![]() ![]() We are given a glimpse of one momentarily illuminated portion of a single, ephemeral footpath in a far-flung region of the garden, but in that fleeting interval, we also can sense the scale of the branching structure, infinite in all directions. In the space of just a few pages, Borges manages to evoke an idea that might take other writers whole novels to explore: the idea of a narrative as a temporal labyrinth, a set of parallel, counterfactual universes. ![]() "Almost instantly, I understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space." "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges Even though we are rarely moving in a straight, forward direction in time through this book, we are always, in every story, inevitably moving toward The End. As Professor Jack Gladney says, in Don DeLillo's White Noise, "All plots tend to move deathward." The truth of this statement is never more clear than in a time travel narrative, and particularly in Slaughterhouse-Five. A discontinuous, non-chronological examination of Billy Pilgrim's temporal existence, especially his time in the war and the fire-bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut's classic about a protagonist who comes "unstuck in time" is a four-dimensional cross-section (a novel) of a four-dimensional object (a life). Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr If they have anything in common, it's that many of them are probably not thought of primarily as writings about time travel, even though they are all essentially about the fundamental weirdness of moving around in time." 1. I've got five novels, one book of lectures on literary theory, two short stories, and one seminal scientific paper. "Instead, I've come up with a much more idiosyncratic list. I haven't included, for instance, many of the best-known time travel books (The Time Machine by HG Wells, The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, to name a few), because (i) everyone already knows about them, and/or (ii) they are already beloved, and deservedly so. Unless a narrative is supposed to represent a single, unbroken, continuous stretch of duration in the timeline of the actions portrayed (in which case it's probably either a court transcript or pornography), there is always, in any story, some element of compression, dilation, distortion or deformation of time – which is a long-winded way of saying there are a lot of time travel stories, and choosing just 10, regardless of criteria, was very hard. "There are two kinds of stories: those that are explicitly about time travel, and those in which the time travel is hidden. ![]()
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