Time in the time of time

No surprise, I’ve been thinking a lot about fascist takeovers lately. A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic in science fiction in the last hundred years, and I’m far from an expert on it. But as a writer, I am an observer. I try to pay attention to things in my life so that when I write, I have experience to draw on.

What’s been the hardest on me living through this last month has been the overwhelm of fast and furious actions, one terrible thing after another on all kinds of topics that make it difficult to keep up from the whiplash. It’s exhausting. That’s by design: the tactic is intended to not give the media or opposition time to keep up.

It also distorts people’s perception of time itself.

People remarked on this phenomena during the pandemic as well. The memes of March having hundreds of days, or graphs that showed it lasting months. That’s how the last six weeks have felt to me too. The world on fire seems to move at different speeds for those affected or paying attention.

So hear me out - where does this make opportunities for time travelers?

Let’s take it a step further than simply sending our heroes back in time to correct mistakes and have unintended consequences. Rather than thinking of time as a single stream that travelers dart in and out of — or get stuck in Groundhog Day loop — I’m thinking of it as events splitting the stream into many strands moving at different speeds.

Futurama Season 6, Episode 7 “The Late Philip J. Fry”

A February 2025 of terrible events making each day feel like it contained to contents of a week, actually takes a week. The experience of it stretches the strand, making time move at a different speed for that group of people. And creating an opening in the timestream for time travelers to slip in. They only have that window of extended perception to work in, and if they end up in a group of people experiencing time at a different pace, they switch streams — losing time to do the job.

Imagine a strike team slipping into a time stream of stressed people reacting to an attack on their civil liberties, their jobs, their healthcare. They have a collective time stream that has a week of a window for the time travelers to find what they’re looking for and prepare to go after the villains — who are in a different “normal” speed time stream. Because of the different time speeds, the strike team has one chance and a very short window to switch streams and get the job done before they’re booted back to their original time stream.

It’s a simple story when I write it like this, a pulpy thriller with heavy overtones and a cathartic ending. And a fantasy, like the fantasy of going back in time to kill Hitler.

In our own timestream, time is about attention and intention. One hero is not going to save the day. People rise and fall and make change when we work together. And that’s where my optimism slips into the timestream. The story that interests me is the complex strategy to send dozens of teams, hundreds of teams to turning points throughout the last hundred years, to nudge things into different outcomes in 2025. I’m not sure I’m smart enough to even attempt that story, but it brings up another whole host of ethical questions — should anyone have the right to remake history, being the first that jumps to mind.

Wishing you all peace in these stressful times.