Unreality Companion: Time Travelling for Fun and Profit

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

So this week's Unreality article left me with a lot of different directions to go with for its companion piece, most of which dealt with the tedious nuts and bolts of its time travelling narrative.  But with as excited as I am for Terminator Genisys, I wanted to do something fun, if a little tangential.  And what fun is time travel without a few good paradoxes thrown into the mix?

Although there are a lot to choose from, my favorite has always been the Ontological Paradox, marginally better known as the Bootstrap Paradox.  This is the paradox where something comes into existence through time travel without any logical origin.  It's what happens if you travel back in time to give yourself blueprints for a time machine, built one using them, then travel back in time to give yourself the blueprints all over again.  The only justification for its existence is that it was fatalistically necessitated to exist, so where did the blueprints actually come from?

Ontological - if a bit technical a phrase - at least makes sense on its face.  Ontology is the study of origins and existence.  But why is it alternatively known as the Bootstrap Paradox?  This term actually comes from the very phrase that you're probably thinking of - to pull oneself up by his or her bootstraps - which was used in the Robert Heinlein's story "By His Bootstraps."  Given that that's what popularized the scenario in the first place, the name stuck.

So where have we seen this before?  It's actually really popular, given just how mind-bendingly fun the idea is and how it highlights the inherent complications of time travel as a concept.  Its appearance in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is actually what introduced me to the scenario.

At one point in the game, you (in the future) go to a windmill that's chaotically spinning out of control.  Its proprietor rages on about a child who stormed in year previous and played the song (where he had learned it from).  He teaches you the song, at which point you can go back in time and, as a child in the past, play the song at the windmill, exactly in the manner that the man described to you.  The song, logically, should not exist.

Most versions of this paradox, however, are inherently seedier: involving characters travelling back in time in order to impregnate relatives of theirs (often with themselves).  This is exactly how Futurama's Fry ended up impregnating his grandmother with his father.  Later on, they even address his family's inbreeding by revealing that Fry lacks the Delta Brainwave (which determines the intelligence of all animals and robots and even some plants).

This particular scenario is taken to its logical extreme in Predestination, an adaptation of another Heinlen story: " - All You Zombies -."  The story follows a temporal agent who travels back in time to recruit his replacement: a post-op hermaphrodite whose daughter was kidnapped years before.  What starts out as a time travel mystery with an especially strong focus on its character's back story, however, proves to be the trippiest movie to come around in years.

All of the main characters in the story are Ethan Hawke's character at different stages of his life.  He travels back in time (as the temporal agent) to hook up his father (the post-op recruit) with his mother (his pre-op self), who ultimately gives birth to himself.  He then abducts the child, starting the whole cycle over again.  The time-jumping unibomber that Hawke is tracking also turns out to be him (near the end of his life) and I'm still not convinced that Hawke's boss isn't also him (after his retirement from the force, but before he goes rogue in his old age).

And the story's title, "-All You Zombies-?"  It's actually a line from the story.  The protagonist (sole character?) thinks to himself that "I know where I came from - but where did all you zombies come from?"  As the middle section of the line, it represents the character's narrative: with neither a beginning nor an end.

So what is you favorite time travel paradox in fiction?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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