. The action sequence is merely a genre-appropriate appetizer while we wait to get into the main story.

What I’m interested in here is the reader’s developing sense of what the main action or conflict is: what goings-on will make up the main business of the story. It’s not as intangible as the theme or “meaning” of the tale. It’s more concrete than that: the overall shape of the plot.

Sequential Plots

Some stories start out with one kind of plot, morph into another, and then take off in a third direction. This can result in a certain amount of reader whiplash, though an adroit author can carry it off. She may even gain points for taking the reader on a ride through unexpected twists and turns.

Diana Wynne Jones’s The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) is my favorite example. The first segment of this children’s fantasy novel is reminiscent of Dickens: the young Christopher, neglected by his parents, is used by a scheming uncle to bring back forbidden goods from alternate worlds. In the second phase of the book, Christopher is sent to a boarding school, where magic is one of the subjects routinely taught. This section recalls the classic British schoolboy tale, with the addition of magic; it’s a sort of predecessor of (and perhaps inspiration for) Harry Potter, which Jones’s book predates by about twelve years. The third part of the novel develops into a high-fantasy epic conflict. At the end Christopher is selected for the future role of “Chrestomanci,” a Sorcerer Supreme position in the British government.

On first reading, I found it a bit of a swerve to go from the narrative of a difficult childhood to that of a genial school-days story. When this evolved into a magical conflict of epic proportions, I was surprised again. But the story held together through the continuity of the strongly sympathetic character Christopher (and his alternate-universe friend Millie). The shifts in tone seemed natural concomitants of Christopher’s growing up and grappling with more mature problems.

In fact, starting on a small scale and gradually building up to grander events made the grander events more plausible, as in The Lord of the Rings. While the opening section of Christopher Chant wasn’t exactly realistic, the issues were more limited and personal. You had the sense of gradual expansion as the story went along.

C.S. Lewis provides a more pronounced example of this effect in the last novel of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength (1945). The novel starts out with extremely mundane matters of domestic ennui and academic politics. This establishes such a sense of realism and naturalness that the later fantastic developments, involving everything from cosmic entities and biological abominations to Merlin and Atlantis, gain plausibility from being built on so familiar a foundation.

Uncertainty About the Narrator

Another kind of story where it may be hard at first to make out the nature of the plot is the tale with an unreliable narrator.

Jo Walton’s Among Others (winner of the Best Novel Hugo Award in 2012) is a fantasy, but it’s set in the present day and much of the action is mundane. The main character, Morgana, is convinced that her mother is a witch. But for most of the book, I wasn’t entirely sure that was true; there was a distinct possibility that Mori was an unreliable narrator who was imagining the whole thing. Nor was it clear how the threat was going to be addressed. I only really grasped what the narrative arc was around p. 291 out of 302 pages—that is, at the very end.

The uncertainty didn’t impair my enjoyment of the story. Mori is an extremely sympathetic character, especially for those of us who loved F&SF back when those genres were considered odd and fans were regarded as uncool nerds. And the events of the tale are fascinating even when you aren’t quite sure they’re real. But the ambivalence of the plot kept me from forming a clear opinion about the book until the end.

The Nested or Layered Story

Occasionally a story will contain one or more other storylines—not like the explicit play within a play that occurs briefly in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but more subtly interwoven. This structure can make it hard to detect where the real plot of the overall story is.

In Patti Callahan’s Once Upon a Wardrobe, an Oxford student’s younger brother, who doesn’t have long to live, asks her to find out where the idea of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (then just published) came from. The student, Meg Devonshire, tracks down the author, C.S. Lewis, and is drawn into hearing the story of Lewis’s life from Lewis himself. Sequences describing Lewis’s personal history are thus sandwiched with Meg’s reports to her brother. With the informal reportage building up to a kind of epiphany, one almost doesn’t notice that Meg’s own story is building toward a romance with a fellow student. The intertwined narrative arcs make it hard to guess in advance where the book will end up.

Much more complex is Jo Walton’s 2020 book Or What You Will, described in Wikipedia as a “metafictional fantasy novel.” The first-person narrator is a kind of character archetype in the mind of fantasy author Sylvia Harrison, the basis of characters in many of her stories. (The similarity of the imaginary Harrison’s oeuvre to that of the real-life Walton adds a further recursive layer to the story.) Fragments of Harrison’s personal history are intermixed with chapters about the story Harrison is writing, and also with the (fictional?) narrator’s plan to deliver Harrison from a fatal illness that may make this her last writing. Given these very different types of story, coexisting in the same book, it’s hard to know what kind of resolution we might expect. Yet in the end, as with Callahan’s book, the story works.

