All The Tropes

You Already Changed the Past: Difference between revisions

← Older edit
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
No edit summary
No edit summary
 
(2 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1:
{{trope}}
{{quote|''Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future... Any moment now, Janey's watchband will break. Somewhere, the fat man is already lumbering toward the shooting gallery, steps heavy with unwitting destiny.''|'''Dr. Manhattan''', ''[[Watchmen (comics)|Dr. ManhattanWatchmen]]'''}}
 
{{quote|''One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not...about changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end. The major problem is quite simply one of [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|grammar.]]''|'''Douglas Adams''', ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/The Restaurant At The End of The Universe|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]''}}
Line 14:
Note that '''You Already Changed the Past''' implies [[Only One Possible Future]], which is the version of [[You Can't Fight Fate|fatalism]] found in many [[Older Than Feudalism|older]] works, such as Greek Drama, that don't involve time travel.
 
This trope ''arguably'' makes the most sense when considering time travel from a scientific point of view, see the [[wikipedia:Novikov self-consistency principle|]] on [[wikipedia:Novikov self-consistency principle|The Other Wiki]].<ref>Novikov's self-consistency principle was named "the [[Law of Conservation of History]]" by [[Larry Niven]] in his short piece "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel," published at least ten years prior to Novikov's work. Of course, [[Larry Niven]] is a [[Science Fiction]] writer, which may explain why [[Sci Fi Ghetto|nobody cares]]. Alternatively, this is an illustration of something called [[wikipedia:Stigler's law of eponymy|Stigler's Law of Eponymy]]: nothing ever gets named after the first person to discover it.</ref> However, the number of time-travel plots that it allows for are extremely limited and the logic gets complicated ''very'' quickly. This, however, also has the side-effect of creating a '[[Functional Magic|self-correcting universe]]' usually by a slew of [[Contrived Coincidence]]s (ie. if you try to shoot your grandfather the gun will jam; if you try poisoning him he will recover; if you try strangling him you will be overcome; if you wear [[Power Armor]] from the future you will have second thoughts; if you try [[Beyond the Impossible|sending a bomb back through time and detonating it directly inside his chest]] the time machine will break down). This can also lead to a scenario where the ''only'' reason why the past is not changed is because someone else says 'you cannot' and you take his advice. Meaning ''the advice itself'' is a part of the universe's self-correcting nature.
 
Thus, most time travel stories that involve altering the past will provide some of the characters with [[Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory]]. This makes less sense, but it makes for a narrative convenience. If a You Already Changed The Past plot is used, the time travel will probably be a one-off thing, since repeating it would most likely get tedious.
Line 78:
** He encounters the brand-new original manuscript of a poem he'd studied in his own century, and wonders how it would pick up the stains he'd seen on it in his own time. A poet he recently met then walks in carrying some food, puts it down, and picks up the manuscript with his greasy hands to look it over.
** He encounters a 17th century book with an inscription in it that shakes him up. He later travels accidentally to that century, and on encountering the then-new book, writes the pig-Latin inscription addressed to himself that he would read in the future.
* The climax of ''[[Harry Potter and Thethe Prisoner of Azkaban (novel)|Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban]]''. They go to the past to save Buckbeak and Sirius, and Harry wants to see a mysterious figure that he believes to be his father. {{spoiler|Buckbeak never died; the thumping sound was the executioner taking his frustration out on a fence (pumpkin in the movie). The mysterious figure was Harry from the future saving himself, his dad really is dead. Then they save Sirius, who rides off with Buckbeak. Plus they hear a couple strange noises, which turns out to be their [[Time Travel]]ing selves.}}
* ''[[To Say Nothing of the Dog]]'' by Connie Willis involves [[Time Travel|time traveling]] historians (which first appeared in her ''Doomsday Book'')who spend a lot of effort to repair the "incongruity" caused when one of them inadvertently brings a cat forward from [[Victorian Britain|Victorian England]] (they're extinct in 2057). This involves trying to make sure that the cat's owner winds up with the "Mr. C" that her diary specifies after they've accidentally introduced her to a different man. {{spoiler|It turns out that all perceived incongruities are the continuum's self-correcting system.}}
* ''Blackout'' and ''All Clear'', also by Connie Willis, have a similar example. Some historians go back to [[WWII]] era, then find that they can't get home. They agonize over every little thing they do, worried that the slightest change might cause the Germans to win the war. {{spoiler|It turns out that the things they did, the people they saved, and so on, were exactly the tipping points to let ENGLAND win the war. Their future, in which the Third Reich fell, predicates on them getting stuck in the past and doing the things they're convinced will ruin everything.}}
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/You_Already_Changed_the_Past"