Two examples of no-regrets time travel in SF, which I take as bouncing off the Trek version of that plot.
1) There’s a bizarre and very bad Orson Scott Card novel that posits time travelers *causing* Columbus to invade the Americas. In their timeline, the alternative to world domination by enslaving Europeans was world domination by human-sacrificing Mesoamericans.
2) This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Gladstone & El-Mohtar: The first sentence is “Burn before reading”. No further spoilers, except that it’s pointedly not a regrets plot.
I remember reading that book as a teenager but I COMPLETELY forgot that part of it (but I just double checked Wikipedia as a reminder). All my recollections are about the primary plot of the story, where future humans go back in time to inoculate Native Americans against European diseases and advance their technology so they can fend off colonization. And in so doing ultimately erase themselves since they set the entire world off in a different direction. Card is such a weird guy, but I'm glad my teenage self read that and somehow auto-discarded the insanely racist aspects (while keeping the rest, which I think is genuinely interesting).
From another TV show (another sequel show!), Walter White would agree with you about time travel and regret, as we learned in the last episode of Better Call Saul. ("You are not asking about a time machine, which is both a real and theoretical impossibility. You are asking about regrets.")
FWIW, I think you're right, too.
I am a bit puzzled by your contrasting "Past Tense" and "City". I think that in many ways they are fundamentally similar: both contain the standard Trek idea that the past must not be fundamentally changed. This is "time travel conservatism", as you call it. But even though one is negative (WW2 still happens) and one positive (the riots & consequential reform still happen) I think what is most important about them both is that they are both expressing the attitude of your students and you at your current age: the past is fundamental to what made us, so we have to embrace it. (A very Nietzschean attitude—amor fati, eternal return, and all that.)
Of course, in TV writing, this time travel conservatism arises out of the same necessity that constrained "Enterprise": if we change WW2, or the 2024 Bell Riots, then the normal Trek future doesn't come to past, and what happens to the franchise? (And that is why alternate universes, like the Mirror Universe, are popular: they let us play with alternates, safely.) It would be fun to imagine a series in which they let the universe fundamentally change. (I guess you could say the Abrams trilogy did that?) But in a TV show that (at least in original & golden age incarnations) always kept the reset button close to hand, it was never going to happen. So the conservatism of temporal theory & preserving the timeline comes out of the writers (that is, God's, as far as the trek universe goes) ultimate concern: keeping the show going.
Two other thoughts:
1) The "Kill Columbus" time-travel scenario was the ending of a famous SF story, which I don't *think* will be spoiled by spoilers, but just in case I will rot-13 the author and title: Wbua Xrffry "Vainqref", zbfg pbairavragyl sbhaq gurfr qnlf va Gur Qnex Evqr: Gur Orfg Fubeg Svpgvba bs Wbua Xrffry ohg vg'f va frireny bs uvf pbyyrpgvbaf & ybgf bs nagubybtvrf.
2) As for "a retcon, itself a form of time travel for franchise storytelling...", that's why I have named my ongoing serialized series of time travel stories Retcon. (https://stephenfrug.com/retcon-a-mosaic-narrative-in-three-movements/) — it's a time travel series, but also a serial with retcons (and of course I will increasingly play with the connection between the two as the story goes on). Sorry for the self promotion but it seemed on point.
Sorry for the meandering reaction. I'm loving the substack!
Thanks for the response and for the kind words! I do gradually come to basically the same conclusion as you about "City" and "Past Tense" -- I was just initially hung up on the difference, because the similarity seemed less interesting.
Voyager's "Timeless" also shares some similarities with the finale: some of the crew arrives, others don't, and at least some of the survivors are willing and able to try a re-do at the cost of their current lives. I think it foregrounds something that the finale's resolution obscures: those Voyager plots don't do time travel to preserve a large-scale preferred/canonical timeline like "Past Tense" or "City" [or even "All Good Things..." and "Yesterday's Enterprise" - the jump to the future was unintended, but the return is a deliberate form of time travel] but rather because the characters find the "real," "unmodified" timeline emotionally unacceptable.
Perhaps this suggests that in "Voyager" the return to the Federation of the main characters stands for what in other shows is the _preservation_ of the Federation as the nonnegotiable goal? I don't recall time travel plots elsewhere where the protagonists touch an unmodified timeline for less than large-scale stakes. (In "Cause and Effect" the time travel such as it is is automatic, and in "A Matter of Time" the intent is small but the character is too.)