The Side Quest That Takes Over

We also see cases where what originally seemed to be a minor side trip or interruption turns out to be the main plot of the whole story. This can be irritating if we’re invested in what we thought was the original tale, and are waiting with mounting impatience for the interlude to conclude so as to get on with it. At some point we need to realize that the apparent side trip or side quest is the point.

I had that reaction when first reading Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones, 1986). Near the beginning, the young heroine, Sophie, is magically transformed into an elderly woman. Somehow I didn’t expect that transformation to last long. But in fact Sophie continues as an old woman for almost the entire novel. It took me a while to stop waiting for the transformation to be reversed and to accept it as a central feature of the plot.

Off Armageddon Reef, first book in Safehold series, cover

Sometimes this is a matter of mistaking the main preoccupation of the author. David Weber’s Safehold series starts with the premise that alien invaders, attracted by Earth’s burgeoning technology, have wiped out the human race, with the exception of a secret colony planted on a distant Earthlike planet in hopes of growing back to a level capable of dealing with the invaders. The refugee world Safehold is deliberately kept under a rigid theocracy which suppresses technology, originally to avoid detection by the enemy, but later going far beyond that motive to a permanent proscription. One might expect that the main plotline of the series would involve reacquiring high technology and re-engaging the invaders. But so far the series has progressed through ten bulky books devoted almost entirely to detailing the military and political campaigns of a sort of Protestant Revolution to overthrow the dominant theocracy. I’m still waiting for the lengthy storyline to wrap around back to the plotline I want to see developed.

Similarly, John Ringo’s “Council Wars” series starts with an intriguing premise in which a high-tech near-future civilization on Earth collapses into a kind of pseudo-medieval chaos due to a conflict among the ruling council. In the initial high-tech utopia, people have entertained themselves by (among other things) participating in live-action game-playing, which involved biologically engineering dragons, randomly hiding useful minerals in artificial mountains, and so forth. The opening conflict thus sets up a situation in which the main characters need to operate in something rather like a D&D game or fantasy world, dragons and all, which they’d initially created themselves but no longer control. What baffled me as this story developed (four books so far) was that Ringo was more interested in military-SF preoccupations—what would combat be like using aircraft carriers with dragons instead of aircraft?—rather than riffing on the fantasy tropes themselves.

Defying Narrative Conventions

In some cases, writers seem to be determined to depart from traditional narrative conventions in ways that make the storyline obscure. I’m generally skeptical about such attempted departures—they often seem mannered or artificial—but there’s no denying they sometimes produce interesting results. Or What You Will, cited above, is an example of an odd approach that nonetheless presents an engrossing and satisfying tale.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, cover

This Is How You Lose the Time War, a Hugo-winning 2019 novella, is a peculiar kind of epistolary story that consists of deliberately obscure messages left for each other by two time-traveling agents of opposing empires. It’s not clear at first where the story is going, and the message-writing format deprives the reader of the background information that might normally help establish what’s going on. But Time War eventually develops into a kind of romance, as well as a meditation on war and politics, that’s definitely worth reading.

There Is No Plot

Finally, there’s a class of stories that don’t actually have an overall plot at all. This isn’t necessarily a fault, but can be a virtue: “a feature, not a bug.” In these kinds of stories, our natural tendency to look for a plot is bound to be frustrated.

A fellow writer on Critique Circle, reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, expressed puzzlement about the plot of the book. I responded that it’s like Winnie-the-Pooh: a collection of linked but separate episodes that don’t actually have an overall plot. There is a sort of overall character arc for Christopher Robin, but it’s not really a plot—just as The Wind in the Willows develops a coherent plot only toward the end, within the background created by a set of separate episodes. My fellow writer, who was quite familiar with children’s stories, grasped the point at once from the Pooh analogy.

"There Will Come Soft Rains," illustration — *“There Will Come Soft Rains”*

We also find the occasional short story that’s essentially a mood piece, evoking an emotion without actually depicting a sequence of events. In the science fiction canon, good examples include Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” a meditation on the transience of the human species, and Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a moving story depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war. In these short pieces, however, there isn’t enough time to build up much readerly expectation to be frustrated; it quickly becomes clear that the point of the story is to express a mood rather than to tell a tale.

