Time Travel Stories Are Now Junk Food For The Mind – They Taste Great Going Down, But Leave You Feeling Empty.
As someone who has been reading science fiction for decades, I am fed up with seeing good writers waste an opportunity to produce truly compelling writing by relying on the easiest possible excuse: time travel. I am not saying that time travel cannot be done well. Back to the Future was a perfect example of that. What made Back to the Future magical was that the time travel was only the vehicle for the true story. The real story was about family, coming of age, and learning to understand your parents as people, not just authority figures.
However, the time travel vehicle in many modern time travel stories is the story itself. Take the book I bought last month (won’t mention the title, as it was at the front of every single bookstore), where the main character kept traveling back in time to fix his mistakes. By page 200, I was ready to toss the book across the room. Why should I care about his romantic problems when he can just go back in time and try again? Where is the risk? Where is the personal growth?
Watching someone play a video game with unlimited lives and save states is entertaining, but there is no tension when there is no consequence to failing. I have seen this pattern repeated in movies and television shows alike and it’s depressing how lazy it has become.
Looper is another great example, and I’m afraid I’m going to get hate mail for mentioning it because people seem to love it. The premise sounds fantastic, “Assassins” that kill people sent back in time, until one day you have to kill your older self. However, when you really think about it for five minutes, the time travel logic doesn’t add up. Why would you send someone back in time to be killed when you could just kill them in the future? The movie tries to explain this away with a throwaway line about disposal being easier in the future, but come on. The entire premise falls apart if you think about it. This means the writers relied on the audience not thinking about it.
The same thing happened with the new Terminator movies. The original film had a beautiful closed loop – John Connor sends his father back in time to create the very timeline that will lead to his own existence. It’s simple, it’s tragic, and it fits the themes perfectly. However, each and every sequel has to muddle it up more and more, introducing additional time travelers and alternate timelines until you need a flow chart to track what is supposed to happen. Dark Fate was especially guilty of this. I walked out of the theatre with the feeling that I’d just watched a very expensive Wikipedia article about the physics of time travel instead of a story about human beings.
Tenet may be the worst offender. Clearly, Christopher Nolan spent months figuring out how to make his time travel mechanics work in reverse, brought in amazing stunt teams to film people fighting in reverse, and built an incredible complex puzzle box of a plot… and apparently, forgot to include characters that I might actually care about. I sat for 2 1/2 hours watching beautifully shot, yet incomprehensibly complex action sequences while I cared for no one on stage. It is the ultimate expression of prioritising the concept over the character, and it makes me mad because Nolan can do better.
Here’s the thing – I know time travel can be done beautifully when done correctly, because I’ve read and watched the stories that prove it. Arrival (which technically is not time travel, but plays with non-linear time perception) blew me away because it took its science fiction concept and explored grief, choice, and what it means to love someone when you know how the story ends. Louise’s journey is not about changing the past or altering the future – it is about accepting both joy and sorrow as integral parts of human experience. That’s what good science fiction does. It takes the impossible to illuminate the possible.
Even in classic literature, time travel worked because it served the purpose of character development. A Christmas Carol is not really about time travel – it is about redemption and the possibility of change. The Time Machine is not about the mechanics of moving through time – it is H.G. Wells using the future to illustrate class struggle in Victorian England. These authors understood that the science fiction element was simply the means to investigate something deeper about human nature.
Somewhere along the line, however, many writers began to believe that the time travel itself was interesting enough to carry a story. It is not. I have lost count of how many novels I have stopped reading because the author seemed more interested in describing their time travel mechanics than developing their characters. The Butterfly Effect was especially difficult for me – Ashton Kutcher’s character could change the past, and that was cool, but every alternate timeline felt arbitrary and lacked emotional connection. The movie was so focused on illustrating various versions of events that it never tried to make me care about any version of the people involved in those events.
Even Doctor Who, which I have watched religiously for decades, falls into this trap more often than I’d like. When the show is at its best, it uses time travel to explore moral questions – Should you save one person if it puts millions in jeopardy? How do you deal with losing everyone you love? But far too many episodes get bogged down in explaining why the sonic screwdriver won’t work on that particular door, or how crossing your own timeline causes a paradox, or whatever technobabble the writers came up with that week. I watch Doctor Who for the humanity of the Doctor, not for lectures about time travel physics.
The problem is that time travel has become a crutch. Writer stuck their protagonist into a corner? Time travel! Need to raise the stakes? Add multiple timelines! Think you’re clever? Create a temporal paradox! It has become the narrative equivalent of Deus Ex Machina, but worse, because at least classical Deus Ex Machina was honest about being a convenient rescue by the gods.
And don’t even get me started on how this impacts the ability to create mystery and suspense stories. If your detective can just go back and see the crime scene, where is the mystery? If your protagonist can just fix their mistakes, where is the suspense? Writers continue to add rules and restrictions to try to create tension, but most of the time they feel arbitrary. “You can only go back once,” or “Changing the past creates alternate timelines,” or “Traveling through time makes you develop nose bleeds.” It is all just made-up limits designed to fix a fundamentally flawed story structure.
What I find infuriating is that it seems to me that many contemporary authors believe complexity is equal to sophistication. Many authors create complex temporal mechanics, illustrate the cause and effects with diagrams, and spend pages explaining how their unique brand of time travel works, and entirely forget to create a connection with the people trapped in their temporal contraptions. I have read hundreds of pages of science fiction novels with less emotional impact than a decent short story about someone missing their bus.
The saddest part is that publishers continue to purchase books like this because time travel is marketable; it implies high-concept science fiction, and promises complex, twist-filled surprises. Unfortunately, many of these books are simply rehashing the same tired concepts we’ve seen a hundred times before. How many more books can we expect to see about someone traveling back in time to kill Hitler, or meet their younger self, or inadvertently create alternate timelines? The time travel well hasn’t just run dry — it’s been strip mined.
I continue to hope that we will start to see more stories that use time travel as a means to explore character and theme as Arrival or A Christmas Carol did, but every year continues to bring us more novels and films that seem to believe that temporal mechanics themselves are fascinating, regardless of whether they are tied to compelling human stories.
Perhaps I’m just getting old and cranky. Perhaps there are wonderful time–travel stories being written that I’m missing. But after fifty years of reading science fiction, I’ve seen enough time–travel stories that lack effort to produce a compelling story to last a lifetime. Next time you decide to buy a book or watch a movie that promises time travel, ask yourself: Is this using temporal mechanics to explore something meaningful about human experience, or is it just another elaborate way to avoid dealing with consequences? Your response may determine whether you’ll be treated to a genuinely told story or just expensive window dressing.
Kathleen’s a lifelong reader who believes science fiction is literature, full stop. From her book-filled home in Seattle, she writes about thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi that challenges ideas and lingers long after the last page. She’s a champion for under-read authors and timeless storytelling.