Back in April of 2012 I read for the first time Stephen King's time travel novel 11/22/63...here is a link to my article about it: [link]. Since I'd be simply repeating from I wrote about this outstanding piece of speculative science fiction, I thought I'd go off in a (very) slightly different direction today...
Time travel has always been a popular theme in fiction and its prospects appeal to a wide swath of the population...at least to that part that is capable of reflection and isn't constantly surrendering itself to pleasure-seeking and ego gratification. I think I might have an answer as to why the idea of venturing into the past or future appeals to a lot of us: time is the dimension of space-time in which we can't travel other than the steady, second-by-second pace with which we live it out. I can imagine what the beach is like and I can also physically go there. And I can imagine the past or future...but my brain and body are trapped in the now. What time travel fiction accomplishes is to make the now a totally personal and portable concept, with the travelers toting it around with them "whenever" they go. And once you can separate now from the notion that we're all locked into the present, where we dwell with our earlier life...and even earlier nonexistence...trailing back on one side, and our future life...and death and beyond...projected ahead on the other...then immortality sounds a bit more achievable, even if this is only felt unconsciously. But even if time travel were possible, we still live within our own physical bodies, subject to wear and tear by aging and vulnerable to injury and disease. But it does seem exciting to some people to be able to escape the confines of our own lifespans and experience other times...as if they were getting away with something much more meaningful and transcendent than traveling cross-country or abroad...
In the 2012 article I wrote about 11/22/63, I alluded to the movie Groundhog Day, which was a different kind of time travel story...one with impenetrable temporal walls confining Bill Murray's character to a single, repeating day. There's another time-themed story, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, that has as its protagonist Billy Pilgrim, who has become "unstuck" in time and goes back and forth through different points within his lifespan and experiences. His time travel, like that in Groundhog Day, while in many ways different, is also based on subjective, experiential reality and not on scientifically provable objective reality. I imagine that if there is truly anything to time travel, it will be as a subjective and not an objectively demonstrable experience...
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