I Found Some Old Story Notes
I’m between books right now. That means I’m laying the groundwork for the next Schlock Mercenary story arc. To celebrate, I went out to the wiki that my buddy Dave has generously hosted for me for the last 4 years and transferred all the data by hand into WikiDPad on my local drive. It’s less elegant than a true wiki, but I can back it up all by myself.
Anyway, in so doing I found the block-quoted gem below: It’s the original set of notes for the time travel storyline found in Book 6. I present it to you so that you can have a peek at my creative process, and see how different the end product is from what I may have been imagining at the outset.
Please note that I’ve not touched these notes up at all. If it looks like there are thoughts missing, or ideas not fully fleshed out, that’s because they are missing, and they weren’t fully fleshed out. This was basically a scratch-pad for an idea that had a slightly more robust shape in my brain. It’s not even an outline.
TIME TRAVEL
End of Story X: In the last 7 days before the climactic scene, it is critically important that Kevyn be present to save the day, which he does.Story Y: a ZPE experiment results in a universe being born inside ours. It’s growing at lightspeed, destroying all in its path. No biggie (eventual doom, but not in YOUR lifetime, right?). Then they discover it’s moving faster than light. The b-universe has different physical laws, and is exponentially accelerating the c-limit as it gains a foothold in ours.
Kevyn is called upon because of his contacts in the Physics community. They decide that time-travel should be tried, and should be powered by yet another ZPE system. This will accelerate the death of the universe, and guarantee the death of the time traveler when the loop is closed. Kevyn volunteers.
He jumps back into story X just before the D-minus-7 point. During the time-jump he gets a head injury (not bad, just visible) and damages the magic cryokit. He sneaks around looking for a shuttle and some gear. CONTINUITY FLAW: the artist now goes back into the archives, and draws Kevin into some backgrounds where he wasn’t before.
He bumps into himself at the critical juncture, and derails Story X. At this point in the ARCHIVES of Story X, two strips are aired, and one links you to the same point in Story Y.
They save the day by assaulting the ZPE experiment before it can be launched, but they abandon friends trapped in Story X. They come back successful, and Kevyn Tau tells Kevyn how to save his friends in a different way. Then the loop closes (Kevyn Tau reaches the same point in the timeline from which he left) and he dies.
So… my original vision of this storyline was to screw around with the archives as a way to say “this is what time travel does.” It would have been funny to me, and maybe to my brother Randy and my friend Dave, but you guys would have been screaming bloody murder.
I’m sooo glad I thought better of it.
You’ve probably also noticed that the science sounds pretty loosey-goosey, and the plotting feels fairly formulaic. (Hopefully you haven’t noticed those problems in the strip itself, where the tight line-art and bright colors distract you from the loosey-goosey science and the formulaic plotting). This story came out SOOO much better when I finally executed it… and I think that’s because I really started working on it after I’d quit my day-job, and had more time to nurse the headache that plotting this monstrosity turned out to be.
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January 25th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Actually, the way you actually penned the strip makes sense based on the current physical model. Time dilation is based on space curvature. The more that space is curved, the slower time travels. If space was curved negatively (which could happen when the Milky Way Galaxy was separated from the rest of the universe, time inside the Milky Way could easily be flowing at a different (negative rate) relative to the rest of the universe. Thus, someone using a wormhole to the Andromeda Galaxy could perceive that time is running backwards relative to the Milky Way, and at a variable rate. Your solution had the advantage that time travel is not something you can “just do.” You need nearly infinte energy (a ZPE) and precisely-adjustable gravity generators with the mass of super-Jovian planets or brown dwarf stars (the Dark Matter Entities). The best stories which use extraordinary means to solve a problem shoud destroy the tools at the end. Since the conditions which permitted time travel were effectively destroyed in the temporal loop, you don’t have the means to undo every little goof.
Also, paradox isn’t a problem in this story line; General Relativity describes a thought experiment in which multiple observers indifferent inertial frames of reference observe events in a different order. Since Kevyn Prime was subject to a serious change in his inertial frame of reference (his trip through the Andromeda wormgate imparted a negative acceleration–which is not the same as deceleration) during his trips through the Looking Glass, I mean Wormgate, it’s just an extension to the tein paradox. Instread of meeting an older twin, he met a younger twin. It’s analogous to having accelerated the entire universe to FTL while Kevyn Prime was not accelerated at all.
This has been an extremely simplified explanation, since I don’t want to be responsible for driving the bulk of the readers here more insane than they already are, or, even worse, stark, staring sane. I could do the math, but it involves complex numbers and other seriously-damaging math.
January 25th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Far too much work, but updating some of the archives with an extra time traveling background character using the javascript magic that swaps images on mouseover events would have been cool…
But yes changing the actual archive images may have caused a mutiny.
Special edition, time traveler updated book versions on the other hand… 10% of books have the updated strips - if you buy 20 books in one order we’ll make sure at least one is an updated strip copy… It worked for Magic: The Money Sink.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Oww, oww, oww.
