Conundrums and Dreams
I’ve never had such a writing experience before. Soft Sci-fi is either good for me, or its about to tip the precious mind over the edge! So there I am, again, pondering my time travel conundrum. At least, I must’ve been doing that in my subconscious more than I realized.
Put simply my problem is like this. In the movie Back to the Future, Marty McFly goes back in time and meets his parents. But he interferes with the natural course of their relationship. In his family photo, his siblings are erased, and even his own hand goes invisible. Because of his meddling with time, his parents never got married.
Thus causing the same conundrum. You see, if Marty McFly never existed, then who meddled and prevented his parents from getting married? And if no one prevented them, then they got married and Marty existed.
Now, everyone let the writers get away with this in Back to the Future. We were all having too good a time to point the obvious out. (Being 24 years old back in 1985, I had the pleasure seeing that movie in the theaters when it first came out! Such brilliance! I had to go right out and buy myself some shoes from the men’s section.)
I assume that my own story might not be as entertaining as Back to the Future. I tried to just say, ‘oh well, who’s going to read it anyway? It doesn’t matter if there’s a flaw!’
But it bugged me. I didn’t want my story left with this flaw hole. Argh.
And then, at three in the morning last night. I figured it out! Of course! They didn’t have a Time TRAVEL machine! Inside the bubble of their machine time was stretched, but only for them! They had 500 years, whereas their neighbors, only 250! Therefore, they had 250 more years to grow in technological advancement. They weren’t aware of the bubble they were in. It stretched out and then realigned, so that when the two neighbors met again, time was the same for both! The dimension I created is the detritus of that experiment, but it’s also barrier of the bubble. Once time aligned, both sides could now travel through this dimension, although they couldn’t before.
Ta Da!!! Maniacal laughter was heard, in my mind. Still I managed to wake up my husband.
He was kind and told me what science actually knew about such things. (Real Science, bah!) And finally, around five a.m. I went to sleep. Then I had dreams, which when I woke up, knew I had to put in my story. I now have a new character I must introduce.
Kind of fun, but as I say, taxing on the old bean. To all my scientist friends, if you see some obvious flaw in my reasoning, KEEP IT TO YOURSELVES!!!