Can you really change the past? And if so, is it dangerous to do so? Should you be worried about the so-called Grandfather Paradox? What about the Butterfly Effect? What do time travellers really need to know? All these questions and more are answered, with examples from popular movies.
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What People Are Saying…
If you’ve ever watched a time travel film and thought to yourself, “Hey, that’s not how it would work!” then this book is for you. While most time travel stories will simply have a character say a few lines of technobabble to handwave away plot holes or logical gaps, in The Essential Guide to Time Travel, Mark Joseph Young explains the leading time travel theories in a logical concise way, then picks apart some of our most loved and cherished time travel films to show how they either make sense or don’t (hint, they usually don’t).
But he doesn’t stop there. Young uses the replacement theory to rationalize what had to have happened across multiple unseen timelines in order for what we see on screen to have happened. His analyses also plausibly solve paradoxes that the stories themselves create, thereby saving the universe!
The knowledge contained in this book will make you enjoy the time travel genre in new, mind-blowing ways. You’ll never just “watch” another time travel movie ever again.
– Eugene Whong, Producer and Cohost of The Time Travel Forensics Podcast
In the future, this book did not exist and I had not read it. Thankfully, I met Mark Joseph Young someday, and asked him to please write this book. He saw the wisdom in my argument and came back to last year to begin writing the book, culling many past arguments and ideas from his previous timelines, and this year, he and I conspired to publish this book. I have now read this book that MJ wrote in this altered timeline, and I think you will agree with me when I tell you that this book is a fine read, and that the universe is better for MJ and I having done these deeds. If you don’t believe me, you can travel back to the time before you purchased and read this book, and you too can change your own history, so that now you have purchased and read this book. See? Isn’t that better?
– Ken Goudsward, author of UFOs In The Bible, Magic In The Bible and Symphony Of Destruction
5.0 out of 5 stars No Time Traveler Should Leave Home Without It
With his particular blend of wit and wisdom, Mr. Young — whose voluminous and insightful “Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies” website certainly speaks to the expertise he has cultivated in the subject matter over the years — dives headlong into the core theories of time travel, using popular films such as “Back to the Future”, “The Terminator”, “Los Cronocrimines”, and “12 Monkeys” to illustrate the pitfalls and promises of time travel, including grandfather paradoxes and space/time-shattering infinity loops. Moreover, he examines how time travel works in these films compared to how it might operate in real life.
While the material Mr. Young presents in this book can be scholarly enough to qualify as a dissertation on the subject, Mr. Young never talks down to his audience. He breaks down time travel concepts in plain, easy-to-understand, and well-articulated language that any film fan can pick up and read. I found the work highly informative, his explanations of the varied time travel paradoxes quite helpful in my comprehension of the subject, and his examination of time travel in “The Terminator” and its sequels was my personal favorite part. (Forgive me; I’m a very biased fan of killer robots.) If you’re a fan of time travel in fiction and you’d like to understand more about how it works — and in how it doesn’t work (so you can laugh at how the occasional episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who mispresents it) — then this book is definitely a “must-read”
– Dunebat; Amazon.com