From this angle Voyager plots might be driven by regret in the sense of trying to repair personal mistakes with personal costs, while in other series it's more about conservation, preserving a preferred political and societal status quo from attack and accident. Although at the right level of zoom how is one to distinguish them? For the Voyager crew the Voyager _is_ the Federation.
As an aside, have you read the "Powers of X"/"Sins of X" and associated material in the Marvel comics? They do some interesting things with some extreme forms of time travel.
Good eye! I always remember "Timeless" as "the one where they defile Seven of Nine's corpse" -- which also associates the Borg with time travel yet again. The ironic thing about this recurring time travel theme in VOY -- which is 100% about regret -- is that early on in the series they get an opportunity to warn their past selves and avoid the dilemma entirely, but reject it on the grounds that the timeline is sacred! So you can undo anything other than the foundational trauma itself.
> So you can undo anything other than the foundational trauma itself.
I like this expression a lot. It's a very neat way to mark the difference between two almost opposite types of time travel story (or as a way to probe what counts as foundational trauma for a franchize (cue pop psych analogy between showrunners refusing to fix things in ways that in-universe tech could and individuals holding on to pain because etc))
Oh, and yes I did happen to read some of that -- the only X-Men I've ever delved into, actually. It was a really daring story, especially in the context of a wider comic book universe.
I agree with everything here, but I'd add a twist to the claim that: "The one where you realize that a painful loss is “baked into” who you are is indeed the more direct exposition of the kind of catharsis we are looking for from time travel." This catharsis can be satisfying in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, it can reassure us that we are who we are "supposed" (but by whom?) to be. On the other hand, it can alert us to the fact that to "be ourselves" in the fullest sense, we must take responsibility for what are otherwise merely contingent facts of our biography (and history). That is, the fantasy underpinning the tragic structure of time travel narratives is that we can "undo" history by rewriting it as an object of free choice—complete with its definitionally unbeatable trauma.
When you mention your students' "basic conservatism", it made me think of what might inform their notions of time travel as media consumers of a certain age and context (in addition to the things you describe). It seems that the dominant consensus of the time travel narrative at this point is an adherence to the "law" that one must not alter the timeline. When I think about the media that has maybe most shaped notion of time travel (at least traveling-to-the-past time travel) in the last few decades, I think of the Back to the Future movies, the Butterfly Effect (Bradbury and Kutcher lol), and others that show the dangers of altering timelines. I wonder how much students are just firmly downstream of this narrative consensus and aren't imagining things beyond that.
This also just makes me link it to other small-imagination concepts that seem to be approaching orthodox such as the ascendancy of the trauma backstory (or backstory generally) in narrative like you mention with Picard, movies about fate like the Final Destination series and other similar notions, the Project 1619-style arguments about racism as genetics, etc. If these "no future" narratives and urges are a symptom of neoliberalism, as many have theorized, could the rigid adherence to "you must not alter the timeline" be a sort of neoliberal consensus on time travel?
Very interesting thoughts! Even if timeline conservatism not a direct product of neoliberal ideology as such (which does seem plausible, by the way), it's certainly a product of the commodification of everything and the emergence of "best practices" in franchise management.
There are other ways to imagine the physics of time-travel, by which I mean, what actually happens when someone travels in time, which make regret less relevant.
One approach is that it was always the case that the time time travel had happened. So you don't change the timeline, because your changes had always been part of it. An example of this is Ecce Homo, by Michael Moorcock. A man decides to use a time machine to go back and find Jesus. He successfully travels to first century Palestine, but sees no sign of him. As he wanders around Palestine, some other people start following him. He eventually realizes that he is all the Jesus there is going to be. He winds up getting crucified.
This is also the way that Heinlein consistently handles time travel, in The Door into Summer, All You Zombies, and elsewhere.
Anyhow, just wanted to throw that into the discussion. Maybe the contrast is partly between single-author novels and TV franchises: in the latter case, there are always tensions around consistency, and time travel seems to function as a way to thematize them.
Two examples of no-regrets time travel in SF, which I take as bouncing off the Trek version of that plot.
