The Grandfather Paradox

Dysfunctional families shouldn't time travel

The concept of time travel is always linked with paradox, and none more famous than the Grandfather Paradox. It’s a story which is used often to disprove that time travel is possible.

I'll be upfront and say I really don't know the origin of the story, and despite much googling am none the wiser. I am pretty sure I read the actual story, but the years of lots of old scifi has not kept the author of that one in my head. I suspect it's probably a Ray Bradbury story or possibly an excerpt in Robert Heinlein, or hidden in a faded old sepia copy of Amazing Stories. So I’d much appreciate it if somebody in the comments would actually link me to the story!

 Anyway, diving into the story. A group of four friends are discussing time travel in a basement where the main scientist has invented a Time Machine and they talk about it and they go in and have a look at it and he shows them how it works.  One man flies into a rage saying he would go back into the past and kill his grandfather because he was such a nasty old man from all accounts and so he dives into the machine and before anyone can stop him he activates the machine and vanishes.

 The story returns to the beginning, where there are only three men sitting around discussing a time machine so his actions have obliterated himself out of the timeline and no one is any the wiser because this is the new normal.

However, as people do, instead of enjoying the variety of ‘what ifs’ of it, they point out that there is a paradox, in that if he went back and killed his grandfather, thereby unexisting himself, then he could not have been there in the first place. So there! Time travel can’t happen. We should all be reading improving literature with nary a mention of time travel.

One of the downsides of being aware and trying to fix time travel paradox is that you tend to end up going in in loops and developing yet more paradoxes where you keep re-changing and re-changing what you've changed until it becomes a nightmare of a tangled do loops or don't loops, and nobody knows what’s going on and we all try and forget it like the second movie of a series and move on.

The other popular solution to the problem is creating an alternate universe or timeline. This is part of the multiverse that we will dive into (ha – in the future, did you see that coming?) where actions split the timeline and people don’t return to their original time, but instead get tangled in the other trouserleg of time where things are a result of whatever change happened. This can range from no letter J (Heinlein), a political dictatorship (Bradbury) and are as unlimited as the writer’s imagination. There’s no harm in this theory, and it does solve the paradox and create an entertaining story.

This is only the tip of the TARDIS in discussing time paradox, so stay tuned for next week.

In the meantime, feel free to check out my story “The Dust in the Kings Library” in Tales from Alternative Earths 2.

Interested in a bit of time travel romance? My Druid’s Portal series is set in Roman Britain. Take a trip back 2,000 years and get ready for action and adventure. It’s not your average romance, but it will get your heart racing!

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I’ll see you last week!

Cindy Tomamichel