Forum: Lost Stories

No, not that one, in this one the woman at the bar turns out to be a Muse or something like that.

But thanks for the reply

High School Again? Ugh! by JoeDreamer on the other site.

make a paradox

You need two doctors to make a pair a docs. If you have a parade with at least two oxen that might make parad(e) ox.

There is a shoe brand called Dr Martens, so the MC could own a pair of docs.

You've been hanging around Richard too much - you've become infected!

If he kills his father AFTER he was born then he won't pop like a soap bubble but there is a good likelihood that his life will follow a differing track to the point he night not meet the Muse who sent him back. On the other hand, that may be the result the Muse wanted - tricky people those Muses.

But he killed himself after killing his dad

But he killed himself after killing his dad

It's better than if he killed himself before he killed his dad.

The whole point of going back is to change your future. Killing himself does that very well.

Going back to kill his dad then himself,he wouldn't be in the future to make the time travel trip.

Time travel and logic cannot co-exist.

But. If you are correct in that if he goes back, kills himself, then wouldn't be in the future, it follows that going back won't allow him to kill his dad or himself. Which is silly.

So, he starts in the present, goes back, kills his dad then kills himself, but since he is in the past, he still lives, because he is his own doppelgänger.

But what if he goes back further in time and kills his father before he is conceived?

We call them do-overs because the basic concept is having the chance to relive our past. Which means we already know what happened the first time, but can change things as we have a second chance. The already twisted logic breaks down as soon as a second time traveller makes changes. Once multiple people make changes no one person can guarantee a specific outcome.

Not to mention that there are more do-overs making money from silver than there was actual silver available at the time.

Right. Many do-overs use silver market manipulation, but do any use the oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979? Or any of the normal fluctuations in the market? No, it's always a single big bet on the same thing.

do any use the oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979?

Yes.

A Fresh Start by rlfj starts in 1968. By Chapter 6, Carl is already planning to use the Yom Kippur war and it's oil price hike to kickstart his wealth gathering.

I'd forgotten that. He also used the 1987 crash as well.

In Lazlo Zalezac's final work "Emend by Eclipse" one of the MCs tries to convince his father to speculate on oil, the father does not see the logic and refuses.
By the time the Hunts' silver speculation comes around the two MCs are old enough to take their own steps and do indeed become very rich.
I think they use the 1979 oil shock but that may be incorrect. They also had little idea exactly *when* these major events took place but - in the case of silver - they knew enough to recognise when to bail out.

People used to confuse Lazlo Zalezac with Lazlong - who has mostly been forgotten now - but Lazlong also had a couple of linked do-over stories, the first one of which was "The Fountain of Youth". In that one the MC had a far better idea of which stocks to buy (or which ones not to buy!) and also invested heavily in silver.
The point is that everyone who was old enough remembers the silver peak, and that the peak was over 10 times the previous value. The oil prices went up by a lot less and were generally less memorable as investment opportunities.

Al Steiner's MC (Doing it all Over) made a career as an investment advisor, rather like Lazlong's.

Depends on which theory of time travel you use.

Einstein's belief was that time travel was not probably not possible, but if it were it would not be possible to actually change anything, all you would do is change your understanding of what had actually happened in the first place. For example, if you killed your grandfather it wouldn't mean that you wouldn't be born, it would mean that the person you had thought was your grandfather actually wasn't, AND NEVER HAD BEEN.

There's also a variation of multiple worlds theory where changing something causes the creation of a new timeline and the erasure of the original. You still exist despite the fact that your timeline doesn't; in this case you are essentially a traveller from a no-longer-accessible alternate timeline. You can't get back to where you came from because it no longer exists, but you still exist because you were not in your timeline when it ceased to exist. A variation of this interpretation is in later seasons of Canadian SF show Continuum.

I've also seen a variation in which which potential paradoxes created these self-contained loops, but I can't recall the book or how it all worked. I read it a long time ago.

In the many-worlds theory, why would the old one have to cease to exist? Your arrival in the past would create a fork, splitting the universe in two from that point forward. In one, you didn't come back and were born with the history you remember. In the other, you did return and need not ever be born. The 1632verse takes this approach, though no in-universe characters know for sure.

You're correct that the normal many-worlds theory would suggest that there are multiple alternate universes all existing at the same time. That's why I said this was a variation on that. I assumed readers would be aware of the main version of many worlds, but the variation where prior alternates become unavailable is less known.

Note also that this interpretation does not necessarily mean that the alternate ceases to exist, that will depend on the specifics of what was changed. The key point is that the time-traveller is unable to return to their original timeline. Even if they go back again to correct whatever was changed, all that does is make the current timeline similar to the one they left but it still takes them even further from their point of origin.

Note that I've read a LOT of time travel and alternate worlds fiction, not all of it in English, and much of it stuff that the average person has never heard of. I'm trying to provide some ideas that are less known, not just retread the same tropes that are in a thousand stories already.

it would mean that the person you had thought was your grandfather actually wasn't

Using Argon's term, you mean his grandmother had subcontracted that part out?

1 thing most time travel ideas fail to consider is the place the earth is in relation to our understanding of time.

Do we understand Time?
Just assume space and time are one compound item, you can't change space coordinates without changing the time coordinate. Our understanding of physics tells us: There is no instantaneous moving from one point in space to another, even light needs time to travel. This should be true in reverse also. Change of the time coordinate would automatically involve changing the space coordinates to the values they had at this time.

By the time you read this post we will have moved as a planet approximately 30k miles from where we were when you started.

If space and time can't be separated, this is no problem.

Problems may arise when you try to go back or fore in time at a place that has changed / will change significantly.
E.g. you are standing on a bridge and go back in time to a period where there was no bridge. Or you are standing in a valley and go forward in time, unaware you are standing at the place of the concrete pillar of a future bridge.

Landing in deep water during a flooding or in midst of a blizzard or a wildfire may ruin the day for the time travellers.

The author should have a concept with solutions for possible problems, not totally relay on handwaving.

HM.

HM.

Reasonably, if you went back in time exactly 30 years, then the Earth would be exactly where it was 30 years ago.

No, besides the Earth spinning and travelling round the sun, also the sun is travelling round the galaxy as it turns, also has some proper motion therein (it bobs up and down), and also the galaxy is fair shifting. Even ignoring the last three (which each have more effect than the first two), if you choose a time which has the Earth in exactly the same place in its orbit, the time of day will be different, so you'd be in a different place on Earth - possibly inside solid rock or 5000m above the ground, or more likely 100 miles out to sea. The Earth's rotation rate isn't quite regular (leap seconds), the continents are zipping around in slow motion, and its orbit round the sun isn't quite regular - it becomes more and less circular, and the perihelion will be affected by relativity just like Mercury's (but somewhat less so). You need to posit something like a wormhole anchored at both ends, where something in-story ensures the ends are at the 'same' place, or at least compatible - but then, they wouldn't even have to be on the same planet.

SOL lists 215 stories tagged with "science fiction and time travel".

But there are 221 tagged just "time travel"

I searched without selecting a genre and got 666 tagged just time travel and 382 using both tags

I currently don't have any exclusions set.

Not sure what caused the difference.
It does support your idea.

Obviously the 'missing' stories are in a different timeline, the one you are posting from.

A rational 'Time' story:
https://storiesonline.net/s/66896/unintended-consequences