Time travel in science fiction

H.G. Wells

A few years ago, I published in this blog a series of posts about the scientific aspect of time travel, the paradoxes it could cause if it were possible (which almost certainly it is not) and proposed solutions to these paradoxes, such as the quantum multiverse, one of the most absurd theories physicists have ever concocted. In another post I talked about the scientific errors in Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel Timeline, which tries to avoid the paradoxes in this way, but does it poorly.

Here I am going to speak about time travel from a literary point of view, as a subgenre of science fiction. In this context, it’s irrelevant that time travel may or may not be possible. We are interested in the question, because this is one of the most frequent topics in this type of literature.

Sin, Redemption and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury wrote a story titled The Man that can be summarized thus:

In its expansion through the galaxy, the human species encounters many extraterrestrial intelligences. The captain of an interstellar Earth ship arrives on a distant planet and hears about something recently happened there. Little by little he discovers that God has become man on that planet and has granted them Redemption, although not in a bloody way. The captain wants to meet him, get in touch with him, but it’s too late: he has left (at least, he thinks so). Then the captain decides to dedicate his life to traveling to other planets in the hope of finding Christ on one of them.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador adapted this story for the radio, and in doing so he changed a few things: the title, which became The Triangle, and the form of Redemption: they kill the Redeemer by nailing him to a triangle, rather than a cross.

Utopias and Dystopias

Utopias, the descriptions of fictitious perfect societies, owe their name to Thomas More's Utopia (1516), a title of Greek origin that literally means nowhere. Before and after More's work there have been many other utopias, each one to the liking of its author, for the question of the perfect society gives a lot of play to the imagination. Examples include Plato's Republic, Tomasso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888, see this post), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), or Aldous Huxley's Island (1962).

Additional author rights

James H. Schmitz

In addition to copyright (the right of the author to receive a part of the profits from the sale of his work), other rights should also be guaranteed. The most important is the right to the integrity of the work, recognized by the Berne Convention:

The author shall retain the right ... to object to any deformation, mutilation or other modification of his [work].

The downside is that dead authors can hardly object. 

Unfortunately, this right is less protected than the copyright, as a few examples will show:

The 25 science fiction stories I most liked

Isaac Asimov

In the United States fiction is classified depending on the length of the work, with four subsequent stages:

1. Novel, any work that has more than 40,000 words.
2. Novella, a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words.
3. Novelette, between 7,500 and 17,500 words.
4. Short Story, less than 7,500 words.

Naturally, the limits are not strict, and in practice they depend on who classifies each book. In Spanish, however, we have fewer categories:

1. Novel.
2. Short novel, which applies to works of intermediate length.
3. Story, with few characters and a simple plot.

The best 40 science fiction novels I have read

Blade Runner poster

Lists of favorite books have always existed, and with the rise of the Internet they have proliferated. That’s why I decided to make a new list (in case there were not enough). But what I’m showing here is not just the list of my favorite books in this genre, but something a little more complex.

To build the list, I started with four lists made by others, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. For example, one of those lists has been created in Goodreads, the social network for books, is called Best Science Fiction and contains over 2,000 books. In order to build this list, the members of Goodreads vote (almost 1000 people have voted for at least one book), together with the book’s score and the number of people who have read it (in some cases several million).

To form my new list I used the following criteria:

1. It just contains books that I have read.
2. It does not contain books that I have read, but did not like at all (i.e. those I would assign one star in the Goodreads or Amazon ratings). As an example of these books I will mention Do androids dream with electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Its argument is based on an interesting idea, but the way it has been developed in the form of a novel is deplorable, sometimes absurd. This is one of the rare cases where the film based on a book (Blade Runner) turned out to be far superior to the original work.
3. Therefore, if one of your favorite books is not listed here, it may be for three reasons: because I have not read it, because I did not like it at all, or because it didn’t come among the top 40 in the average of the lists I have used to build mine.
4. It only contains science fiction books. The Lord of the Rings, for example, has not been included, although it is on one of these lists, because I don’t consider it science fiction.