When the plotline of a story doesn’t immediately become clear, or is subverted, the best advice may be simply to roll with it and see what happens. And I give myself that advice occasionally when I’m puzzled with a tale.

Conclusion

This does, however, require us to trust the author. Knowing an author’s work can give me confidence that taking the time to read will be worth it in the end. Hearing that an author or a work is highly regarded by others may, to a lesser degree, give us a similar confidence. If the author is new to us, though, that trust may be harder to come by. Lacking a sense of direction, we may give up on a story prematurely. If a writer isn’t going to meet the reader’s ordinary expectations about where a story is going, they’ll need to find other ways to reassure the reader that the tale is worth the investment of time.

Lost World-Ships

November 22, 2016May 28, 2017 / Rick Ellrod / 9 Comments

Lost Universes

Suppose it turns out that the world in which you and your ancestors have lived isn’t a natural world at all, but a construct. All you know of reality is the interior of a vast spacecraft. If the truth ever becomes apparent, you’re going to be in for a shock: the universe is vaster and stranger than you ever imagined.

The immense distances between the stars, and the speed-of-light limit, make this kind of situation a staple of modern science fiction. Barring some as-yet-undiscovered method for faster-than-light travel, like the Star Wars hyperdrive or Star Trek warp drive, an interstellar voyage is likely to take many years.

The “generation ship” is a common SF assumption. What I call “lost world-ship” stories, in which the inhabitants have forgotten they are even on a spaceship, form a subset of generation ship stories. The generation ships, in turn, are a subset of the broader category of what might be called “sealed environment” tales: people live for generations in an restricted artificial environment, but it isn’t a spaceship (as for instance in the movie City of Ember). The sealed environment stories can in turn be seen as a subset of “exotic environment” SF tales, where an unnatural situation places unique pressures on the people who live there.

. . . And Where To Find Them

I find the lost world-ship plot particularly fascinating, so I’ve accumulated a number of examples over the years.

My first exposure to the idea as a child was in Milton Lesser’s The Star Seekers (1953), one of the distinctive Winston Science Fiction publications that introduced so many kids in that era to SF. I recently obtained a Kindle copy and was charmed to encounter the story again, after all these years. On a 200-year trip to Alpha Centauri, the four levels of the starship have separated into four different cultures, three of which are no longer aware they are on a spacecraft. The setup is not entirely convincing; there’s no real explanation as to how most of the inhabitants simply “forgot” their origins. But the book conveyed to me the mystery of discovering something that changed one’s whole world-view.

In pursuing the stories in Heinlein’s Future History, I ran across the real bellwether of the lost world-ship tale, the two novellas “Universe” and “Common Sense” (1941) that form the book Orphans of the Sky. It may not be the earliest treatment— Don Wilcox was a year ahead with “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940). But in the Wilcox story, as in The Star Seekers, there was still someone on board who remembered the ship’s purpose. In Heinlein’s starship Vanguard, no one preserved that memory. A mutiny long ago had killed off the technically skilled, and their descendants preserved the story of the “Trip” to “Centaurus” only as mythology—which they interpreted as pure allegory, not to be taken literally.

Orphans of the Sky focuses on how hard it is for those raised in the artificial environment even to conceive that there could be an outside. The escape of a few characters to make landfall on a planet, at the end, is a dramedy of errors.

Another lost world-ship story that fascinated me in my misspent youth was the Brian Aldiss book Non-Stop (1958), published as Starship in the U.S. As in Heinlein’s case, Aldiss’s travelers have reverted to barbarism. The artificial nature of their surroundings is masked by the fact that much of the ship is filled with “ponics” – mutated hydroponic plants that have spread through the corridors. The real story does not emerge until close to the end, mediated, as in Orphans, by a diary left over from earlier times. The ship had been ravaged by a disease of sorts, the result of a previously-unknown amino acid picked up on their destination world, from which the ship was now returning. This plague, and the long unpiloted voyage, has rendered the inhabitants far different from their ancestors, rendering their hopes for escape from the degenerating vessel problematic.

