"Conventional Models of Time and their Extensions in Science Fiction"
An informal introduction and summary

I started reading and watching science-fiction at a very early age. I always liked science fiction for the ways it flexed the rules of the obvious, rational world, and forced me to learn and comprehend new rules and new worlds. The time-travel theme always held the additional fascination of digging up in me a logic which I felt I was somehow already cognizant of. I did not have to learn much about how time-travel could work -- for some reason, like most science fiction readers, I knew why a person disappeared if you killed their grandfather in the past, and the reasoning behind that always seemed very common-sense, although no one, including myself, has ever actually engaged in time travel and proved it to be so. I was also aware that other people were engaging in arguments about why a certain time-travel story was more or less logical and rational than others, so it seemed other people also shared this sense of the rationality of the irrational idea of time-travel. In my master's thesis, I wanted to find out whether this unconventional rationality of time-travel stories and their readers was really that unconventional, and then puzzle out the conceptual mechanics of it. Since cognitive linguistics in general, and the theory of conceptual blending in particular, seemed particularly useful for researching the ways people think about time conventionally and unconventionally, my exploration of conventional conceptual models of time and their extensions beyond the convention uses cognitive linguistics. Importantly, I believe it is necessary to achieve at least a basic understanding of the theory of conceptual blending to enjoy and comprehend this thesis.

Chapter One contains an introduction to conceptual metaphor theory and an overview of conventional models of time as presented by conceptual metaphor theory. Chapter Two contains an introduction to the theory of conceptual blending, and presents a conceptual blending account of the conventional models of time presented in Chapter One.

As I was preparing to write Chapter Three, I realized that in order to analyze the thinking that sanctioned the idea of time-travel, I needed to find out what it is that travels in time, and what it travels in. I started out by surveying the phenomenon of mental time travel and the process of episodic memory (in the current understanding of the faculty, which also subsumes the capability of the human mind to run imaginative scenarios of the future) and how it can provide the experiencer with the experience of concrete locations other than the one the experiencer is in. I went on to explore how, at any moment in time, the experiencer can be conceptualizing a scenario (e.g. a remembered event) as taking place not only in a physical location, but also in an abstract location forming a section of an objective time (and, in effect, the experiencer can have subjective, direct, physical experience of an objective, shared, abstract and immutable past, present and future). I also analyzed conventional compressions over change of location, and tried to indicate the conditions under which it might be cognitively uneconomical, or even impossible, to compress change of location with a conventional model of physical change of location, and then, models of change of physical location in time can take over.

Additionally, since time-travel scenarios typically involve the change of physical location (in time) of human (or human-like) actors, I overviewed the role of the models of normal locations of the SELF in time-travel scenarios. This allowed me to distinguish between and analyze science-fiction examples of what I termed simultaneous presents, chronesthetic time-travel, ego-deictic time-travel and cosmic ego-deictic time-travel. I also argued that the models of physical and temporal locations which I describe sometimes prove to be incompatible (irrational with respect to one another), and therefore clash, and I analyzed selected science-fiction examples of such clashes and attempts of resolving them.

Most discussions of time-travel in science fiction (a lot of which I referenced in my Reference section) focus on the unconventional causal relations that the time-travel produces in the science fiction story, and how they are dealt with. Accordingly, the final section of Chapter Three provides a conceptual blending account of several temporal paradoxes found in time-travel science fiction (and fact).

It has to be pointed out that, since I chose to concentrate on attempting to provide an analysis of the thinking process that occurs in comprehending time-travel, my thesis does not do justice to several hallmarks of time-travel science fiction (e.g. alternative histories or temporal loops). The science fiction examples analyzed in my thesis (some of them only briefly, most--in depth) are taken from the following: the stories "Brown Robert" by Terry Carr, "A Gun for Dinosaur" by L. Sprague De Camp, "All You Zombies" by Robert Heinlein, "Time Locker" by Henry Kuttner, the stories "Backward! Turn Backward!," "Fault," "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket," "The Man Who Walked Home" and the novel Brightness Falls by James Tiptree, Jr., as well as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. The thesis also includes the analysis of an excerpt from a lecture by Prof. Stephen Hawking.

I woud like to use this opportunity to thank my supervisior, Prof. Dr Hab. Elżbieta Tabakowska, for allowing this thesis to happen, for her advice throughout the way, and for her bearing with my abuse of deadlines. I would also like to thank the members of pl.rec.fantastyka.sf-f for providing me with oh-so-many examples of potential source texts.

I hope you have as much fun reading this thesis as I did writing it. Feel free to e-mail me with comments and questions. The thing is not unlong (over 120 pages), so I recommend using the bookmark index in your Adobe Reader. Peace!

Krystian Aparta
krystian.aparta@gmail.com