I just need to get this off my chest. Time *travel* is garbage writing. I don’t think a time *loop* is bad writing because “changing the past” can be framed as fighting fate or altering a prophecy. Time still flows one way, you’re not undoing or rewinding. You’re not rendering anything that the reader has already read as meaningless. Precognition falls under that same umbrella imo, you’re still just fighting fate. I feel like that’s all been written and executed well by some authors, but it’s rare.
However.
I was a fan of this fantasy series that was… let’s say it was on a hiatus. A decade of no writing, nothing, and then a side story was “remastered”. The author used the novella as an opportunity to make time travel canon.
It’s such a joke. Time travel is lazy writing, and it’s pathetic to introduce it to your readers (in a “remastered” novella no less) after **a decade** of silence. It was never alluded to in the original books either. The author left fans waiting for over a decade for the last book in the trilogy, and instead they used a side story novella to introduce time travel, effectively rendering the story so far as meaningless.
Flushed all of that potential. RIP.
by Smurphilicious
9 Comments
It works in The Dragonriders of Pern.
Time travel is bad but time loops are not?
Well, either way, The Forever War is great
Time travel *can* be lazy writing, but to dismiss all time travel stories as lazy is ironically pretty lazy itself.
I live time travel stories. That’s not to say there can be poorly written ones as in any genre but I think it’s fun generally
Really enjoyed Frugal Wizards Guide to Surviving Medieval England. Really liked the guide parts that talk about the ethical implications of going back in time.
I’m a slut for time travel
Mark Lawrence and his Impossible Times trilogy is the only time I’ve enjoyed time travel.
End of Eternity is amazing. All the time travellers ‘exist’ outside of the timeline and are just fucking with it for their own reasons
Time travel as a tool to solve a plot is terrible but stories that are centrally focused on time travel are some of my favorites. IMO that is the important distinction and why you feel cheated by a story suddenly introducing it.
It’s why I hated where the MCU films went with the Thanos saga since it was incredibly lazy writing.