I encountered Clifford D. Simak’s Target Generation (1953), originally published as Spacebred Generations, in Simak’s collection Strangers in the Universe. There’s a well-done summary and analysis of the story by Zachary Kendal on his Web site. When Simak’s automated starship reaches its destination, it triggers a sequence of events that lead the main character to open a sealed book of instructions that has been waiting for that moment—rather like the instruction page in City of Ember. He concludes that the builders of the ship had deliberately caused the travelers to forget their origins, except as a vague quasi-religious observance, because that was the only way they could (in Kendal’s words) “survive the journey without terrible psychological trauma.”

All these stories affected me with a sense of vast, brooding spans of time and forgotten lore. The settings tended to be gloomy, the societies stunted or degraded, the environments worn-down and cramped. But the tales also raised a sense of hope—that the travelers could somehow break free of their limited universe in the end, and recover the way humans were meant to live.

Other Media and Sources

The lost world-ship trope has turned up in other media too. The original Star Trek series included a third-season episode (1968) with the cumbersome but evocative title “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” in which the Enterprise crew discovers that an “asteroid” approaching a Federation planet is actually a generation ship. There was a mercifully short-lived TV series in 1973 called The Starlost, a decent concept (by Harlan Ellison) with a completely botched execution—an entertaining story in itself. The Pixar film WALL-E incorporates the idea that the remaining human beings have been living for generations aboard a luxury starship and have almost, if not entirely, forgotten what it’s like to live on a planet. There was even a 1976 role-playing game called Metamorphosis Alpha set on a generation ship afflicted by an unknown cataclysm.

There’s more. The Wikipedia and TV Tropes pages on generation ships provide useful lists. Still more are summarized in a study by Simone Caroti, The Generation Starship in Science Fiction: A Critical History, 1934-2001 (2011)—though Caroti’s study is a little heavy on the academic Marxist/deconstructionist attitudes for my taste.

For the broader categories I mentioned above, examples of non-spaceborne sealed environments include Hugh Howey’s Wool, James White’s The Watch Below (which pairs an alien fleet of generation ships with a human group trapped in a sunken oceangoing vessel), and Daniel F. Galouye’s Dark Universe. TV Tropes lists others under the headings City in a Bottle and Small, Secluded World. Other “exotic environment” stories include Ray Bradbury’s memorable “Frost and Fire” and Christopher Priest’s Inverted World.

Themes

What is it that’s so compelling about the lost world-ship stories as to explain my lifelong love affair with them?

Sense of Wonder. The strangeness of the environment—the union of familiar human concerns with surpassingly unnatural situations—evokes the “sense of wonder” that is characteristic of F&SF. But we can point to more specific themes that arise in the lost world-ship setting.

Loss and Forgetfulness. A sense of loss pervades these stories—a loss not fully appreciated by the characters, but clear to the reader. The starship inhabitants have lost their history, and with it, their sense of who they really are. They have lost other kinds of knowledge as well, especially technological knowledge, often existing as barbarians in the ruins of a superscientific construct (again, a wider SF trope).

This sense of loss is like that of another subgenre, the post-apocalyptic story. The disaster that afflicts the starship is a sort of localized apocalypse; this is what differentiates the lost world-ship from a functioning generation ship. Pondering the causes—whether mutiny, plague, accident, or even deliberate obliteration of the past—makes us reflect on the fragility of our own histories and societies.

Illusion. In these stories, the world is never what we think it is. One need not live on a starship to share that experience; the whole history of modern science can be read as a progressive penetration of appearances. (Heinlein has a character in Orphans unknowingly echo Galileo as he tries fruitlessly to convince others of how their world really works: “Nevertheless—Nevertheless—it still moves!”) The lost world-ship story brings home the way our knowledge is bounded by our experience—or by our assumptions.

The Natural and the Artificial. This dichotomy can play out in two ways. Either the inhabitants take their artificial world so matter-of-factly that it seems perfectly natural to them, and they can hardly imagine anything else (Heinlein); or the unnaturalness of their world subtly warps or frustrates them (Aldiss).

