Dimensionfold: What got you interested in time travel?
MJY: Wow, that’s a tough one. I know that I read fantasy when I was very young–I remember borrowing Madeline l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time from a church library at an early age. I also remember borrowing H.G. Well’s The Time Machine from a public library, definitely by the time I was twelve, maybe earlier. I watched first-run episodes of The Time Tunnel, which IMDb tells me started in 1966, so I was eleven. So the idea of time travel has been with me from a very young age.
I think a more serious level of interest was sparked by a couple factors, one was the release of Back to the Future and The Terminator, pretty close together, and at this point I can’t remember why the neighborhood kids, who played Dungeons & Dragons at my dining room table, wanted me to make sense of them. Then Ed Jones asked me to help him make the game Multiverser a reality, and I had to wrestle with rules for time travel for it. That led to building the Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies web site in 1997, and I had to watch a lot of time travel movies to create material for that and read a lot of articles about the subject to be able to answer questions from readers. So as Dr. Seuss once said, from there to here from here to there, funny things are everywhere.
Dimensionfold: You mention a lot of movies in your book. Which one is your favorite?
MJY: That’s a really tough question. Even looking over the list of fifty-some movies on the web site, there are quite a few gems in there, many of them ones that readers have never seen. With a tip of the hat to writer/producer Bob Gebert, I really enjoyed 11 Minutes Ago. Other little-known films that I think are wonderful for various reasons include Safety Not Guaranteed, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, The Jacket, Los Cronocrimines (which we cover in the book), and O Homem Do Futuro. In better-known films, I watch Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home probably a couple times a year, I was blown away by Source Code, Kathleen Turner is brilliant in Peggy Sue Got Married, and I think I’m falling in love with Rachel McAdams, who was the titular character in The Time Traveler’s Wife, the time traveler’s fiance in Midnight in Paris, and married the time traveler again in About Time. That last is a wonderful movie. Very few of these are particularly good as time travel movies, but they’re good movies worth seeing. Oh, and hats off to local South Jersey boy Bruce Willis, who has done at least three time travel movies of which 12 Monkeys is epic and Looper is quite engaging.
But I guess I really can’t just pick one.
Dimensionfold: OK, so which one did you find the most difficult to wrap your head around in terms of time travel affecting plot?
MJY: I think that’s probably 12 Monkeys. It’s extremely complicated, with multiple time travelers making multiple overlapping trips that interact with each other. I’ve watched it several times, but I’m probably going to have to go through it again a few more times one day.
Premonition, with Sandra Bullock, also gets honorable mention in this regard, as she lives a critical week of her life out of sequence, although ultimately it fails as a time travel movie, I think.
Dimensionfold: If you could time travel when would you go to?
MJY: I hope I would be wise enough not to go. I’ve studied time travel enough to recognize that it’s terribly dangerous. Of course the joke is that I would go back to last Tuesday so that I could fix something last week, but that would be the worst disaster possible (read the book if you don’t understand that). I would be interested in a time travel viewer, something that would let me see what really happened in times in the past, but I think I would rather stay right here (and in the words of Lorraine Baines, “in good old 1955”).
Dimensionfold: Do you think we will ever develop time travel in real life?
MJY: Experts including Albert Einstein thought we would never build an atomic bomb. I really hope we will never develop time travel, because it is phenomenally dangerous, but I’m not going to be so foolish as to assert that it’s impossible. The wormhole theory discussed in the book might ultimately be harnessed. We see that in Timeline and Deja Vu. That has promise. I think, though, that it’s pretty safe to say it won’t happen in the twenty-first century. There’s also an interpretation of Niven’s Law that suggests that if someone invents time travel, someone else will go back in time and prevent them from inventing it, until ultimately it will never be invented. I’ve been made aware of a movie called The History of Time Travel that plays cleverly with that idea which I’m going to have to study more closely, but it does make an interesting suggestion. I think, though, that time travel will prove to be impossible. There’s a part of me that would love to be proved wrong, just because I’ve enjoyed time travel stories since I was a young boy, but the disasters that can be caused simply by making one trip to the past are terrifying. I don’t see it happening, and that’s some comfort.
Get M.J.’s book: The Essential Guide To Time Travel