Similarities of the Time Travel concept with another movie

[davewitley]

Griffin wondered if the idea for POA might be based on 'The Twelve 
Monkeys'

Heidi replied:
> Had the person reporting on your tv show never seen Back to the 
Future 
> or the Star Trek:The Voyage Home films?

Agreed.  The Terminator films come to mind, too.

The specific idea in POA, of a time travel escapade in the past 
whose overall effect is to leave history exactly where it was, while 
explaining its quirks, has been fairly thoroughly explored in 
science fiction, too.  I have no idea whether JKR has come across 
any of it, but I can recall, rather vaguely I have to say:

- a short story (can't remember the title) by Isaac Asimov in which 
an enthusiast for the ancient Greeks sends back designs and drawings 
to kick-start an industrial revolution, which fails but Asimov uses 
to explain some of their advanced inventions;  

- The Door Into Summer by Robert A Heinlein;

- Two stories by Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The 
World (IMO not very good; I preferred his other SSR stories), and 
The Technicolor Time Machine, a very funny story indeed about a film 
crew who go back in time to make a movie about the vikings.  This 
one really goes to town on the possibilities of time loops, with 
loops within loops and a self-perpetuating loop with no entry and 
exit points (unlike POA where H&H enter the loop in the hospital and 
leave it just outside the hospital door).

- I'm pretty sure John Wyndham had a go, too.

- The ne plus ultra of the genre, though, AFAIK, is Asimov's 'The 
End of Eternity' which I read a couple of times as a teenager and 
never understood.  I think possibly good advice for writers 
is 'don't have flashbacks and time travel in the same story if you 
want to bring your readers along with you'.

There are other stories, of course, which adopt other approaches to 
time travel, e.g. that the past really is changed in some sense 
(Back to the Future has this), or that a parallel universe with a 
different history is created, or entered, in time travel (some Star 
Trek episodes explore this).  Wyndham wrote a very amusing short 
story called 'Pawley's Peepholes' in which an English village is 
visited by travellers from the future who gawk at the locals.  
Asimov has yet another nifty little story in which time travel 
creates a duplicate copy of the object being transmitted, in the 
case of a person, a corpse, which allows the (anti-)hero to fake his 
own death - then made permanent by his wife who siezes the 
opportunity to murder him.

All these stories were written, I'm pretty sure, before JKR was born 
or Star Trek conceived.

So, lots of interesting and complex ideas have been explored.  JKR's 
version stands well with them, but is by no means original or 
pushing the boundaries of this topic.

David