The former may seem more plausible to those who prefer “nurture” to “nature” as an explanation. When you grow up with something, why wouldn’t you take it for granted as normal and natural? The latter approach may appeal more to those with a strong sense of the natural as fundamental and superior to the artificial. For example, a character in Non-Stop tries to show his companions that the ponic plants are natural, but corridors are not. The key question, of course, is how he knows that plants are more natural than walls: is the difference somehow wired into the human brain? In Howey’s Dust, part of the Wool series, a knowledgeable character says of their underground sealed environment: “They don’t know anything beyond their walls, so I guess they don’t have some of the stress about what’s out there that you and I feel. But I think they have something else that we don’t have, this deep feeling that something is wrong with how they’re living.”

We frequently encounter such nature-nurture arguments in more conventional sociological contexts. But the lost world-ship story brings us face to face with them in novel ways.

Incongruity. The lost world-ship is a fertile ground for irony and “cognitive dissonance,” where the reader knows things the characters do not. In principle this sort of incongruity could be played for light comedy or farce—but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it done that way, except perhaps toward the middle of The Star Seekers, a young adult novel and thus somewhat lighter in tone. The starship stories tend to be too grim for farce.

Escape. The somberness of the classic lost world-ship is alleviated by the possibility of getting out, into a freer and better world. Once the characters realize there is somewhere else to go, they may be able to escape.

Escape is a major preoccupation in Non-Stop, and contributes much of the story’s emotional force. It fits in with the fact that we encounter the starships in Target Generation and The Star Seekers just as they arrive at their destinations: a hoped-for new world, a natural world free of the constraints of the world-ship.

The last generation is in a far better position, in this respect, than their ancestors. As TV Tropes puts it, commenting on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora: “A major theme of the book is the fact that while the original generation-ship crew may have consented to their risky mission, their children don’t get a choice.” The writer of the ancient diary in Non-Stop, facing the beginning of the generations-long return trip, bursts out: “Only a technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in [the ship], as if man were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration.”

But the characters we’ve come to know in the story do have the possibility of emerging into something wider and greater. This hope is not quite the same as what Tolkien means by “Escape” in On Fairy-Stories (a topic for another day), although there is some common ground.

The contrast between the all-too-human characters and the artificial environment has still more resonance, perhaps, with the common human feeling that we don’t really belong in this world. Some of the twentieth-century existentialists took this reaction as a sign of despair and meaninglessness. But the notion of escape suggests instead that such emotions may instead point to another place where we do belong, evoking hope rather than despair. The plight of the lost world-ship traveler may recall Chesterton’s lines in “The House of Christmas”:

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
. . . . .
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

Changing History: “Timeless”

October 9, 2016October 11, 2016 / Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

The initial episode of NBC’s new time travel series, Timeless (premiered Oct. 3, 2016), does a neat job of handling the classic trope of changing the past. There’s more to that kind of plot than generally meets the eye.

The following necessarily contains spoilers for the first Timeless episode, so if you haven’t seen it and want to, be careful when scrolling down. I’ll drop another alert message at the point where the spoilers begin.

The Lure of the Past

Oddly enough, travel to the past fascinates us more than travel to the future. One might expect it to be the other way around. After all, we’ve been to the past. The first classic time travel tale, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, concerned itself exclusively with the future. But it’s backwards time travel that lets us imagine changing the present by altering its causes—and produces the causal tangles that are unique to time travel stories.

Larry Niven’s essay “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel” (found in All the Myriad Ways) points this out: “When a child prays, ‘Please, God, make it didn’t happen,’ he is inventing time travel in its essence. . . . The prime purpose of time travel is to change the past; and the prime danger is that the Traveler might change the past.”

The Past Doesn’t Change

Some stories assume that the past can’t be changed. The time stream protects, or heals, itself automatically once the moving present has passed. There was an old-time SF story (anyone remember the title?) in which successive attempts to change history misfire because of progressively more unlikely accidents. The gun misfires. The bullet misses. A bystander intercepts the bullet. A meteor knocks the gun out of the assassin’s hand. The hypothesis has an air of fate about it, as in the Greek myths.

But unchangeability needn’t be a matter of fate. It may simply reflect the fact that the past event has already happened, incorporating any interventions from the future that may have taken place. There is a single past event, which is the product of all its causes, whether they come from the event’s past or its future. As TV Tropes puts it, “You Already Changed the Past.” Robert A. Heinlein wrote some of the most famous time travel stories using this approach to generate “constructive” or “ontological” paradoxes—By His Bootstraps and “—All You Zombies—”.

A technology that only allows viewing the past, rather than interacting with it, falls into a similar category. There’s no chance of changing things; we’re mere observers. Isaac Asimov’s The Dead Past leaps to mind.

