Time travel through different authors’ eyes
- Kamila Niemotko
- Feb 27, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 1, 2023
Time travel is a very popular book trope, because everyone thinks of it in a different way. In some stories, the past can’t change even though you see it, in other you can alter the future and the present by the smallest movement. Because there is such a wild range of points of view about this topic, it might never get old and people will continue writing time travel stories forever.
One of the first books that shows the main character travelling through time is one we all know-”A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. The way Dickens portrays time travel may seem quite unusual in comparecent to ones we see today-it may not seem like time travel at all. Scrooge cannot affect the timeline directly while visiting the future of the past, but his actions in the present get altered by things he saw while “visiting”, so basically he gets a second chance.
In the book “Before the coffee gets cold” Tawaguchi’s take on time travel is nothing like Dickens’. This book tells stories about different people visiting a small cafe in Japan called Funiculi Funicula, which is famous for it’s supposed ability to make people time travel. Visitors soon learn time travel is not as simple as it seems. Cafe has some rules that must be followed, or the traveller will face consequences. The first rule, is that nothing you do in the past will change the future. This rule confuses people, because why would you want to visit the past if it can’t change the future? The second rule is that the people who you can meet are the ones who visited the cafe. The third rule states that only one chair gives one the ability to travel through time, and while the traveller is in the past they mustn’t leave their seat. There is also a time limit. The traveller must drink their coffee before it gets cold. If they forget to do that, they will become a ghost trapped in the cafe. I personally really enjoyed the author’s take on time travel, because it shows that the only thing time travel can change is your own mindset.
In J.K.Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban there is yet another take on time travelling. In Rowling’s time travel you instantly jump back in time, without generating any new timelines. Your clone from the past still makes the same actions at the same time, but the time traveller you is kind of a different person-makes different decisions, has their own conciousness. In the book future Harry and Hermione save the past versions of themselves from dying, and before the time travel they both wonder who saved them. This version of time travel makes a lot of sense-when you go back in time, you truly are supposed to be in that place so the present doesn’t get altered. But that shows that the time traveller actually doesn’t have free will because their actions have already been done.
Even though I showed just 3 examples, I think it shows how different people can put their own twist on the same subject. I think this is a topic you can’t particularly hate or like, since every take on it is so different.
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