Confusing Time Jumps

[Ihe]

Question about the OP's story: if time travel is so casually done by any bored teen with a common gadget, wouldn't it be impossible to do damage control?

And you mentioned paradoxes done by the first time travellers: if paradoxes happen, then multiverses shouldn't. You can't have it both ways. And if time travel doesn't give birth to a multiverse, then every time travel will have to cause a paradox somewhere because they're all on the same unique timeline. If you are going for multiverses, then paradoxes won't exist because every change creates a new timeline. Both premises are mutually exclusive as far as I know. How do you tackle this?

How do they figure out if a paradox is happening already despite the fact that the society tries their best not to create them.

I would think it's impossible to detect when your reality has changed if you're not an external observer--only the returning time traveller that made the change would know. But all that pales in importance when you consider that both consistency paradoxes and causal loops mean that NO change can be done to a timeline. A time travel paradox is literally what happens when you try to change the future, and in doing so, you create that same future you're trying to avoid--thus, no actual change happens. If change does happen, you've entered the multiverse, where paradoxes don't exist. If you wander outside of this maxim, you'll trip over contradictions which will most assuredly sink your story. I think you might be using the term "paradox" incorrectly here.

Going the fantasy route with this story might be the right thing to do. If you call it SF, readers will ask A LOT of questions you won't have the answer to. When it's just the one time traveller doing it it's already a mess. But millions, at the same time? You don't wanna go there. Too many implications. But even as fantasy, people will still have story-breaking questions. Specially if you don't resolve the paradox vs multiverse issue early on.

Overall, massified time travel does NOT mesh well with paradoxes and just the one timeline. I don't know how you go about it in your story, but tread carefully during revisions. These sort of time travel stories almost always have major plot holes in them, and they'll be even more obvious at the scope you're going for. Nevertheless, a whole society of time travellers is eye-catching to say the least.

PS: despite detailed explanations of tech mechanics not being always necessary, you WILL need to explain convincingly how this time travel is regulated, otherwise you'll be snuffing suspension of disbelief faster than a multiversal plane shift in real time (whatever that means ), SF or not.

 

[Cli-Fi]

Question about the OP's story: if time travel is so casually done by any bored teen with a common gadget, wouldn't it be impossible to do damage control?

And you mentioned paradoxes done by the first time travellers: if paradoxes happen, then multiverses shouldn't. You can't have it both ways. And if time travel doesn't give birth to a multiverse, then every time travel will have to cause a paradox somewhere because they're all on the same unique timeline. If you are going for multiverses, then paradoxes won't exist because every change creates a new timeline. Both premises are mutually exclusive as far as I know. How do you tackle this?


I would think it's impossible to detect when your reality has changed if you're not an external observer--only the returning time traveller that made the change would know. But all that pales in importance when you consider that both consistency paradoxes and causal loops mean that NO change can be done to a timeline. A time travel paradox is literally what happens when you try to change the future, and in doing so, you create that same future you're trying to avoid--thus, no actual change happens. If change does happen, you've entered the multiverse, where paradoxes don't exist. If you wander outside of this maxim, you'll trip over contradictions which will most assuredly sink your story. I think you might be using the term "paradox" incorrectly here.

Going the fantasy route with this story might be the right thing to do. If you call it SF, readers will ask A LOT of questions you won't have the answer to. When it's just the one time traveller doing it it's already a mess. But millions, at the same time? You don't wanna go there. Too many implications. But even as fantasy, people will still have story-breaking questions. Specially if you don't resolve the paradox vs multiverse issue early on.

Overall, massified time travel does NOT mesh well with paradoxes and just the one timeline. I don't know how you go about it in your story, but tread carefully during revisions. These sort of time travel stories almost always have major plot holes in them, and they'll be even more obvious at the scope you're going for. Nevertheless, a whole society of time travellers is eye-catching to say the least.

PS: despite detailed explanations of tech mechanics not being always necessary, you WILL need to explain convincingly how this time travel is regulated, otherwise you'll be snuffing suspension of disbelief faster than a multiversal plane shift in real time (whatever that means ), SF or not.

As to not give away the ending, you've touched upon the end in part of this post. It's sort of like a religious treasure hunt that my MCs go on. To seek out these paradoxes and either fix them or let them be. Some paradoxes are more dangerous than others, and the ultimate goal is to find the biggest one. Time travel is regulated and whole entire eras are blocked off due to monopolies that other time travelers have on the sectors. The society is more focused on the myths/prophecy than on the science and that's another big argument between the warring factions in the book.

 

[Ursa major]

My story has both. Physical time travel, and time jumps.

With the proviso that most things, if done well, can work....

It seems to me that you may risk confusing the reader unnecessarily. You have to consider (as all writers should) that you, as the author, know far more about both the content of the story and the way it is told than a reader can, and that while you should understand what is going on -- if you don't know, no-one will -- the reader may very well not. Even if you want to confuse the reader, it's far better to do this consciously, as a special effect**; otherwise you'll lose control of (= have less control than usual over) how the reader consumes your story.

And one last thought. If you want people to understand something, then the more complex it is, the clearer the way it's described should be.


** - The companion problem is that doing this just the once, at a crucial point in the story, risks accusations of "cheating", because the reader has been given no forwarning that this might happen... so you might want to provide an example where it happens but is not crucial to the plot.

 

[Tim Murray]

What did your character do when they jumped, and if it was into the past, how did it affect the "present" they originated from? I deal with a time paradox in my second novel, which is in a completed transcript form.

If your solution works, stick with it, this is science fiction.