1) There’s a bizarre and very bad Orson Scott Card novel that posits time travelers *causing* Columbus to invade the Americas. In their timeline, the alternative to world domination by enslaving Europeans was world domination by human-sacrificing Mesoamericans.
2) This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Gladstone & El-Mohtar: The first sentence is “Burn before reading”. No further spoilers, except that it’s pointedly not a regrets plot.
The Card is of course very like a Trek plot in form, but overtly racist.
An interesting non-racist time travel narrative about the invasion of the Americas is Time Without Number by John Brunner.
I remember reading that book as a teenager but I COMPLETELY forgot that part of it (but I just double checked Wikipedia as a reminder). All my recollections are about the primary plot of the story, where future humans go back in time to inoculate Native Americans against European diseases and advance their technology so they can fend off colonization. And in so doing ultimately erase themselves since they set the entire world off in a different direction. Card is such a weird guy, but I'm glad my teenage self read that and somehow auto-discarded the insanely racist aspects (while keeping the rest, which I think is genuinely interesting).
From another TV show (another sequel show!), Walter White would agree with you about time travel and regret, as we learned in the last episode of Better Call Saul. ("You are not asking about a time machine, which is both a real and theoretical impossibility. You are asking about regrets.")
FWIW, I think you're right, too.
I am a bit puzzled by your contrasting "Past Tense" and "City". I think that in many ways they are fundamentally similar: both contain the standard Trek idea that the past must not be fundamentally changed. This is "time travel conservatism", as you call it. But even though one is negative (WW2 still happens) and one positive (the riots & consequential reform still happen) I think what is most important about them both is that they are both expressing the attitude of your students and you at your current age: the past is fundamental to what made us, so we have to embrace it. (A very Nietzschean attitude—amor fati, eternal return, and all that.)
Of course, in TV writing, this time travel conservatism arises out of the same necessity that constrained "Enterprise": if we change WW2, or the 2024 Bell Riots, then the normal Trek future doesn't come to past, and what happens to the franchise? (And that is why alternate universes, like the Mirror Universe, are popular: they let us play with alternates, safely.) It would be fun to imagine a series in which they let the universe fundamentally change. (I guess you could say the Abrams trilogy did that?) But in a TV show that (at least in original & golden age incarnations) always kept the reset button close to hand, it was never going to happen. So the conservatism of temporal theory & preserving the timeline comes out of the writers (that is, God's, as far as the trek universe goes) ultimate concern: keeping the show going.
Two other thoughts:
1) The "Kill Columbus" time-travel scenario was the ending of a famous SF story, which I don't *think* will be spoiled by spoilers, but just in case I will rot-13 the author and title: Wbua Xrffry "Vainqref", zbfg pbairavragyl sbhaq gurfr qnlf va Gur Qnex Evqr: Gur Orfg Fubeg Svpgvba bs Wbua Xrffry ohg vg'f va frireny bs uvf pbyyrpgvbaf & ybgf bs nagubybtvrf.
2) As for "a retcon, itself a form of time travel for franchise storytelling...", that's why I have named my ongoing serialized series of time travel stories Retcon. (https://stephenfrug.com/retcon-a-mosaic-narrative-in-three-movements/) — it's a time travel series, but also a serial with retcons (and of course I will increasingly play with the connection between the two as the story goes on). Sorry for the self promotion but it seemed on point.
Sorry for the meandering reaction. I'm loving the substack!
Thanks for the response and for the kind words! I do gradually come to basically the same conclusion as you about "City" and "Past Tense" -- I was just initially hung up on the difference, because the similarity seemed less interesting.
Voyager's "Timeless" also shares some similarities with the finale: some of the crew arrives, others don't, and at least some of the survivors are willing and able to try a re-do at the cost of their current lives. I think it foregrounds something that the finale's resolution obscures: those Voyager plots don't do time travel to preserve a large-scale preferred/canonical timeline like "Past Tense" or "City" [or even "All Good Things..." and "Yesterday's Enterprise" - the jump to the future was unintended, but the return is a deliberate form of time travel] but rather because the characters find the "real," "unmodified" timeline emotionally unacceptable.
Perhaps this suggests that in "Voyager" the return to the Federation of the main characters stands for what in other shows is the _preservation_ of the Federation as the nonnegotiable goal? I don't recall time travel plots elsewhere where the protagonists touch an unmodified timeline for less than large-scale stakes. (In "Cause and Effect" the time travel such as it is is automatic, and in "A Matter of Time" the intent is small but the character is too.)