These kinds of stories are fun, but they don’t have quite the emotional appeal of “Make it didn’t happen.”

How A Change Propagates

Suppose, then, that we can change the past. How exactly is that supposed to work?

A writer sometimes introduces a sense of urgency into the plot by imagining that a change in history propagates through reality in a process that itself takes time (of some sort). This is what creates the tension in Back to the Future. We can see Marty’s family gradually disappearing as his disruption of history works its way forward. Presumably Marty disappears last because he was conceived last. If he doesn’t reestablish history before he disappears, it’s all over.

This makes a weird sort of sense, because natural processes do normally propagate gradually. Even gravity has its waves. But it does result in the curious phenomenon of a reality that isn’t entirely self-consistent. Marty’s parents never got married, but Marty himself is still inexplicably there. (For the moment.)

It makes more sense, maybe, to picture the change as taking effect instantaneously. Take away the causal “supports” for something, and it’s no longer there at all. This assumption would have made Back to the Future a much shorter movie—and highlighted the “Grandfather Paradox” at the core of its plot. The time lag gives Marty a chance to cure the paradox before it fully takes effect.

What Happens to the Traveler?

But we’re assuming that the causal ripple from history’s change follows the time traveler even when the traveler’s world line has looped around into the past. What if that isn’t how it works? (We’re inventing a theory of time travel; we can make what assumptions we wish.) If the traveler is absent from the future when the change “gets there,” will the traveler be affected at all?

If the traveler is affected by the same change that affects everything else, we get a time stream that’s more consistent, but harder to tell a story about—because no one in the story will remember the change. The traveler’s memory alters along with everything else. (There’s an old SF story about this, too—and it only works because the reader is outside the story’s time stream. At the end the bizarre monster that was human on page one proclaims, ‘the time experiment is over, and nothing has changed.’ The story only works from an omniscient point of view.)

So a time travel story almost always assumes that the traveler, who was out of the affected time region when the change occurred, remembers the old when she encounters the new.

You Can’t Go Home Again

Here’s where Timeless comes in. Villains of some sort—or are they?—steal the secretly developed time machine and set off to change history. Our three heroes take the older prototype vehicle (a little less streamlined than a DeLorean) and follow. They don’t quite succeed in preventing their adversaries from altering the past. The Hindenburg explodes on its return trip, rather than on its arrival in America.

When our heroes come back to the present, their colleagues believe the zeppelin had always exploded on its return trip—because the change in history has affected them. The three travelers have to explain to them what’s changed. In a sense, they no longer belong in the world from which they set out. It’s an unusual and interesting situation for a TV series.

The Butterfly Effect

So far, we haven’t seen what larger alterations or political ramifications may have resulted, in this new world, from the deaths of several prominent figures on what was now the Hindenburg’s ill-fated second flight. But the personal implications turn out to be devastating.

The screenwriters also have a good handle on another time travel staple, the “butterfly effect,” named for the metaphor that in a massive chaotic system, a butterfly flapping its wings on one continent might result in a tornado in another (or, possibly, named for a classic Ray Bradbury short story). When main character Lucy Preston comes home from her adventure in the past, she is overjoyed to find that her mother, comatose when Lucy left, is now perfectly healthy. But Lucy is appalled to find that her beloved sister never existed. How could the Hindenburg’s altered history have anything to do with this, she cries—and now she has new, and very mixed, motivations as to setting time back on its original course.

The show thus picks up on a theme that’s frequently neglected in a tale about changing the past. Each change has unpredictable ramifications. Marty McFly comes home to find his parents much improved, his siblings successful, and the despised Biff reduced to a cipher. But what of all the people in town who will have interacted with the changed McFlys and Tannens over the past thirty years? If even minor events can have large long-range effects, it may not be so easy to confine a temporal change to the intended consequences.

This means that our Timeless heroes may have no way to put things back the way they were. The change may be essentially irreversible—a sort of temporal entropy. Anything they do to counteract the bad effects of the original change will lead to still more alterations. They really can’t go home again.

If the writers carry through this fascinating, if rather chilling, line of thought in subsequent episodes, we may get some really interesting story lines—as time goes on.

Rick Ellrod's Observatory

Science fiction and fantasy, philosophy, music and romance

Ray Bradbury