re: #28 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

So my long standing soap box against (alleged) “science fiction” and time travel has been begging for me to stand upon it yet again… and I’ve got two rants early this morning:
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These kind of problems are why time travel should be forbidden for stories. Any writer who wants to write a time travel story has to be especially well disciplined. And most writers (for scripts or short stories) don’t have such discipline.

ianasfttl (i am not a science fiction time travel lawyer) or expert in the genre.
i’ve always seen two major problems with the concept

often the person/people traveling though time presumably still age as if they werent traveling - based on where and when they came from originally.

in some stories like 11/22/63 the time travel does have physical effects.

my little brain cant wrap itself around the concept of time being a representation of a sequence of events becoming something different depending on whose perspective is looking at it.

as a god-like outside observer as it’s occurring, or looking back from the ubiquitous deathbed scene as these stories are sometimes told, your life timeline is always linear. experiences happened in sequence to you, even as you bounced around the timeline of everyone else. your body had an inherent age limit and it progresses regardless of where and when you are (presumably - i mean unless you want to change that rule too).

second, it seems to be always one person or group bouncing around a single timeline that contain everyone else with neat entry and exit points of time/space/place. even if one is chasing another through time - ie traveling separately but arriving at the same point and place in time, using the same portal or gate or closet door or whatever. a sort of ‘everything else is exactly the same except this one thing’ makes it neat and simple as a concept to explain.

if you started adding multiple travelers from multiple sources/places/gates and chronologies, imo the concept would become untenable. and that’s before exploring the multiplicity of effects each one wants to do to the past to change or correct the outcome in the future they’re after.

i guess if you go into the every one of us has “infinite time lines multiplied by infinite time line travelers so given infinity to the infinity power nothing is impossible” it could work.

it makes my head hurt.

like you though, i’m more than willing to suspend disbelief and still like a story that is more or less reasonably, inherently explainable