Please stop, my brain can’t handle stuff like this, this early in the morning.
Still, sounded like a plausible storyline. However, I too like the way it was finally presented to us.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:02 am
So… my original vision of this storyline was to screw around with the archives as a way to say “this is what time travel does.” It would have been funny to me, and maybe to my brother Randy and my friend Dave, but you guys would have been screaming bloody murder.
Sounds rather keen, actually. But to keep people from getting upset perhaps you could maintain two archives - one the universe where time travel did not happen - the strips remain unaltered. Create a second set of archives (ArchiveB) where the strips are updated with the time traveler.
Hmmmmm … our artistic style has changed over the years. Putting a ‘drawn in 2007 Kevyn’ into a ‘drawn in 2005′ strip would be very interesting. Remember the Star Trek DS9 episode where the crew traveled back in time to the 60s to the ‘Trouble With Tribbles’ episode? Something like that.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Argh. Not ‘our artistic style’ but ‘your artistic style’.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Not that it really counts for anything, but it was this story that brought me to Schlock. Howard mentioned in passing that he had killed a major character and what a stir it caused. I was intrigued enough to go read that strip. Of course, it made no sense without some background . . . well, I guess everyone knows how THAT always turns out.
I would have been okay with screwing around with the archives. I mean, what’s the point of being the Malevolent God of your own Universe if you don’t take advantage of the chance to screw with people’s view of reality.
I mean really, OUR God does it. (Sun standing still in the sky, Red Sea parting, burning bushes, walking on water . . .)
January 25th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Messing with reality tends to upset everyone who doesn’t get the joke - changing the archives is similar.
I liked the way the story turned out, and the hours we spent speculating as to what they were doing wearing skins and using spears. Changing the archives would only have worked for the fans that remembered the old version - everyone else would have said ’so what?’
January 25th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I find the idea of changing the archives intriguing, but as Parkway said “Changing the archives would only have worked for the fans that remembered the old version - everyone else would have said ’so what?’”
The Archive B idea would have been interesting, sort of like Terry Pratchett’s Trousers of Time (mentioned in a few of his books, and one of the major gags in Jingo.)
In the end though, I think the way you ended up doing it was more than sufficient and just as entertaining (if not more so,) with less headache and confusion for you and us.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
“Then the loop closes (Kevyn Tau reaches the same point in the timeline from which he left) and he dies.” And I’m so glad you didn’t do this. One of my favorite comics is when Kevyn Tau retires and shows up on General Tagon’s yard.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
brenatevi: Some of my very best plot decisions (including this one) have been made because they allow me to set up a gag that I think will be funny.
Not killing off the time-traveling, galaxy-saving mad scientist was just a happy side-effect. Besides… this way I can use him again later.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Change the archives.
Remember Ferris Buehler’s Rule One: You can never go too far.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
This makes me think of the time when Straub was running two websites, StarSLIP and StarSHIFT.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
On changing the archives: To make changes (other than minor corrections) without a fan mutiny, you *need* to keep the old version accessible. Remember Greedo shooting first?
By the way, I think changing the archives in a time-travel story is known as “Painting the Fourth Wall”. But since strips in the archive are identified by the day they’re published, it doesn’t really make sense to do that, since you’re not changing what happened on that day, just replacing it. (Although you could fiddle with the “next comic” link.) If they were identified by serial numbers, like some webcomics, then it might make some sense to replace them. But again, keep the old versions accessible.
On doing time-travel well: One of the most important things in a time-travel story is keeping the chronophysics *consistent* and *sensible*. As written, MSMNHTAWTWTTCH does that—the old timeline is gone, with nothing remaining of it except the time-traveller(s), and they appear in a universe reset to whenever. And there’s no special link to your doppelganger, except psychological and having compatible organs. (Oh, and possibly legal implications.)
As opposed to the Terminator series, which can’t make up its mind whether history can be changed, or Timecop, where touching your duplicate destroyed both of you even though the only parts that touched were skin cells, and they get replaced quickly enough that it wasn’t the same matter anyway, or Seven Days, where the time-traveller disappears from where they were last week, apparently including the matter that left their body during that week but not including the food they ate during that week.
I could be wrong about Seven Days, though. He might leave a mess, and it’s possible that he’s only allowed to eat food that’s been on the base for a week, to prevent anomalies leaking outside if he has to backstep. It still seems strange to me though—like someone said in the novel-length version of The Hammer of God, “Even God can’t tell one carbon atom from another.” (I assume he was talking about carbon atoms that are the same isotope.)
On today’s strip (and yesterday’s): Too bad you can’t put a vertical red bar between days.
January 26th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Messing with reality tends to upset everyone who doesn’t get the joke -
This explains why my first marriage didn’t work out so well.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Incidentally, that’s way more plotting than I’ve ever done for a novel.
Though I do do extensive worldbuilding first.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:37 am
Four words: “Campaign For Real Time”. :)
(_Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ fans will get this. The other
four of you can look it up. :) )