From this angle Voyager plots might be driven by regret in the sense of trying to repair personal mistakes with personal costs, while in other series it's more about conservation, preserving a preferred political and societal status quo from attack and accident. Although at the right level of zoom how is one to distinguish them? For the Voyager crew the Voyager _is_ the Federation.
As an aside, have you read the "Powers of X"/"Sins of X" and associated material in the Marvel comics? They do some interesting things with some extreme forms of time travel.
Good eye! I always remember "Timeless" as "the one where they defile Seven of Nine's corpse" -- which also associates the Borg with time travel yet again. The ironic thing about this recurring time travel theme in VOY -- which is 100% about regret -- is that early on in the series they get an opportunity to warn their past selves and avoid the dilemma entirely, but reject it on the grounds that the timeline is sacred! So you can undo anything other than the foundational trauma itself.
> So you can undo anything other than the foundational trauma itself.
I like this expression a lot. It's a very neat way to mark the difference between two almost opposite types of time travel story (or as a way to probe what counts as foundational trauma for a franchize (cue pop psych analogy between showrunners refusing to fix things in ways that in-universe tech could and individuals holding on to pain because etc))
Oh, and yes I did happen to read some of that -- the only X-Men I've ever delved into, actually. It was a really daring story, especially in the context of a wider comic book universe.
I agree with everything here, but I'd add a twist to the claim that: "The one where you realize that a painful loss is “baked into” who you are is indeed the more direct exposition of the kind of catharsis we are looking for from time travel." This catharsis can be satisfying in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, it can reassure us that we are who we are "supposed" (but by whom?) to be. On the other hand, it can alert us to the fact that to "be ourselves" in the fullest sense, we must take responsibility for what are otherwise merely contingent facts of our biography (and history). That is, the fantasy underpinning the tragic structure of time travel narratives is that we can "undo" history by rewriting it as an object of free choice—complete with its definitionally unbeatable trauma.
Ooh! I like that!
Great article! I agree, this one seems beardly.
When you mention your students' "basic conservatism", it made me think of what might inform their notions of time travel as media consumers of a certain age and context (in addition to the things you describe). It seems that the dominant consensus of the time travel narrative at this point is an adherence to the "law" that one must not alter the timeline. When I think about the media that has maybe most shaped notion of time travel (at least traveling-to-the-past time travel) in the last few decades, I think of the Back to the Future movies, the Butterfly Effect (Bradbury and Kutcher lol), and others that show the dangers of altering timelines. I wonder how much students are just firmly downstream of this narrative consensus and aren't imagining things beyond that.
This also just makes me link it to other small-imagination concepts that seem to be approaching orthodox such as the ascendancy of the trauma backstory (or backstory generally) in narrative like you mention with Picard, movies about fate like the Final Destination series and other similar notions, the Project 1619-style arguments about racism as genetics, etc. If these "no future" narratives and urges are a symptom of neoliberalism, as many have theorized, could the rigid adherence to "you must not alter the timeline" be a sort of neoliberal consensus on time travel?
Very interesting thoughts! Even if timeline conservatism not a direct product of neoliberal ideology as such (which does seem plausible, by the way), it's certainly a product of the commodification of everything and the emergence of "best practices" in franchise management.
There are other ways to imagine the physics of time-travel, by which I mean, what actually happens when someone travels in time, which make regret less relevant.
One approach is that it was always the case that the time time travel had happened. So you don't change the timeline, because your changes had always been part of it. An example of this is Ecce Homo, by Michael Moorcock. A man decides to use a time machine to go back and find Jesus. He successfully travels to first century Palestine, but sees no sign of him. As he wanders around Palestine, some other people start following him. He eventually realizes that he is all the Jesus there is going to be. He winds up getting crucified.
This is also the way that Heinlein consistently handles time travel, in The Door into Summer, All You Zombies, and elsewhere.
Anyhow, just wanted to throw that into the discussion. Maybe the contrast is partly between single-author novels and TV franchises: in the latter case, there are always tensions around consistency, and time travel seems to function as a way to thematize them.
Oh, oops, I meant "Behold the Man," not "Ecce Homo" (which is by my other favourite fantasy novelist).