Going back in time

H.G. Wells, a pioneer of science fiction who penned the original alien invasion story, was probably also the first to write about time travel.

If you only know “The Time Machine” from the great George Pal movie of 1960 or the not-so-great remake of a few years back, you may not know that Well’s original novel (novella, really) is 111 years old. Hollywood may disdain anything older than the latest supermodel starlet, but it is surprising how often it turns to the classics for inspiration.

In the original, the main character has no name. He is simply The Time Traveller, with two l’s in the British fashion and his title capitalized.

Wells also identifies other characters in the story solely by their professions – the Psychologist, the Medical Man, the Provincial Mayor and, my favorite, the Very Young Man. (One could quibble this last is not a profession, but for many, being young is full-time work.)

I believe Wells made his characters safely anonymous in hopes of creating verisimilitude, a sense his story might be thinly fictionalized reality. He knew he had drawn up from the well two primal archetypes: our voyeuristic desire to watch what came before and what might come after, and our urge to “fix” what has already happened.

How often have you said, “If I knew then what I know now…,” followed by the changes you would have made – taking or not taking that job, moving into that house, buying that car, ripping that half-gallon of ice cream out of the hands of your younger self before you gained an extra forty pounds.

The expression, “hindsight is 20/20,” taps into the same vein of wish fulfillment. It expresses a desire for time travel by people who may have never considered the concept.

For me, the desire to flip though ages of history like a reader flipping through pages of a history book pales next to the desire to time travel within the last five minutes of my life. I could avoid so many sticky situations if I could just relive selected 300-second intervals.

Boring meeting? Jump back five minutes and run like mad for the door before the boss announces it.

Wife asks for an honest opinion and you are naive enough to give it? Flip back five, anticipate the question, and then tell her she looks great.

Need extra cash? Check lottery results, then go back and buy the winning ticket. Not with all numbers correct, mind you, because that would draw attention. Five of the six is still a nice chunk of change, you greedy slob.

Time travel continues to exert its hold, evidenced by the dozens of books, movies, and songs expressing a desire to change the unchangeable. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a killer robot from the future sent to assassinate a future leader. A time safari hunter seeking to bag a dinosaur steps on a butterfly and affects the presidential election sixty million years in the future. (Hey, maybe that’s how we got Bush.) Cher wants to turn back time and take back those words that have hurt you so you’d stay. In the latest, due out this summer, Adam Sandler gains possession of a remote control that allows him to rewind and fast forward life.

But then there is the “grandfather paradox,” which asks what would happen if you traveled into the past and accidentally killed your ancestor before he had a chance to further the bloodline.

Would you simply disappear? Would you create an alternate timeline where you never existed? And what if you, erstwhile Time Traveler – or Traveller, according to Wells – bumped into an earlier or older version of yourself along the way.

Would you sit down and have tea? Drown in a veritable sea of conundrum? Compliment yourself on your fashion sense and dashing good looks?

One’s things for sure: Time travel would be a boon for aspirin sales. Just thinking about all those paradoxes makes my head hurt.

I'm not sure when this column ran originally in The Alliance Review. I would guess 2006, based on the George W. Bush reference and the age of The Time Machine, first published in 1895. 

If I revised this, I would mention Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol as an earlier novel that featured time travel, as Scrooge travels to the past to observe his younger self.